Hashtags in the Sky

So Bluesky wants to change how hashtags work

Since quitting Twitter in April, I’ve become active on Mastodon, Bluesky and T2. None are perfect substitutes for Twitter (even as some aspire to be) — but the battle to define the future of the social web is often preoccupied with redefining elements of its past.

And with reason: redos are rare in the tech world. Platforms ossify and enshittify. Network effects thwart effective social graph portability. Upstarts fake it until they… get caught. It’s hard to unentrench the entrenched — especially when doing so depends upon overcoming our thumbs’ muscle memory.

And while some cynics decry the sameness of today’s Twitter successors, relitigating bedrock aspects of social media may win over some refugees who are seeking a fresh take.

But regardless, fifteen years on, we should revisit some of the assumptions passed down from the proto social web (e.g. as pertains to identity, moderation, portability, encryption, interoperability, etc).

While decentralization isn’t something most people care about, promoting competition should be. Participation in the common discourse depends on it — especially as we pendulate from centralization to disaggregated digital social spheres.

While I have more to say about the fediverse generally, today my focus is the future of hashtag support on Bluesky. While still invite only, its million member waitlist implies that its design decisions may have broad cultural implications, especially as Bluesky product developer and protocol engineer Paul Frazee continues to work in public, and has shared several proposals to solicit public feedback.

One of those proposals concerns Bluesky’s support for hashtags — a topic of interest and familiar controversy. You can read it here:

proposals/0003-hashtags at main · bluesky-social/proposals

Now, I’ll step back and acknowledge that, as always, I’m just a man on the internet spouting off and sharing my ideas. Even though I birthed the hashtag phenomenon in 2007, their use far…