Blogging to the Fediverse via WordPress without Tags

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I noticed a drop in traffic to the blog which I would attribute to three things. The main reason is that I went from main-vision.com/richard/blog to blog.main-vision.com. This screwed up all the search engine results, despite adding the redirection order in the htaccess file.

As if that wasn’t silly enough I then redirected my blog back to its original place to see if that would revive traffic and of course I can’t tell. I can’t tell because I don’t know whether the posts I am writing now have less relevance or if the posts I am writing now are no longer showing up in results, due to the twice changed URL.

Not Using Hashtags

The other reason is that I stopped using tags in my posts. I noticed that by using tags my WordPress posts appeared on the Fediverse with hashtags which I find hideously ugly. My dislike of hashtags stems from 2007 when I saw people forget the art of conversation, for the art of using a short cut, attention wise. Hashtags.

With Jaiku, Bulletin boards, forums, Facebook and more, we have threads, and groups, and more. This allows us to have conversations that are clean and rational. With twitter it was decided that instead of threading like Jaiku had, back in 2006-2007 and Google + had after this Twitter would use hashtags. Instead of a clean tidy way of having conversations we were given something hideously ugly and inefficient and it has stuck to this day.

It annoys me because instead of having something elegant and efficient we have something that has been obsolete since the iPhone came out, and if we’re really critical, since Jaiku came into being. Jaiku was decades ahead of Twitter, and yet Twitter won. Google+ was the transformation of Jaiku, and I loved Google+, but the crowd didn’t, and neither did Google.

My Frustration

I am frustrated because it would be easy to program the Fediveres, so that hashtags are shown in an elegant and efficient manner. We could get hashtags to show up as keywords at the top or bottom of a post. We could get the Fediverse to thread, using Hashtags. Instead hashtags are just a jumble of words at the bottom of page. I wouldn’t be frustrated if I wasn’t being coerced into using them. I am coerced twice. I am coerced by the Activitypub tool for WordPress screwing up how I use tags, and by the Fediverse not wanting to make keywords more elegant than they are.

And Finally

As much as I hate hashtags I think I should continue to use tags in my wordpress blog. It might be fugly on the Fediverse but my posts are more visible. I come from the olden days, when we called web dev web mastering, and for me, to add hashtags is to spam, like white text on a white background was seen as spam, in the 90s. It goes against my moral code to use hashtags.

It isn’t that I am using them. It’s that the tools we have to share from WordPress to the Fediverse are still mediocre, and the Fediverse is still primitive. One day it will be upgraded, where threads, or key words will appear, rather than hashtags. For now we’re using a technology that should have been dumped when Twitter stopped sending SMS, over a decade ago.