Was there a clear point where TAGS emerged as a distinct concept to you or was it a more gradual movement from the "subject" days? I read Maciej's account of ingesting A03s giant tag ecosystem in which he quotes you calling tags "a reverse search engine." That stuck with me as an insight that doesn't come up as much in a world where we take tags for granted. Curious how you got from Memepool to there.
This part of the documentation needs serious cleaning up -- which is one of the reasons we haven't done a public launch yet. This is referring to: https://octothorp.es/docs#anchor-tag which is a bit of an edge case that we may not even launch with. This example anticipates a circumstance where someone would want to link to their own url, such as their own tag page, and at the same time use that term as an octothorpe. This might be something no one wants! TBH I'm not sure if it's even implemented anywhere right now. It certainly shouldn't be more prominent in the docs than the basic anchor-based implementation that got discussed over at Lobste.rs.
> Now it’d be fine to use href if only they had the full URL:
Totally agree. This hits on what we're actually going to ship for how to create in-line octothorpes with plain anchor tags, and the docs should reflect the primacy of this approach.
> Suppose you want to be on _two_ rings, and they use the same keyword, but differently—what do you do? “You can only be on one ring” is a rather unnecessary and limiting restriction.
Also agree, which is why that is not a restriction. We have two live demos of thorping to multiple rings from the same URL.
Term collision is very much something we've been thinking about. For now it has to be handled manually. But because we're building the whole system off of an RDF base, we have a lot of low-level tools to define and process different vocabularies in some powerful ways. The same term having different meanings on different servers is the most immediate application of this, and it's high on our roadmap.
We agree! That's why we don't require this anymore. That was an early approach that we need to remove from the docs. We're currently building out a web-of-trust approach too, but authentication / verification in general is something we want to test in the real world and learn from before a fully public release.
We very much would not be working on this if not for your earlier work! However, despite writing a grant proposal in which I had to research the history of backlinks and attempts at implementing them, I had not known about Reversible. And it's super cool to find out about.
A lot of the questions on the "Further questions, problems, observations" list for Reversible are front and center for us, and we're hoping to demonstrate some answers to them as we roll things out to more real world users.
When my collaborator saw this he said "isn't our whole point 2003 had some good ideas that we want to revisit with perspective from today.”
Also -- Memepool was an early fav of mine and an inspiration for https://mothra.click/, which I built in 45 minutes for my wife, who has never owned a smartphone, so I could send her links. Getting lazy about updating it meant "Wanting to post to mothra.click easier" had a non-zero impact on the existence of Octothorpes.
Well, Hi. I'm one of the guys working on Octothorpes -- thanks all for digging into our project! So, some context. You've found the project in a sort of liminal stage between launched and not launched. We only started telling people about it at XOXO, and planned a semi-public roll out for some time this month. But then Weird Web October https://weirdweboctober.website/ asked if they could use it, and they very much are. See https://octothorp.es/~/weirdweboctober. So we're in a little holding pattern where we're keeping it open for them but not promoting it to the wider world yet. "Post on Hackernews" is definitely not in this part of the roadmap, but we really appreciate that someone considered it worth sharing!
So caveats are that our documentation isn't fully up to date, some features aren't part of core yet, and we're still in a fairly rapid test and update cycle.
I've compiled a bunch of answers to this and a discussion on Lobste.rs in a blog post > https://ideastore.dev/blog/shrodingers-launch/ but will address some specific questions about the protocol in-line here.