Tagging and wrapping your posts
What is tagging?
When you create a post on Blorbo.Social, or in other places on the Fediverse, you can tag the post.
In this context, tagging means adding a word or a phrase to your post that other people can use to:
- Filter it out of their feeds, or
- Search for content with that specific tag.
Tags help others filter out content
Whenever you post about topics that other people might find distressing, or even just uninteresting, we encourage you to use words or phrases that other people can filter on.
(To set up your own content filters, go to Preferences > Filters > Add new filter.)
Hashtags help others find content
When you put a hash (#) symbol in front of a word, it becomes a hashtag.
You can search for content using particular hashtags. There is no full-text search in Mastodon. If you want people to find your posts through the search function, use hashtags liberally.
(This has a side benefit: If you don't hashtag key terms, your posts won't appear in search results for those terms, and you're less likely to get haters flocking in to dump on you.)
Each hashtag must be a single string of characters, without spaces or special characters.
If you want to use a hashtag with multiple words, run the words together in CamelCase, so that there are no spaces between the words and each word is capitalized.
(Hashtags still work if you don't use CamelCase, but they're less readable, especially for people who use screen readers.)
You can follow a hashtag, so that any posts containing the hashtag appear in your Home timeline.
What is wrapping?
You can add a content wrapper (CW) to a post, so that the viewer won't see the rest of the content unless they choose to click through.
These are sometimes called content warnings.
Wrapping helps other people manage what they see on their timelines
Many people use CWs to warn other people that a post contains something that they might not want to see right now (or ever).
However, you can also use CWs to:
- Hide spoilers for a show, book, or game
- Conceal the punchline of a joke
- Provide a read-more link for especially long posts.
You can also configure your own filters to automatically put CWs on certain types of content.
Tagging and wrapping examples
To help people filter a post, use words or phrases that people are likely to want to filter on. They don't have to be formatted as hashtags, but they can be if you want.
Examples: uspol, auspol, wordle, nsfw, rpf, addiction.
To help people find a post, use hashtags and CamelCase.
Examples: #MyBlorbo, #MyFandom, #OnlyOneBed, #FicRec, #BDSM.
To wrap a post with a CW, put enough words in the CW to help people decide if they want to see the post at all, and if they want to see it right now.
(I might be very keen to see your explicit fanart of my favorite blorbo, but I'm not going to look at it on a crowded train!)
Examples:
explicit fanart of My Blorbo, nudity, masturbation, blindfolddiscussion of dark themes in fanfic, including incest, abuse
Hashtags don't work within CW text, but you can still use any relevant hashtags within the body of the post.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.