Native discovery of related tags (fedibuzz/tags.pub)

3mon 3d ago by activitypub.space/uid/1 in technical-discussion@activitypub.space

I was talking to my marketing guy about integrating a tags-based onboarding workflow for freshly installed forums.

The gist of it is, the forum admin adds a couple tags for the forum to globally follow, and achieves this via fedibuzz relay or tags.pub. Auto-categorization rules are automatically added and the forum starts receiving new (highly relevant!) posts through the magic of hashtag+federation ✨

He then asked whether it was possible to suggest related tags (e.g. add guitar suggest acousticguitar, electricguitar, etc.) for the admin to also add, to which I replied in the negative "for now".

But that got me thinking, is this something fedibuzz or tags.pub could achieve/offer in its API? It would require a bit of data analysis, to match up common hashtag usage, but doable maybe?

cc @evan [@evan@cosocial.ca](https://activitypub.space/user/evan%40cosocial.ca) @astro@c3d2.social

@julian @evan I do trends for individual hashtags only. I fear that analyzing co-occurrency is going to use much more memory than I am allowed to use on our servers in the basement.

@astro @julian I think channel.org and Surf are doing this at a higher level.

@evan@cosocial.ca good to know, I'll reach out!

Do you know if there are rough analytics available per tag, e.g. "7 posts in the last 7 days", etc.?

@astro@c3d2.social

@julian @evan If I provided them, I would probably implement https://github.com/mastodon/fediverse/_auxiliary/_service/_provider/_specifications/blob/main/discovery/trends/v0.1/trends.md but haven't done so yet. Is that suitable for you? If so, I should do it soon.

@astro@c3d2.social well I certainly don't want to give you work! Please don't worry too much about it.

The FASP concept is good but sounds technically difficult to implement, so I'm a little wary of it at the moment. I'm a fan of simple APIs especially for public data.

@evan@cosocial.ca