hi @Marek 🇦🇺🇩🇪 @Friendly Koala @Friendica Support

after much prevarication, due to the unsolved issue of the instance not fetching most of my followed hashtags [latest post: https://friendica.au/display/f3535bde-5769-d73a-ae22-15e898311506], i decided this arvo to press ahead anyway & import my Masto contacts here, via the corresponding Masto following_accounts.csv file. it did not work; nothing happened, despite a brief popup msg telling me the import had finished.

wondering if the #friendica contacts tool possibly didn't like the other account info after each account name [various combos of true, false], i edited the text file to remove them all, & retried. it still didn't work.

i feel a bit silly, in that there must be some obvious error i'm making, but atm i can't see it.

this is a sample from the edited file i've tried to import:

1earthmedia@universeodon.com
wansti@friendica.au
thisweekinkde@social.opendesktop.org
newd_bot@chinwag.org
lowqualityfacts@mstdn.social

there are 289 entries in the file, fwiw.

Droppie

2026-04-09 05:35:42

@Friendly Koala @Marek 🇦🇺🇩🇪 @AJ Sadauskas @FollowBackBot today i have mucked about some more with this, & now have formed a tentative conclusion that this service is not compatible with friendica.

the essential first step is to

FollowBackBot

Follow me and I will follow you back. Your public posts will then be boosted through tags.pub. Unfollow me, and the boosts will stop

but afaict the #friendica GUI simply provides no facility to DO that initial Follow of this service. i tested in #FirefoxNightly, #Floorp, & Vivaldi.

in Masto, per pic below, searching for that tag does generate the standard Masto Follow Hashtag button.

otoh by contrast, in friendica a completely different page ensues, per next pic, which has NO button or any other way obvious to me, to actually DO the Follow.

alas, it seems i still have no good way so far to expand the reach of hashtag-fetching across fedi, in a small friendica instance.

Here's something really useful I've found.

One of the great things about the Fediverse is being able to follow hashtags.

But.

If someone puts up a post using that hashtag, and no-one on your instance follows that person or anyone who shares it, it won't appear in your feed.

This is particularly common if you're on a small or single-user instance.

Here's the solution.

First, follow @_followback

It will follow you back.

And then tags.pub bot then reshare all of your posts that use hashtags.

So if you do a post with the hashtag #Fediverse, then @fediverse will share your post.

Here's where the magic happens.

The tags.pub bot will do the same thing to everyone else who follows that followback account.

So if you follow @fediverse, then you'll get a feed of everyone who uses #Fediverse on the Fediverse.

And you'll see their posts even if no-one on your instance follows them.

And it works for all hashtags.

Just put the name of the hashtag, followed by @tags.pub

So @tech follows all posts using #tech, for example.

Or @news follows all posts using #news

#relay #relays #selfhosted #selfhosting #Mastodon #feditip #feditips #fedihelp

𝐇𝐞 𝐝𝐮𝐠 𝐭𝐨𝐨 𝐝𝐞𝐞𝐩 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐄𝐥𝐬𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐫'𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐥 𝐟𝐮𝐞𝐥 𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬: "𝐈 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐝"

If you're into science or medicine, you may have heard of journals like Cell or The Lancet. You might also be familiar with their parent company Elsevier / RELX, and their predatory practices: sometimes charging more than 10,000 dollars for publications whose running costs don't reach a tenth of that amount.

What you might not know is that beyond pocketing public research money, Elsevier is also contributing to climate breakdown, pouring millions into tools and journals providing information about areas yet to be exploited for oil and gas extraction, as well as new technologies needed to dig up oil more efficiently in the Arctic and the Canadian tar sands. The motto of one of their online tools, Geofacets, used to be that, thanks to it, “exploration has never been more seamless.”

But that's the tip of the iceberg. For years, RELX's political action committee REPAC has been providing support to climate denialist politicians in the US, preventing carbon mitigation bills from reaching a vote in Congress.

I document this and other complicities of big academic publishers in my new book Science in Resistance, where I interview Kip Lyall, a former employee of the journal Cell, who was fired after asking too many questions about the company's fossil fuel ties.

Excerpt below. 👇

#Science #OpenScience #Fossilfuels #Climate #Climate #Activism #Journal