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Dear @Gargron — Can we take another, fresh look at github.com/mastodon/mastodon/i… ? Hashtags should ultimately support full UTF8, IMHO, but adding at the very least the dash would be very helpful. It's not just band or artist names. CVEs are a better example. It would be really helpful when I can use #CVE-2025-6019 instead of #CVE20256019 as I am forced to do now. I guess hashtags are not in scope of the ActivityPub protocol, @evan ?
in reply to Jan Wildeboer 😷

Is #cve_2025_6019 an option for you?

(Edit: had to remove the / variant, #Mastodon doesn't do nested-obsidian-style variants either 😀

This entry was edited (5 months ago)
in reply to Lars Marowsky-Brée 😷

Sure Using #under_score is an alternative, but a poor one. Exactly what is the reason to not also support the dash? Tradition, legacy or documented breakage? @Gargron @evan
in reply to Jan Wildeboer 😷

People use dashes as punctuation--for example, double dash instead of the em dash. If I said "I love #Mastodon--though I am biased", I would be very surprised the hashtag got turned into "Mastodon though". Some people don't bother to double dash and use a single dash for the same purpose.
in reply to Eugen Rochko

@larsmb
But dashes need to be surrounded by space characters, otherwise this is a hyphen and correctly links the two adjacent words together to form a compound.
in reply to Norbert Rittel

@norbert @larsmb An em dash is not supposed to be surrounded by space characters however. Also, I can say something is #Kafka-esque and have it show up in #Kafka where people are more likely to look.
in reply to Eugen Rochko

I am more shocked that people would use a dash without surrounding whitespace, but I guess I am just an old typographic nerd ;) @larsmb @evan
in reply to Jan Wildeboer 😷

@larsmb Othrography online varies a lot. In French it's common to put two spaces after a period. Some people in English forget to put a single space after one. What I'm trying to avoid is a hashtag unexpectedly consuming more text than it should, and in my view, the dash is commonly used as a word boundary.
in reply to Eugen Rochko

I used to believe that real em-dashes, eg in LaTeX and HTML, and en-dashes, and hyphens ... should rarely have space around them, but now I liberally space at least em-dashes to reduce ambiguity...
This entry was edited (5 months ago)

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