While looking for posts with the #degoogle hastag with my mastodon account, I realized that mixed in the hastag timeline there were posts to the !degoogle@lemmy.ml community, but not containing the hastag itself in the text.

I tried to look around, but In wasn't able to find an explanation of how this is supposed to work: is it because of the name of the community that is the same of the hastag? Or is or because the hastag is "embedded" in the community itself?

Edit: for those interested, the explanation is in this comment -> https://lemmy.world/post/39083486/20606028

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[–] Cris_Color@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Thanks for making this thread, I didn't really realize it worked this way either!

When I've posted to lemmy from mastodon, you "@" the community, treating it like a user which is interesting. The underlying guts of the fediverse are fascinating lol

[–] Axolotl_cpp@feddit.it 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Basically on lemmy the communities are users that you can follow

[–] lordnikon@lemmy.world 16 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Because they're Federated and that's how Lemmy is represented in Mastodon when you Federate between the two

[–] lgsp@feddit.it 0 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Mmh, that's not an explanation: when I look at an hastag timeline in mastodon, I expect to see all the posts that federate with my server and contain the relevant hastag.

In this case I for sure see also posts that are federated, but, AFAIK, do not contain the hashtag. The only element is the name of the community

[–] cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 14 points 1 day ago (2 children)

According to the protocol they share (ActivityPub) communities and hashtags are essentially the same thing, they're a grouping containing many posts. Typing out a hashtag is how you tell Mastodon to add your post to that "hashtag group" (and you can add your post to multiple hashtags). In Lemmy, the community you post in IS the group (and you can cross-post it to multiple communities). The result is the same. They're the same thing, just different ways of connecting your posts into them, and displayed in very different ways depending on which part of the Fediverse you're using.

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 day ago

No, this is false as far as I can tell. I am willing to be corrected by someone more knowledgeable but my understanding is:

Communities are implemented not as hashtags, but as special users who "boost" everything addressed to them. That is why Lemmy sometimes gets posts made on Mastodon that mention a Lemmy community. It doesn't always look great: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/45785836

So communities and hashtags aren't the same thing. In particular, communities have moderators who can remove things or ban people. Hashtags don't.

It is a feature of Lemmy that all new posts (not, AFAIK, comments) also get the community name added as a hashtag. This is what OP was seeing and serves to somewhat increase the reach of Lemmy posts. But you can't follow microblog hashtags on Lemmy.

[–] 30p87@feddit.org 6 points 1 day ago

The confusing part is that it didn't work most of the time. This seems to be a very recent change. Before, and still now, you could only post to lemmy communities by tagging them with @. Now they federate back, but as hashtags.

[–] MelodiousFunk@slrpnk.net 5 points 1 day ago

The only element is the name of the community

Consider community names hashtags.

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3906

[–] lgsp@feddit.it 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

Ok, clear, thank you.

So this has been implemented as a Lemmy feature for more than one year, and it's default behavioiur ~~a setting for the particular community~~

[–] asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

it's a setting for the particular community

No, not really. The devs made it an automatic one. Not ones you can manually assign to a community.

[–] lgsp@feddit.it 2 points 1 day ago

Oh, on. The setting thing was what I understood from the discussion in the link, but I didn't go very deep

[–] tamlyn@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

if you open the post you see the hashtag, i don't know how it works, but a community post it's name as hashtag with every post.

[–] lgsp@feddit.it 1 points 1 day ago

Ok, this makes sense, and I had no idea it was like this

[–] kariboka@mastodon.social 1 points 1 day ago

@lgsp @fediverse because it's better this way