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Principal engineer at Mercury. I've authored the Dhall configuration language, the Haskell for all blog, and countless packages and keynote presentations.

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Gabriella439
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cohost.org/newmoon

I feel like "The Cohost Global Feed" is too long and formal of a tag and could be workshopped a bit


First off, the use of capital letters is too stuffy IMO, but we can't really change that at this point. However, I'll be using all lowercase for the remaining suggestions.

One of the things I'd focus on is getting rid of some of the redundancy from the tag name. Do we really need the "the"? No. We can shorten it to "cohost global feed".

Also, do we really need to specify that this feed is for "Cohost"? Not really. It should be clear to everyone using this website that this feed is located on Cohost, so we can shorten it further to "global feed".

Now, we could in theory drop the "feed" since all tags on Cohost are feeds so that is a bit redundant. The problem with that is that a tag like "global" could be used to describe other things (like international news, for example), so it's a little too short. Also, a tag called "global" wouldn't be self-explanatory. Ideally, you'd want someone who sees this tag show up on their timeline to intuit what its purpose is for, and "global feed" works better in this regard than "global".

If you really wanted to workshop this further, you could look for alternative names for "global" and "feed". For example, you could call it the "global timeline", although I personally think "global feed" is better because there's already prior art for this name (on mastodon) and it's shorter. It also benefits from being similar to the "The Cohost Global Feed" tag.

I'm obviously not the first person to think of this since the "global feed" tag already exists and has quite a few posts. It seems like a lot of people posting to "The Cohost Global Feed" have already been cross-posting to "global feed". However, if there is an origin story for the "global feed" tag then I can't find it (since there's not an easy way to browse the earliest posts for a given tag).

Anyway, this is just a long-winded way of saying that I prefer the "global feed" tag and I think the "The Cohost Global Feed" tag is noise and tag debt.


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in reply to @fullmoon's post:

I'm not sure how long you've been here, but the "#The Cohost Global Feed" first came about as a jest from users who thought the idea of a global feed, akin to the local feed on any given fediverse instance was a bit silly, which is why it sounds so stuffy
There is also a little quirk of the site where the first usage of a tag will be the canon capitalisation (you can see this with the star wars and totk tags respectively), so it makes co-ordinating "proper capitalisation" a bit tricky as tags will be auto corrected to it when you search for them

some people are used to a constant blast on an entire site's contents, but others are glad it doesn't exist here. the attempt to recreate a stream of everything here seemed a joke but some are still comitted to putting everything they post in these global tags so they are very busy bookmarks to follow. and very random.

only speaking for myself, global tags are for boosting output or input, and any theme is purely coincidental.

there's also a tag with the words swapped round, and pages for each with a declaration saying the other is the canon version, and regional variants, usually with deliberately unconventional capitals .. seems like lovely mess! i'm only using "global feed", and i appreciate your observation of the redundancy of adding "cohost".