Mr. Meitar Moscovitz wrote:
There's been some discussion on the Identi.ca Laconica group with
regards to bangtag syntax for groups infringing on the space of tags[0].
Here are some difference between groups and tags: anyone can post
something with a particular tag, but only members can post to a group. A
group's membership can be limited, approval only (future) or members can
be blocked from a group (future). Group notices can be made private
(future).
Groups have an identity: a home page, a location, and a description, as
well as a logo. Groups are administered by one (or more (future))
admins. Groups can have related groups (chosen by the admin or suggested
by membership overlap).
Finally, groups fit into the federated subscription model of OMB.
Joining a group -- even a remote group (future) -- means you'll get all
messages to that group, no matter what, /no matter what server you're
on/. Subscribing to a tag (which /is/ an upcoming feature) means that
you will only receive notices with that tag that your server knows
about. We would have to distribute every notice to every server in order
to get every tagged notice to you.
If we tried to make groups and tags the same thing, we would ruin
people's expectations of hash tags in order to make a bad version of
groups. I would prefer not to do either.
I think there's an interesting problem with posting a notice to !php
with the tag #php. The question is one of addressing; are you trying to
address a group of people you belong to, or just trying to mark a
message with a topic (which may be interesting to that group of people,
or to others)?
I think the fact that so many of our current groups (like !ubuntu) are
related to particular topics makes this even more confusing, but I think
that as groups mature this will become less of an issue.
I'd be happy to add an additional tag for each group in a message, so
that "!php hello world" is automatically tagged with "php" and will show
up in the tag stream for that tag. That would at least save people the
trouble of having to add an extra hashtag.
-Evan
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