this is a test of the octothorpe broadcast system

so a while ago i read something interesting: bear blog was adding support for something called octothorpes. i don't use the bear blogging platform but a quick perusal of the article made it seem like that any website could use this system to add a hashtag to a page and be able to discover other pages without relying on a big platform. i thought to myself "wow this is pretty cool, i should add support for this." anyway, it's been a few months since then and i'm just getting around to it. it got lost in the tab shuffle, what can i say. in theory it's pretty easy to set up, although i obviously can't tell whether what i did worked yet or not. i think i'm also set up to endorse backlinks from others in the ring, although i'm not actually pulling those in for display. there's also a pre-registration step for signing up for the main web ring on octothorp.es. it went through after a few days of some kind of review process; it might be manual? i'm not entirely sure.

in any case, there are some things that i think are really good about this type of system and other things that might be a little challenging. maybe my favorite bit about this is that it's very reminiscent of old yahoo! where things were separated into categories and it was more of a catalog system than the third-rate search engine it would eventually become. actually it's just long been a purple coat of paint over bing, now that i think about it. it also handles server trouble nicely - while you wouldn't be able to search through tags and so on if the central site is malfunctioning, leaf pages such as this one will work completely fine other than one failed network connection that eagle-eyed debugger window watchers might spot. the downsides, of course, are some of the same intractable problems that affect every collection of text on the internet. as far as i can tell, there's no tag aliasing or canonical tags, so while this post will show up under #octothorpes, it won't appear on #octothorpe or #octo-thorpes. and while there are some provisions for moderation by sending the devs a request to take something down, at some point someone is going to come along and ask "why are you still linking to this?" i wish that it wasn't so and that you could run a service on the internet and people could behave like civilized adults, but alas. this is partially mitigated by the site whitelist (although that's hard to scale) and having the actual content hosted elsewhere to be subject to actual takedown requests with their hosting provider. although looking at the documentation i'm not sure anything ever gets removed from the index? i think if i want the actual answer to that question i'd have to read the source.

anyway, i think i'm done rambling. i might try and add h-entries or webmentions or something next. it can be a little lonely on here sometimes

EDIT: i tried for a while to get this to work... and it doesn't, at least as far as i've been able to tell. oh well. i'll keep an eye on it.