I finally caved and filled the right sidebar in Soapbox FE.

@alex Have you considered adding a trending section to the side too? IMHO it might be better suited for the left than the right.

If you think it would clutter the UI you could make a tab for it next to the Notification section and give it its own page instead

@realcaseyrollins Yeah it’s a thing people ask for a lot, but nobody in Pleroma wants to do because Mastodon’s implementation caused a lot of problems.

I will probably add it at some point, with some configuration options. It will be hard though. There’s no way to query that data quickly, so we have to store a cache of all incoming tags and then sort them. Even Mastodon’s algorithm doesn’t order these tags properly, it has a minimum threshold (10 statuses) after which it takes the top 5 by order of insertion… so the most active hashtag might not even show up on the list.

@alex Interesting. I didn't know all of this.

I frankly believe that a single website to view trends, or perhaps work as an API, would be the best option. I feel like a script that reads all the toots in the timeline should be able to scan the hashtags and sort them fairly quickly. Right? Shouldn't be too hard to do in #JavaScript.

@realcaseyrollins For each new tashtag it discovers, it will get slower to sort the entire list. Also, what’s the cutoff point? We have to store a date with each hashtag too, and we want to count occurrences of that tag from today but not occurrences of that tag from yesterday. Sorting them and pruning the old ones is too slow to happen every time someone loads the trending panel. So we need multiple layers of cache with background processes that automatically update them.

Mastodon just prunes it at 12am midnight UTC every day. So if you ever visit in the morning and there’s no trends, that’s why. It’s not from the past 24 hours, it’s trends since 12am UTC.

@lain @realcaseyrollins Makes sense. In the case of Spinster I made trends local-only, and I think that brought some value, by makings tags like #bookclub easier to find (although we did also get #FreeSquiddy, which was not good).

There are probably better ways to increase discoverability. But I fear they will all have this problem of needing some manual curation.

@lain @alex I really don't like the idea of curating trending hashtags, IMHO...I'd prefer it to just show what people are talking about. Local-only trends would be helpful for filtering things specific to the community tho

@lain @alex Ain't that what antispam policies are for

@derek @lain @alex I feel like an AI algorithm should be able to automatically lump #COVID with #COVID_19 by character similarity. I've done similar text matching in #Python before.