Whether you love them or hate them, #hashtags are ubiquitous.
One of the reasons hashtags became so popular is because they created a bridge from the social graph (who you know) to the interest graph (what you are interested in).
The idea for hashtags was first proposed by @chrismessina.me in a 2007 tweet. Soon after Twitter implemented hashtags, they spread like wildfire across the entire social media landscape including Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. Within a few short years the hashtag had captured the zeitgeist enough to be crowned the American Dialect Society's 2012 word of the year. And in June 2014, hashtag was added to the Oxford English Dictionary as "a word or phrase with the symbol # in front of it, used on social media websites and apps so that you can search for all messages with the same subject".
What if, instead of reinventing the social media wheel, we brought some of social media's best ideas to regular websites?
One of the reasons hashtags became so popular is because they created a bridge from the social graph (who you know) to the interest graph (what you are interested in). Fast forward to today and a lot has changed. The hashtags role as a rudimentary interest graph has been displaced by socio-interest graphs as popularized by TikTok and its #FYP (For You Page). These and other changes have caused many to become algorithm-aware and seek out alternatives such as Bluesky and Mastodon which aim to facilitate a "decentralization" of the social internet. While these approaches offer some interesting benefits over traditional social media – including better support for hashtags – they suffer from similar problems (e.g. content moderation).
Hashtags for the largest social network in the world
Just in case someone needs to say it out loud: a decentralized social network already exists, it's called the internet. What if, instead of reinventing the social media wheel, we brought some of social media's best ideas to regular websites? What would this look like? This is one of the ideas we want to explore with HyperTexting.
To be clear, we're not there yet. Automated tag feeds like this one and converting plain text #hashtags into customizable links are not it — but they are a start.
What we need is a hashtag service – or ideally, competing hashtag services – that websites could opt-in to sending "hashtag mentions" (think push notifications).
These "hashtag mentions" could be built on top of existing standards like Webmentions, so hashtag services could offer public APIs (e.g. POST /api/hashtags/#example).
They could even interoperate!
If such services existed, websites could further opt-in to these interest graphs by directing their own hashtag links to the hashtag service of their choosing to promote discovery.
For example, this #HTML hashtag actually links out to x.com/hashtag/HTML instead of a page that only shows the #HTML posts from this website.
The hashtag services that provide clear value to their users would effectively become aggregators, and could thus benefit financially from @stratechery.com's aggregation theory.
Hashtags for the human internet
Social media isn't going anywhere anytime soon. But social media platforms are effectively just websites. They are websites with arbitrary rules that change whenever it benefits the platform, not the people. More and more people (and businesses) are feeling the effects of these changes every day, and many of them are seeking alternatives. One of those alternatives is to have your own website where you can make your own rules.
Just in case someone needs to say it out loud: a decentralized social network already exists, it's called the internet.
Our goal with HyperTexting is not only to make having and updating a website as easy as creating a social media account and posting to it – we also want to make it as interesting. We think hashtags are one piece of that puzzle.
A public hashtags service is on the roadmap for HyperTexting, but we would absolutely love it if someone would beat us to it. If you are reading this and nodding your head, please consider joining the @hypertexting.community to continue the discussion. 💬
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Caleb Hailey
Founder @herd.works
June, 2025