So my friend Nik and I made a way to use hashtags on any website. You set up little networks, like webrings, so that all the sites on the network can see the hashtags just like they were part of the same platform. We’re calling it Octothorpes and if you just want to get started using them, go here.

This post is to attempt to explain why we did this. In 2024, when most websites are either bad, gone, broken, or secret other thing. We’ve been talking about this project for almost three years now, and I’m finding it harder than I expected to answer that.

The obvious answer is, why not? Hashtags are fun.

Then there’s the fact that hashtags seem to want to leave the platforms that confine them. They’ve inserted themselves in our language to the point that we write them on physical surfaces or pretend to hashtag words while speaking. Hashtags seem to imbue words with a sort of magic that turns them from mere labels into portals to the real world things they refer to. One research paper calls them “searchable talk.”

They’re also useful. In one of the best things ever written about tags, the founder of Pinboard¹ recounts asking the founder of Delicious what good tags were.

I didn’t see why tags were a big deal, but Joshua explained to me that tagging was basically a search engine in reverse. This was an incredibly powerful idea.

New kinds of search engines seem… welcome right now.

These are true answers to the question of why, and ones most people seem to infer right away. We really just want to see what people do with them, so we can call this post done and you can go use them. Hashtags are something that exist, we know what they’re for, and here’s a new way to use them in more places.

But… why tho

That question has many facets. Here is the octothorpe that captures the ones I have written so far, and any Nik has to add: why-we-made-octothorpes.