cohost support

This current behaviour surprised me; I assumed this was precisely the use case that “tag‐only” shares were meant to address. I have seen users in the wild using “tag‐only” shares to add tags that they assume will be properly filtered for their followers who have any of those tags filtered, but this doesn’t actually work even though one could reasonably assume that it does.

I would say the current behaviour exacerbates “context collapse” issues. The burden for adding filterable data should not fall exclusively on the original poster because they cannot know all the audiences their post will be shared to. For instance, not everyone is going to think to tag #food, but someone who wants to share something depicting food and knows that they have followers with eating disorders who could be triggered by it should be able to add data (like a #food tag) that enables their followers to filter according to their needs. Since this doesn’t work right now, the only alternative is to add tags and content warnings to a post that contains nothing but a hyperlink to the content they wanted to share, which is obviously cumbersome and removes all the other benefits of shares.

It remains unclear whether or not the added tags should apply to all shared content or just the last shared post for the purposes of filtering. I would think the former is more useful. This could be implemented just fine without it, but a bit of polish that might be nice in this case is changing the notification text from “This post has tags you muffled:” to something like “This share of this post has tags you muffled:”.

Alternatively, if neither behaviour is desirable because tags and content warnings should only apply to the content they are attached to, then shares should be able to add tags and content warnings that apply to all of the posts they are sharing (which should probably not be automatically added to new shares). This would expand the scope here from fixing what could be interpreted as a bug to an entirely new (and, IMO, much‐needed) feature.