@jnkrtech On CJK hashtags from scratch, I honestly don't know. My suspicion is that hashtags may be the wrong unit in the first place. Some kind of topic grouping might fit better. But once you go there, you're getting uncomfortably close to a recommender, and that's exactly the sort of thing a lot of people came here to get away from.

The ML idea is interesting, but I think it would be a very hard sell even if it were strictly opt-in. On the fediverse, once you put “ML” on the label, half the objections start writing themselves.

I think the bigger issue is that hashtags are partly compensating for weak search. And weak search is not just a bug. In some corners it is very much the point. A lot of fediverse people want discovery to stay limited because it keeps spaces smaller and less searchable by strangers. So this stops being just a technical proposal pretty quickly. It turns into an argument about what the fediverse is for.