About

What are Octothorpes?

Octothorpes are hashtags that can be used on regular websites, connecting pages across the open internet, without a central platform.

Tagging or hashtagging a page the normal way links pages on a single site with the same tag, but octothorping it will show you the pages with the same tag across an unlimited number of sites & domains.

Octothorpe Protocol jailbreaks your hashtags

It's totally cool if you just think of octothorpes as "hashtags for independent websites". But they work on Octothorpe Protocol, and OP can do so much more than hashtags.

Hashtags are just fancy links. When you hashtag a page #hummingbirds, you link your page to the term hummingbirds. Now you're also sorta linked to all the other pages using that term. So hashtags are special because they create a relationship between all the pages using the same tag. But someone's got to keep track of all those relationships -- HTTP doesn't have that feature. Every site does it their own way, so it's hard to connect hashtags on one platform to another. That's where OP comes in.

OP is a univeral way to track relationships between web pages and a set of tools to navigate the web of relationships between URLs.

To that end, OP servers provide not just pages where you can see hashtags and their relationships, but feeds that you can subscribe to via RSS or embed on your page.

Hashtags aren't the only kind of relationship

When you click on a hashtag, you expect to go to a page that shows you all the pages that use it. Without the hashtag, that web of relationships just looks like a few different pages linked to the same place.

So that's why OP can also track links. OP servers can make feeds of all the links to or from a URL, turn links into backlinks, and track different kinds of links like bookmarks, citations, or mentions.

It does Webrings too.

We already have a word for a bunch of related sites linking to each other, and that's a webring. So you can also make and manage webrings with OP.

The home page of a webring looks a lot like a page for a hashtag. It's just a fancy kind of page that lists all the domains that link to it. So if you tell an OP Server that your page is a webring, then it knows that the domains mutually linked to that page are members of that webring.

It's really that easy -- make a page, call it a webring, link to some sites, and if they link back to the ring's homepage, they're members.

OP gives you special feeds for webrings. There's the usual stuff of webrings, like a list of all the domains or your neighbors, but you can also scope all the other kinds of feeds to your webring. So you can make one feed that shows posts from all the members of your webring, or just all the members that use the hashtag #wombats, or just all the links to your site from other members. Like a social network, but without all the other garbage.

OP lets you to build your own algorithm

Every list of things that OP can describe can be a feed. OP servers have pages for basic feeds, like all hashtags or domains. But they also have an advanced API that lets you build feeds based on relationships. You can subscribe to them as RSS or use them as data sources in your own applications and sites. Some examples are:

• Mentions from friends
  • Say you make a webring for your friends. With OP, you can subscribe to a feed of every time anyone on the ring links to something on your site. (And yes, it's [WebMention compatible].)
• Subscriptions to a topic
  • Just like normal hashtags, you can subscribe to all posts with the same tag (or tags). But with OP, you can specify exactly which sites you want to see posts from, even if they spell their hashtags a little differently.
• Dynamic blogrolls and webrings
  • You can easily get the classic "sites we like" list or prev/next/random webring widget out of OP, with the added advantage that they stay up to date as they change.

There are a lot of options. If you want to learn more about the API, check out the [docs].

How OP works

OP servers store the links and relationships that you create on your web site. They don't actively crawl sites like a search engine. Instead, you put some simple HTML code on any page that you want the OP server to track. Then, when someone visits your page, it tells the OP server to look at your page. If you label your links and tags in a way that the OP server can recognize, it will record them. OP Servers only track what you ask them to. They do not store any information that's not already on your public web page. They only reflect existing links between webpages in a way that makes it easy to navigate the relationships those links represent.

OP is a social network for regular websites that you can add without knowing how to code

Closed social media has poisened the free, open web, but it's also become a utilty many of us rely on. We wanted to bring just the parts that make social networks so useful and fun within reach of anyone who wants to do their own thing on the internet. Octothorpe Protocol makes that possible.

Contact

We are on Mastodon and Bluesky and the source code is on Github.