Octothorpes

Version 0.5

Hashtags have broken free
from big platforms.

You can too.

Octothorpes are hashtags that work on any website.

"Octothorpe" is an old-fashioned term for "hashtag."
This one was written by Isaac Newton

Explore the
World Wide Web
with Octothorpes

Use hashtags on your own site. Backlinks too. Connect to anyone else's site.

Build your own feeds. No platform. No algorithm.

Follow any combination of sites, hashtags, mentions, links, & Web-rings.

Start a webring without running a server or writing code.

Find fellow aliens.

The humble hashtag is an ambassador of the social web.

With one #, a link becomes a relationship.

The social web should be light, but strong.

It should be so simple you can build it yourself, or with friends.

You can, with Octothorpe Protocol.

OP is an easy way to add social tools to any website.

If you can paste one or two lines of HTML on a website somewhere, you can use OP.

Use it in the background without changing your site, or embed rich social features using the API.

Build your own algorithm. No site required.

OP gives you the tools to make your own feed.

Even if you don't have your own site, anyone can subscribe to anything on the network whether it’s a #, posts from multiple different websites, links to your own website, or everything posted on your favorite Webring.

Or just click on a hashtag and explore. Let's go back to browsing.

We miss the old web. Don't you?

If you miss useful search results, index pages, chronological feeds, webrings, and personal sites made by humans, then OP is for you.

Build

OP exists to make it as easy as possible to create useful, human networks with regular websites. With OP, you can have hashtags, mentions, and groups anywhere you can host a webpage, just by pasting in one or two lines of HTML (or javascript if you want to be fancy.)

Browse

An OP server is like a combination of a search engine and an old-school web portal or index page. OP doesn't crawl pages, it only shows you what actual humans ask it to. So there's no SEO game to cheat at. And there's no algorithm, because you can make your own feeds.

You can subscribe to most anything on an OP server with an RSS reader.