What are Octothorpes?

Octothorpes are hashtags and backlinks that can be used on regular websites, connecting pages across the open internet, regardless of where they're hosted.

A page that's tagged or hashtagged will show you the pages on a single domain with the same tag, but a page that's octothorped will show you the pages with the same tag across an unlimited number of domains.

What does “octothorpe” actually mean?

It's one of the many synonyms for the number sign, or hashtag, with dubious origins.

What is this website?

Welcome to the first Octothorpe Protocol Web Ring!

This site is a hub that connects independent websites using the Octothorpe Protocol. So, sites that are registered with this Ring can use hashtags on their own pages, and other sites on this ring can see what they hashtagged, just as if they were on a shared platform like X or Instagram. The platform in this case is just the world wide web, and you don't have to give anyone your personal data to use it.

An Octothorpes Ring keeps track of info that registered sites have sent it, and gives them ways to use that info. It has a basic interface for browsing its hashtags and domains, including RSS feeds for every hashtag so you can follow them as if you were on a platform.

If your site is on a Ring, you can embed octothorpes on your site, or use the API to build your own interface. Here's an example that lets you browse every topic that was part of Weird Web October

What is the Octothorpe Protocol?

If you just think of octothorpes as "hashtags for independent websites", that's great. But the system that lets you put a hashtag on your website can do so much more than that. The Octothorpes Protocol is what makes it work. It's basically a putting labels on webpages.

Why Would I Want to Put Labels on My Webpages?

When you hashtag a page #wombats, the statement you make is "this page is associated with the term wombats." An Octothorpes Web Ring keeps track of those statements so that you can click on #wombats and see all the pages associated with that term. This gives you a way to find new sites and build communities or groups without relying on search engines or social platforms. We really liked what ribo.zone said about using octothorpes to find new sites, and we never would have known about it without octothorpes to follow.

Hashtags are just one kind of label

There's no reason we have to stick to hashtags. Say you read a thought-provoking blog post, and you wrote down the thoughts it provoked on your own blog, and you want to make a statement that "these two posts are related?"

That's what's called a backlink -- a link that goes both ways. You can link to a site, they can know you linked to them, and they can link back to you. There are a lot of different ways to do this on the internet. The Octothorpes Protocol has a special statement just for those, and, between sites that are using OP, it's as simple as making a regular link.

Find out more at the demo site.

Development is underway to add lots of other kinds of useful statments to the OP. You cacn check out our public roadmap to see what's happening.

How Can I Use It?

There's no app or account to create -- all you have to do is paste a couple lines of HTML into your website. If you can do that, you can use octothorpes.

First step is to register your site here. Then check out the quickstart page to, well, get started quickly.

If you want to get more in-depth, check out the documentation.

Why Did You Make This?

Lots of reasons! We're collecting them here as we think of them: why-we-made-octothorpes

I'd prefer a nerdier, more detailed summary

Great. Here ya go:

Octothorpes is a lightweight protocol for creating hashtags and backlinks between websites across domains. The process is simple and platform independent. Register your domain with an octothorpe server, and you can send and receive information about hashtags used by any other domain on that server. "Octothorping" a webpage creates a relationship between the page's URL and the octothorped term on a server. All pages sharing terms and servers will be linked to each other just like posts with the same hashtags are linked on closed platforms like Instagram.

Servers are simple API hosts, and the network is intended to be distributed -- there's no limit to the number of servers a domain can interact with. Access can be controlled on a per-URI basis -- different pages on the same website can communicate with entirely different sets of servers. Communication between servers and pages happens over standard HTTP requests. Relationships are stored as RDF, and the core protocol includes the ability to create direct backlinks between URLs. The Octothorpes project provides basic client-side tools like drop-in scripts for easy adoption, and endpoints for platform-specific implementations.