[Originally from Week­notes 2023 W47: Closed in.]

In organizing my personal notes, I’ve stumbled into a problem with tags (like #week­notes). It seems impossible to reference a tag without also using it at the same time.

To illustrate this, imagine I were to mention the tag #fiction in these week­notes because I want to link out to the overview of all notes with that tag. If I do so, then that tag is also applied to these week­notes themselves, which means they’ll show up in the list of notes tagged with #fiction, and that is not what I want.

In Bear, my note-taking app of choice, I work around this problem by using specific URLs that open tags, like bear://x-callback-url/open-tag?name=week­notes. This works, but it feels like a workaround than a proper solution.

This is an issue on social media as well: if, for example, I were to post “the #asstodon and #bloomscrolling hashtags are so wholesome” (with the sole intention of linking out to these tags) then that very tweet or toot will be unintentionally tagged with #asstodon and #bloomscrolling as well.

I have no idea what a solution could be.

This might be a manifestation of the use–mention distinction.