Announcing Octothorpe Protocol v0.6

Image made with MacPaint 1.0 on MacOs 6.0.5 on Infinite Mac

Hi. A new version of Octothorpe Protocol is live, and it's got a lot of new stuff.

v.6 got here via a twisty path, and our numbering continues to be somewhat arbitrary. When we launched v.5, we tried to be Proper and Decent and added automatic versioning to our main repo, which managed to handle a single update and then quickly crapped out. To any of you who might say, lo, you should be following the creed of semantic versioning as law, I say gaze upon the version history of WinAmp and despair.

The twists and turns in the road to this point are, I think, representative of where we are in the wild world of open source development in 2026. This is a project maintained by two people without funding, seeking greater adoption, built on open source and pro-community principles, regrettably locked in to some shitty services, trying to fit to the way people actually use the internet while aspiring to change that, if even a little, at a fundamental level.

The road also wended around encounters with ATProtocol and the Fediverse, agentic development, grim feelings about our own future employability, conversations with other folks trying to Change Things and Do Something Useful, conversations with artists, conversations with developers, building a homelab, and muppet making. These encounters didn't so much change our plans as they accelerated them and set up some compelling targets. The next release, which is coming on the heels of this one, will make this all much less abstract.

OP, as it stands, does far, far more than what most people are using it for. When we release the next version, which will be soon, all these extra features should fit together to become an entirely new class of Thing. Version .7 will be so close to the original vision for Octothorpes, so I hope a few, clickable examples of that vision will be enough to understand how useful it could be, and inspire people to do new, cool things with it. That's the hope, anyway.

So .6 is a transitional release. It patches some bugs in the API introduced in .5, fills in some gaps in expected features (hashtags on links! tag your bookmarks!), adds some bonkers new things (MultiPass in a gif!), and sets us up for v.7. So please forgive me if I'm just teasing new stuff right now. v.6 is great on its own, in my humble opinion, but the big news is just around the corner. We'll be blogging more and actually using our newsletter. If you want to hear more -- sign up !

This might be a good time to point to our Ethos doc. We are committed to making a better internet, and so we have written out our principles.

Here are the hits for v0.6:

Browse with the Explore page

Tags on Links

New Link types

Multipasses

Custom harmonizers

postDate and image added to listings

More web components and a web component factory

Index a page with our button

Index a page by sending it to us

Set indexing policy with basic HTML

What does this mean for me? What can I do now that I couldn't before?

It's easier than ever to get on OP

If you can only edit the body of your document, throw the new indexing badge on there, and we'll see your page.

If you can make a custom harmonizer , you can tell us how to interpret your site without changing your html.

If you can't or don't want to do standard indexing requests, you can just put a form somewhere on your domain and post urls to us directly.

CURATION

Now that you can tag links , you can bookmark things and tag them to make groups.

Now that MultiPasses and the Explore page are a thing, you can bookmark searches or save them in an image, text it to a friend, and they can share the fun.

We're gonna take a little break, but in the coming months as we get v0.7 ready we'll be posting a lot more on Bluesky and Mastodon , this blog, and our newsletter (for real this time) about stuff you can do with OP and stuff that people are doing with OP.