Experimental top trending hashtag code was added to twister-core (0.9.14) and twister-html.
It seems to work, it is nice, helps finding about what is going on and everything… but it’s very naive implementation so i guess it will take no time until someone tries to abuse it…
i’m already thinking in improving it by incorporating the notion of “degrees of separation”. We all know we are friend of everybody in the world with less than 6 degrees of separation, right? 
The idea is having a crawler thread in twister-core which would periodically go recursively into the following lists (starting with local users) until a certain deep of separation (2? 3? 4?). Then it would collect the list of these usernames as “trusted” users.
The thing with top trends would be that only posts from users in this list would be considered. This way, fake users or spammers (who are not followed by anyone) would not be able to send thousands of posts just to make a top trend. Their posts would be simply ignored.
Discussion of Top Trends and degrees of separation here
Miguel
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