That's actually been the option that is the most attractive replacement in my mind. However, I am not sure that new users will be able to figure out that the link is split. It might be worth trying. We would also have color splitting going on as well, which may or may not help. For example, if you followed #blog.hubski, the entire thing would be blue. However, if you only followed #blog, then just the blog portion would be blue. -That splitting of colors might be instructive when it comes to the split link, however. It's probably worth mocking up. It's not terrible when the color splits. However, I do see people stumbling on the split link.You could even have #blog.hubski be two links, one for #blog and the ".hubski" part link to #blog.hubski". That, I believe, is most people's concern with visual clutter. It's just redundant display. Once we get to #blog.hubski, we already know it's in #blog.
Idea: just have all the tags as shown before, but not including "#tag.user" tags. If a user then follows the "#tag.user" tag and that's the only reason that post would show up in the feed, have it show up at the end of the list as: by user #tag1 - #tag2 - (#tag2.user) surrounded by parenthesis. It's otherwise implied that the #tag1.user and #tag2.user tags exist. Maybe in the post page itself, you can have links for users to follow the #[tag].[user] personal tags. Of course, I don't really know what you do with community tags, but I assume there isn't a #[community].[user] for that specific post? So maybe that would get a little confusing.Title
I like it, but then I'm not opposed to the way it is currently, I don't find it ugly or cluttered. I mean, the site itself is... text heavy altogether. I also think the progression currently educates as to the process. #science then #science.user suggests that perhaps the second tag is a subset of science, specific to that user. -It's visually informative. That said, this suggestion looks nice.