Fellow Lemmy users,

The Lemmy development team is considering adding a new tag system that would allow us to tag posts with keywords. This could make it easier to search for and find content on Lemmy.

Before implementing this, the team would like our feedback as users. Specifically:

  • Do you think having post tags would be helpful on Lemmy? Why or why not?

  • How should tags be displayed and integrated into Lemmy?

Please share your thoughts on whether you’d find a tag system useful, and if so, how you’d want it implemented. The dev team reads the feedback and will use it to decide how to proceed.

To give your input, you can comment or vote here or on the GitHub issue[1]. You can vote whether or not you want the feature, and the different implementations, so we can see which is the most popular.

Thanks for helping shape Lemmy! This is our community, so please speak up.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.


  1. GitHub — Post tags ↩︎

  • RonSijm@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    I’d like tags, but they’d have to be something different than just communities / categories, since that’s already what communities are for.

    I’ve build multiple CMS like systems, and how I’ve implemented tags before, and liked the most was as a node tree - Since a lot of the comments are focused on NSFW, to illustrate an example:

    • SFW
    • NSFW
      • NSFW/Porn
        • NSFW/Porn/Straight
        • NSFW/Porn/Gay
      • NSFW/Gore

    This allows users to use tags as a sort of searching mechanism with an hierarchy, and fine-tune how specific they want to search for a specific thing. Do you want all NSFW stuff, or something more specific.

    The downside is that it could get complicated to maintain a good tag structure, plus you might run into scenarios where 1 subtag might fall under more categories. In that case a “Parent 1-x> Child tree” doesn’t work anymore, and you’ll end up making an “Parent x-x> Child structure” - which is even more difficult to maintain

    The argument against tags, is that posts are already categorized by communities. Though not everything, and not every niche thing needs it’s own community in my opinion. Look at !programming@programming.dev for example - a “general purpose community”. Just taking the top 2 posts there, you could still create a similar note-tree tag structure there like:

    • Programming
      • IDEs
        • VSCode
          • VSCodium
      • Code Style
        • Tabs VS Spaces

    These tags could still be “communities”, but communities are non-hierarchical, and at what point to we really need an extreme niche “Tabs VS Spaces” community? If there would be a tag system like this, people could select the “Code Style” tag, and see posts under that tag plus all child tags.

    This is just an idea for tag structuring, the concepts of ACLs of “who can make these tags” and “who can move around tags” or “who can append new child tags” - and “Introducing new child tags could require reordering the parent content into those tags” is an whole other discussion

      • RonSijm@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        I’m not very familiar with the ActivityPub protocol, but there are easy ways to flatten an hierarchy.

        For example, the tag could literally be “NSFW/Porn/Straight” - though I assume then there’s no system in place to request tags by their parents… So posts with that tag would just get 3 tags: “NSFW”, “NSFW/Porn” and “NSFW/Porn/Straight” in the API, and would be hidden / breadcrumbed in the UI.

        Though it’s not ideal to do it like that, as it would make maintaining structure more complicated - though not impossible.

        Just curious, how open / extendable is ActivityPub? Just to say “the protocol doesn’t have it (yet)” - doesn’t mean it can’t be implemented, either properly or through some workaround like mentioned above