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:
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Do you think having post tags would be helpful on Lemmy? Why or why not?
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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.
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I like the idea of predefined / selectable post #tag and user defined #tag in comments.
Believe there should be a question type tag for a post that allows the OP or the moderator team to apply 1 or more answer type tags to the comments.
I think it is important for a community to decide which tags will be mandatory, and if they are, requiring the post to have at least one of those tags before submitting (esp for fan communities where spoilers can be a thing). Reddit does this in the worst way possible and should not be a model.
When posting content, community specific tag guidelines should be visible.
It will be important for tags to work from both mobile and laptop views.
DO NOT USE THAT TERRIBLE LANGUAGE DROP-DOWN. Use chips.
A community should be able to optionally define up to three tags as hot / hotter / hottest (in order) to encourage content.
Tags should have colors.
Community specific tags should have limits (3? 5?) so that users don’t have to deal with OCD mods.
Communities should be able to decide which instance tags do and don’t apply—don’t force tags in a community.
When viewing a list of posts in a community, I should be able to select tags to filter posts.
When viewing a post, I should be able to select the tag to see a list of other posts in that community that also have that tag.
Finally tags should be multi lingual. Even community ones.
I think limiting the number of post tags is not a good idea. Of course it’s probably for the better if a community can’t have 200 different tags for “active use”, but for a community with a broad topic (which is common at this time in Lemmy), tags would be useful for the kind or the topic of the post one makes.
With kind I mean “question”, “meme”, “news” and “sale” among others, or also if a kind of post is only allowed on a certain day of the week, a useful rule could be the mandatory use of the corresponding tag on it, so those whom it bothers can filter it out, and the posts are also searchable based on that for those interested. Adding to this, as time goes on and the day-limited topics change, you (as a community moderator) probably don’t want to delete their tags to keep the posts of it searchable, just as it was originally. Archiving tags (like Gitea will do apparently in the next major version) would be a useful feature for this case, to keep them for searchability, but also keep them out of the way of actively used tags for when you tag your new post. It is basically a boolean variable for each tag, and sorting of tags in menus based on its state.
And with topic, it would be a similar use case but for a recently very hot topic, but to be honest I can’t see this one being used by posters, as I imagine these would be very volatile, and as I understand posts can only have tags that were declared by mods for the community.If we have a limited number of community specific tag, at least make the limit configurable by the server admin.
What about the federated picture?
An instance doesn’t just have its tags, it has all tags for all communities and instances. tags require storage (disk); retrieving and searching by tags require compute.
So if you have x instances each with infinite tags, but each tag referring only to a tiny … this may not be great for the server.
Great point about frozen tags.
Also, yes this sounds a little scary, but is it really a problem? Posts and comments can be infinite too, and they contain much more data, a long blob of text. Compared to that, tags should only contain a label, a color code, maybe a description, and that’s it. Maybe some simple properties in bitflags later.
And tags should also accumulate much slower than posts and comments.
But, if a federating sever or a client would load all the tags at once (which does not happen with posts and comments, right?), that may be a problem, but the limit on non-archived tags could solve this I think, and a conservative limit on tag label and description length (details may as well go into a wiki (I think we don’t have those yet, though) or a post like that)A binary large object (blob) is trivial for a database; a post is only loaded once & rendered in full exactly once.
Tags are a search key and will be constantly rendered & used as a filter.
Maybe archived/frozen tags generally should not be transported to federating servers, except when actually needed like for showing them in a list, or when a post that is being viewed has some of them. Even then, these ones could be only stored in a cache-like fashion, possibly with an upper limit on storage.
A count of such tags may still be useful to transport, though… to show it on the UI to the user, and possibly for the server to decide whether it wants to preload them right now.There could be limits though on the number of tags a post can have (10?), and the number of non-archived tags a community can have (50?), with both of these being configurable for a server by an admin, and preferably also allowing community specific overrides for these limits.
Great as I don’t like Github and dont have an acxount there I’ll try to make suggestions here. I’ll refer to this comment for further clarification.
- As already discussed in the github issue tags should imo be the lemmy implementation of hashtags as they can be seen on mastodon. ActivityPub already handles them well and on the lemmy side it’s just a matter of redesigning in order to display them as more reddit like tags. We have the moderator tags which look pretty nice already. Also important tags like the Mod or NSFW tags could be displayed in a red or orange color which signalizes the importance of the tag.
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My second suggestions was also already pointed out but as on reddit communities should be able to predesign some tags that the users will be able to select (just like on reddit). Additionally users should be able to add maybe up to four other tags to their post the number would have to be discussed with the community to prevent tag spamming.
Adding user based tags should not be a big problem for moderation as on mastodon anyone can give themslves any hashtag they wan’t which seems to work well. Additionally (community and even instance) moderators would have the ability to search for inappropriate tags in bulk which they can then further analyze and remove if it contains inappropriate language.
These user based tags could be displayed in a small field right below the post body wheras the important tags as well as the community picked tags would be displayed above the post just like on reddit. In a further step an option could be implemented to hide the user given tags entirely or just collapse this field.
hashtags as they can be seen on mastodon.
I haven’t seen the federation content exchanged, in the UI I’ve only seen hashtags from mastodon as links inside the content of the post.
For the implementation in lemmy I’d guess they need to be included in the metedata (as in one of the examples in the rfc), does mastodon already does this so lemmy can properly display them in a separate section in the ui?
Also, how would mastodon handle not having the hashtag in the content but only in the metadata?I cant find it anymore but I thought that this was actually part of ActivityPub. Also I’ve seen a comment exactly pointing this out in the issue thread.
I have a big problem with Mastodon tags being I need to go to another website to search them and figure out which ones are actually in use.
The community curation of tags idea would be a very low-tech and simple solution to this!
Yes totally needed.
I dont get Mastodon at all, posting random content just out there. Twitter was a horrible platform to copy I dont get it.
On Mastodon tags are the only way to filter useful content. On Lemmy you have forums but sometimes duplicates, so tags would be great!
It’s a good idea.
I would say that so long as communities are governing their own tags but it’s somehow monitored to make sure two tags don’t mean the same thing it could be a real positive, especially for support topics etc.
What is the priority for this?
Better mod tools, scanning uploads to combat illegal images, and ways to combat bad actors in general are needed long before this.
Tags should be set up in the community settings. That way there is a community specific list to choose from when posting.
It’s open source, priority comes down to what devs want to work on. Development doesn’t focus on a single feature at a time, but in parallel.
Yes. That’s obvious.
I am asking if there is a stated priority on this new feature?
The dev behind this is fed up with lack of proper spoilers on lemmy. He chose to implement them himself. He is not @dessalines or @nutomic
I would love to see tags. This could be used like post flair on reddit, and to search or block specific content and to find new communities.
That would be awesome! We really could use something like flair on Reddit.
Personally I think communities should be tags - lobste.rs style. You would have tag mods determining whether a tag belongs or doesn’t, and it’ll increase participation in the comments since everone interested in the post will be discussing it in the same place (nifty, as lemmy is still growing). Cross-posting always felt like a bolt-on solution. It also addresse the issue of cross-instance content preservation in case of outage better
I think it may turn out to be useful if besides posts and comments, communities could be tagged too. The moderators of the community would select the appropriate tags, but only from a set defined by server admins.
This could help with discovering similar communities, among other things.That’ll be a great feature. Some notes:
Tags should not be arbitrary text, but instead predefined per community. This would help with automation tools. E.g. spoilers, NSFL/NSFW distinction, trigger warning etc.
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Yes because I like Tumblr more than Reddit. I like searchability, and while it can lead to Brigading, is often better for communities with useful information (tech, hobbies, DIY). I think basically some communities should be allowed to turn off any functions that make content more searchable, if they feel they need it to prevent brigading.
I’m really hoping Lemmy can become a little more personal… this threaded communities concept based almost entirely on Reddit does not facilitate 1 on 1 discussion. At best, someone will add a very useful comment to a thread and if people see it then it will rise to the top and be directly under the post. I think maybe being able to star/pin a great comment (like youtube) would be best, but again tumblr deals with this using Reblogs. Just… add someone elses’s comment to the post and share it with those comments added.
