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 ↩︎

  • @PuppyOSAndCoffee@lemmy.ml
    1•10 months ago

    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.

    • @ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org
      2•10 months ago

      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.

    • @ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org
      2•10 months ago

      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)

      • @PuppyOSAndCoffee@lemmy.ml
        1•10 months ago

        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.