- cross-posted to:
- selfhost@lemmy.ml
- selfhosted@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- selfhost@lemmy.ml
- selfhosted@lemmy.world
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.
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.
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.
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.