in general, i think a hierarchical community system would be leagues better than a tags system. for tags to be really useful, they have first-class citizens: allow me to subscribe to just /c/community@instan.ce#favouritetag (or /c/community#favouritetag@instan.ce?)^[1], allow me to subscribe to just that tag with rss, and allow me to add just that tag to a multicommunity, when they’re released. with all of those features, it may as well be a subcommunity, but i digress

this issue seems to be confused between two or three different things called tags, as well, which is an issue for readability but never mind

A post tag would be defined as a “subtitle” of the post inserted by a mod of the community (or an admin) after the post is published, with the purpose of categorizing or adding flair to the community post. It would be displayed in the post listing alongside the title in a smaller font, inside a bordered box, reddit style.

i quite like this. i’m presuming it’d be similar to reddit’s “flair” system

Also, the main usefulness of tags, is being able to list / filter on them, which already works with searching. Lets say a music community requires a [Genre] tag, so if you wanted to list all the rock posts, you could just this: https://dev.lemmy.ml/search/q/[rock]/type/all/sort/topall/page/1.

this i would say is another point in favour of tags, as the mod of a community could add them whereas we currently can’t edit post titles (which is good)

i can’t remember, however, whether reddit allowed >1 flair per post. this seems like something that’s almost compulsory

Have you considered tags as an alternative to sub-communities? It seems to work pretty well for lobste.rs, this is where they discuss their reasoning: lobste.rs/about#tagging

this seems like a terrible idea. i will copy a comment from reddit and the response from the sift developer, which didn’t really solve my qualms:

i feel like this would not be a reddit alternative, more a twitter or tumblr alternative.

subreddits are (or were) disparate communities, with different philosophies. if somebody tags a post with #trans and #gender-critical just because it relates to both; the comments will be an absolute cesspit

That is a reasonable concern. Sift is aiming to be something of a hybrid/hopefully superset that can be used reddit like or twitter/tumbler like.

The community aspect is indeed tricky. The solution we are trying is to use our reputation graph (see my top level post for more information) to pick out which comments get shown to which users.

The hope is that this will allow us to support partially overlapping virtual/individualized communities. In your example the #trans folks can be having a discussion about the article and mostly seeing posts from other #trans folks (because of their graph connections) and the same for the #gender-critical side. What will also (hopefully) happen is that some of the (highest quality|funniest|best reasoned|least offensive|…) things from each side will float up to the top of the graph intersection and maybe give a little bit of a chance for some constructive cross dialog.

Sift is aiming to let everyone be a “mini-moderator” of their own experience and then also propagate that curation to others who will find it useful.

Our model does have potential failure modes of even worse echo chambers, but we are well aware of that and trying our best to design around it.

We’ll be having more discussion of this over at /r/siftquest and (eventually, when it supports discussion better), sift itself.

now i personally dislike that idea. i don’t want my experience curated by a “reputation graph”, i want it curated by me. but this is a bit of a digression as i presume this idea was never really considered

Hierarchicial tags — a cool feature to borrow from Tildes! […]

this actually seems like a reasonable idea, but it was abandoned due to mastodon^[2]

I think the idea of using nsfw, cw, and spoiler tags for labelling objectionable content should be considered. This idea originated from Tildes, where hierarchical tags are used to add specifics. I no longer think hierarchical tags are a good idea, however, as they could potentially break compatibility with services that use tags differently.

this is a great idea! there should definitely be more than one “blur post” tag. in fact, an editable CW: reason^[3] so that users can pre-emptively block tw tags they don’t even want to see blurred would be great too

to be honest, i think the current “spoiler” formatting is bad as well - it should just be called “folded text” or “<details><summary>” or something, and have a spoiler system that just blurs, or blacks out the text/images which would work as block or inline

I disagree for a couple reasons:
\

They would enable better discoverability on non-lemmy software where hashtags are the main topical grouping mechanism right now.

so zcdunn is proposing they’re cross-community? that sounds like it would make things awfully cluttered

While lemmy uses communities for topical grouping, some posts might fit into multiple categories, even unrelated categories. Crossposting sort of solves this, but crossposting can be considered spammy if it’s done too much. And crossposting creates another post which fractures the conversation. This may be desirable sometimes, but a poster may also prefer to keep all the conversation in one spot.

see my thoughts on sift. i’d rather posts be crossposted so that the comments sections would be separated per community

as a less inflammatory example: if a cinnamon news post is tagged Cinnamon and Linux, half the comments will be “man, i could never use cinnamon, they don’t even support wayland”, drowning out actual cinnamon users because there’s less of them

It would allow finer grained filtering of posts, even within a community. Users may be interested in a topic, but not every facet of that topic.

this is the only good use of them, but see my first point

@remram44 I think we’re talking about different types of systems. What i’m suggesting is hashtags that work the same way as the rest of the fediverse. A user could tag their own post when they create it; no other user would be able to tag your post.

You would be able to write a post like this:
URL: example.com
Title: Whatever
Body: Hey check out this interesting #Elixir post that discusses possible #BEAM optimizations
Community: !programming@lemmy.ml

and it would have the hashtags Elixir and BEAM. Users on pleroma/mastodon/misskey/etc would be able to find the post on their instance under either of those hashtags.

this is, in my opinion, the worst possible solution. twitter posts read completely disjointedly, as there are random punctuation marks and diffferent coloured text strewn haphazardly throughout the post, like twitter. it becomes almost unreadable. just tag them when posting, like we do with nsfw currently

To add to @techno156:

Protocol:
According to w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-tags a general tag object exists in the ActivityPub protocol. As dessalines said having unmoderated tags is not an option here as it would increase moderation work too much.

emphasis mine

i’m not entirely sure i see this - dessalines never explained why it would increase moderation…

To whoever starts working on tags, can we please add a feature that allows for advanced tag filters? I want for those things to be possible:

1.) Don’t show posts with choosen tags
2.) Show posts where all of choosen tags exist
3.) Show posts with at least one of choosen tags
4.) Show posts with at least one of choosen tags but exclude ones that have choosen unwanted tags

this is another great idea; and ideally would be added to the url scheme as well (/c/community@instan.ce+#wantedtag-#unwantedtag? i’m not sure how to implement this)

@Neshura87 This probably can be a separate issue but if we are about to implement advanced filtering for tags then maybe we could implement date filtering along tag filtering? Saying that here because I thought that ideas/features overlap a lot and it would be better to have it made together. :x

you are on fire here

that’s pretty much everything i have to say, i’m sorry it’s so long. any comment i haven’t commented on i either agree with, am neutral on, or haven’t seen