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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Useful, but there would be a big risk is tag spamming.
It might be worth weighting tags. E.g. a single tag would get a 100 point weighting, but 5 tags would only get a 20 point weighting each. This would discourage tag spamming, without compromising flexibility.
Also, further to another comment, a global tag search should be a must have feature. Tags could be EXTREMELY useful for reducing centralisation. If you could search tags across the whole fediverse, then it will make it a lot easier to find small communities away from the big servers.
One idea to prevent tags being spammed would be to have them be moderated as well. Thoughts?
Moderation requires someone to put the effort in to moderate them. For some servers, this would make sense. We don’t have a central reference however, so the default should be more permissive. If communities want to limit tags, that’s fine. If they don’t, that’s also fine. What’s awkward is when both have to play together, for searching purposes.
in any case i think this should be up to the individual server or client to decide, i don’t want to see a hardcoded limit to the amount of tags.
There wouldn’t be a hard coded limit, and the tags will ultimately still be there, so alternative searches can be used. The main goal is to discourage excessive tagging, or spamming popular (and irrelevant) tags to get more visibility.
Making the default favour concise tags over a hit in a wall of them seems a good way to encourage this, without heavy handed forcing. Twitter’s wall of tags, is a good example of what we (or at least I) don’t want.
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I read it as a way to filter/ sort the results. For instance i tag a single tag ‘DnD’ on a post, it would show higher up on the results list than a post tagged with ‘DnD’, ‘fantasy’, ‘tabletop’,‘minis’,‘#cute’. This would encourage concise taging vs spamming as many tags as you can.
Just my interpretation though, could be wrong.
That’s my intent. Tag spam shows up, but lower down. Focused tags show higher up. It doesn’t set an explicit limit on tags, but rewards concise use.
The weight means people won’t put every vaguely related tag on their post, and so poison other searches. It’s of the mindset that a post with a small number of tags is more likely to be what you want than a hit in amongst dozens.
E.g. a post focused on sci-fi books might be tagged with #books #scifi. If they also include #fantasy then the ‘value’ of the tags get diluted. If they also include every other genre of story, then it’s watered down to almost nothing. If you then search for #books #scifi then the focused post will appear higher than the more general one. It’s more likely to match what you want.
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So who makes the decision on what is accurate Vs inaccurate? Who does the banning?
The main goal is to take the human bias out of the loop. You can still throw a wide net, with your tags. That might even make sense, with a more niche topic. At the same time, a set of tags that closely match your search should be rated higher than one that just happens to include it. A split weighting system provides a soft pressure towards better behaviour, without being authoritarian about it.
Tag spam would make this feature far more useless and an ordering bias.
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And how would that work between instances? One advantage of tags is that it would make searching between instances a lot easier. Unfortunately, you would end up with a race to the bottom, with the allowed number of tags. It would quickly become useless due to spam from instances with less interested admins. It also lumps a lot more work onto the mods and admins, for no good reason.
Basically, your idea actively fights the nash equilibrium, something I’ve never seen work well, longer term. It’s better to change the underlying pattern and so change the equilibrium. This makes the system a lot more self correcting, even when people try and game it (and it will be gamed).
Depends on how it’s implemented.
If it leads to anyone subscribing to a tag (like technology) would get posts from all instances in the Lemmy network tagged with technology, it would make it much better for all smaller instances to get an audience without posting to the larger ones.
This is in my opinion how it should be implemented, so it’s not important where a community is stored.
But if its just a way to tag posts with several tags, it may lead to posts being really spammy in nature, and everyone using 5 tags on each post. I think mastadon posts here on Lemmy are already a bit spammy.
this is like “flair”. but, tailored for lemmy. that looks good
I hope it’s flair (that would be great and very useful) and not tags, like the ones mastodoners put in the title which break when dispalyed on Lemmy. I don’t see a use for regular hashtags on Lemmy, it’s not Xitter. People would start adding as much tags as possible so their post get more attention, this will look super spammy.
I don’t see a use for regular hashtags on Lemmy
Discoverability is still a weak point for Lemmy, so adding more ways to find content would be useful.
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If there’s tags, there needs to be a way to prevent spam abuse where someone adds like 100 popular and trending tags on their post to boost visibility for their advertisement, even though those tags do not fit the post. The simplest solution to that is limiting tags to like a maximum 1-3 per post, though other more complex solutions exist.
A good solution would be to have up/downvote on tags. The German image board pr0gramm.com has a system like this
The way I would like to see tag spam addressed is for every community to have a strictly enforced list of allowed tags.
Since every post would be limited to the tags allowed by the community it is posted in: they wouldn’t be able to spam more than a handful of tags.
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Not the parent poster, but I am similarly concerned about tag spam. I find big tag blocks can ruin the reading experience on platforms that display them in-line with the body text.
Another comment suggested that tags be put in a field separate from the body of the post (and they shouldn’t be parsed from the body, either). I think that’s the best way to facilitate Lemmy clients to (optionally) hide big tag blocks.
I’m less concerned about the client side ui layout, so much as for enabling spamvertisements. So for example if a feature is added to be able to search by tag someday, then theres a potential for people to try and abuse that by labeling irrevelant things under tags in order to get attention.
I’ve experimented with other platforms before, and whenever a search feature gets added in any system that supports multiple tags, you start seeing posts with literally two dozen or more trending tags, and its irrevelant spam. I think the big proprietary platforms like tumblr have tools to moderate these, but I am aware that a community-led version of fighting spam has different needs and tools
Theres likely a way to incorporate downvotes into the server search algo, so it isnt surfacing junk for example. All of that is just one idea of a complete plan for helping the community to moderate spam. I’m not proposing any complete strategy here.
All I’m trying to get across: don’t forget to anticipate spam, and give the platform and users tools to defeat it.
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You asked
How should tags be integrated into Lemmy?
Which is a generic question that goes beyond the scope of one change, so I assume you also wanted to shore up probable future changes, all of which built on top of the first change. Forseeing problems in advance can prevent problems from propagating down the chain like this, so my contribution here is to reiterate the mistakes Ive seen other failed social networks make. That is, if spam bots have a way to output sludge faster than genuine content can be created, people will leave. I dont know lemmys specifics and its not my job to learn that, and this is not a code review. I do expect defederation to add some unknown complexity, so literally all i am asking is to just have a strategy for the final implementation and not handwave stuff as someone elses problem or take moderators for granted like reddit did.
I foresee tagchaos with multilingual instances. It would be great if identical but translated popular tags could be LUTted together such that a ‘technology’ tag also gives ‘technologie’ results if the user sets their preferred language tag settings accordingly. The tagger also needs to be stopped from using both.
I think it would be an excellent feature. I would also suggest limiting the keywords to something like 5 per post to avoid people spamming every conceivable key word in order to get more exposure.
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Don’t repost my comment onto github issue 317, I’ve commented there already.
A tagging is something that would be very nice to have and I’m in full support of it. Anyways here are the parts that I’d like to see implemented:
- Communities can have inbuilt tags that apply to every post
- Users can add tags of their own to a post
- There should be reasonable limits to how many tags can be placed and federate (I suggest 5 of each type)
- Communities should optionally have a filter list of what tags are permitted to be assigned and anything outside of that is discarded from the post
- Instances can maintain a list of “popular tags in the last day” etc. (a /trending page)
- The endpoint for aggregating local, subscribed and Fediverse posts by tag is a big feature and should be prioritized. e.g. server.com/t/gaming
- An endpoint for filtering posts by tag is desirable: server.com/c/community/t/discussion for example. This could be implemented similarly but separately as a flair, possibly.
- Tags should be a separate field entirely to the post body if possible, otherwise they should exclusively be written at the end of the body, to avoid parts of the body text incorrectly picked up as a tag
- An instance’s slur filter should apply to the tags
- Users should have the option to not display tags
- Backwards compatibility doesn’t have to be perfect but should be kept in mind (e.g. can the tagged and untagged versions of lemmy still federate, etc.)
- How tags on Lemmy will federate and display on other ActivityPub servers is a consideration.
I’ll add: I think having a limit on number of tags, not just the number displayed is important, to ensure people actually curate their topics correctly, it limits stupid tags like #lol that you’d see on tumblr and it prevents bots that tag everything with 100 tags from appearing everywhere.
If it also comes with being able to filter a community using tags, it would be perfect. Also, please make it so the moderator can add a tag to a post.
There should 100% be a pretty low cap on the number of tags you can apply. I don’t want to be seeing shit like some sketchy Craigslist post with 500 hashtags at the bottom so it’ll match as many searches as possible.
A better solution is a curated list of tags users can attach to their posts.
I understand some communities wouldn’t want unrestricted tags, but it’d be nice if this was an option they could configure. It’d be annoying for say a gaming community to have to add a tag for every game ever, or a music comm every band ever.
I think its a good idea. I hope this will allow nsfw to be broken up into better tags to block porn but allow other nsfw topics. Or vice versa.
I’d like the Reddit style flairs. On communities, mods could set up a bunch of flairs for people to choose from when making a new post. Also be able to assign a user flair.
I think this is useful for distinguishing e.g. questions from debates or memes.
Twitter-style (hash)tags, I understand why they exist but I don’t care for them. Everyone just puts all the tags into every post anyway. Communities on Lemmy serve mostly the same purpose anyway. Like, would technology posts on technology communities have technology tags? Silly.
I would love, to have Tags in Lemmy. I love them to find posts on the same topic ore news in Mastodon, and I would use them the same way here. For me it would also be a good solution of the “Problem” with dublicated ore unspecific Communities. So if i’m only interested in a subtopic, I can just follow the tag, and get only the content I’m interested in. (For example, if I only want posts about climate news, I can follow a community for climate news, but also the tag #climatenews (ore something) to get posts from for example Worldbews too.
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It depends on the details.
What exactly does “tags” mean here?Are we talking about unrestricted hashtags that can be added to any post or comment? Hard pass.
Kinds of flags or categories that can be created by mods, and used by members, to identify certain kinds of posts in a community? That would be a great idea. Things can be labeled as [meme] [serious] [question] [advice] [discussion] [rant] [whatever works for that specific community].
Why don’t you read the document explaining what they mean by “tags”?
