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 ↩︎

  • Spider@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Lance404@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Spider@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        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.

          • Spider@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            1 year ago

            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.

      • Byter@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        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.