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Where should I discuss "tagging" in websites? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by actual_patience to c/[email protected]

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I want to discuss a better means of organizing tags for websites that use a generic tagging system. I propose a tag hierarchy.

Basically, if I search for #dog, I should find posts with #puppy, #pug, #baby_pugs, #cute_dogs, etc.

But, if I search for #pug, I should only get posts with #pug, or other tags like #baby_pugs, #cute_pugs, etc.

This would make adding 50+ similar tags to a post irrelevant and allow for normal people to put a single obscure tag and still gain visibility.

I want to bring this idea up to more people. Where should I discuss this? You can suggest any website, community, or Lemmy instance where I could possibly develop this further.

I'm happy to discuss this here as well.

[Edit for clarity]: I am not just talking about tags for the federation and Mastodon. I am talking about improving any and all websites with a generic tagging system. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. etc.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I don't think Lemmy or Mastodon would be a good place to start necessarily. Don't be discouraged, I just mean that I think this should be something separate, like a library, that other systems like Mastodon or Lemmy could then use. As a code library it could be maintained elsewhere and let these folks keep working on their projects.

However, the large architecture issue is that those tags must be added in secret - or dozens of queries would have to go off. Either:

When someone comments #pug you also need to add on all possible permutations of pug so it's queryable or
When someone searches for #pug you need to do a much more complex query for all possible permuations of pug.

It would be possible to do a lookup table in sql for this, but again that requires maintenance and again every instance keeping track of their own set of known lookups. Anyone else have alternative architectures?

[–] actual_patience 1 points 10 months ago

I don't think Lemmy or Mastodon would be a good place to start necessarily. Don't be discouraged, I just mean that I think this should be something separate, like a library,

True. I meant suggesting this idea for generally any website that uses tagging. Will update post to show this better.

As a code library it could be maintained elsewhere and let these folks keep working on their projects.

We would need a group like the Wiki Foundation to set this up. Though I wouldn't know how to pitch this.