Before the scaled sort was introduced, the hope was that it would provide a solution to surface posts from smaller communities, without being overrun by memes and political posts from larger communities. However, the scaled sort has been ineffective so far, as most posts appear with a single vote, making it practically the same...
It provides context and meaning to posts - just think of all the disambiguation pages on Wikipedia. Are you looking for Predator the film, the UAV, etc? Really only tags can help there - multitags or disambiguation? Or both? There are discussions to be had.
It allows more depth to things like communities - I was just talking to someone who had been failing to find a place to talk about a specific British comic until they found !britishcomics. With tags, I could have tagged the community with #dandy, #beano, #2000AD, #bunty, etc.
It also provides a way for Lemmy to integrate better with the Fediverse as it doesn’t currently play well with services outside the Threadiverse.
My current thinking is leaning towards FediTags - a separate, federated plug-in service. So you could run it with Lemmy, Pixelfed, etc and it would bring together all the tagged content. You look up stonehenge + photographs and get pictures on Pixelfed, Mastodon and kbin. As a plug-in the changes in code needed to, for example, Lemmy would be minimal and, hopefully, a one-time thing. Development of FediTag could then take place completely separately.
Surfacing Content from Smaller Communities on Lemmy
Before the scaled sort was introduced, the hope was that it would provide a solution to surface posts from smaller communities, without being overrun by memes and political posts from larger communities. However, the scaled sort has been ineffective so far, as most posts appear with a single vote, making it practically the same...