cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/712978

Does Lemmy currently use hashtags in any way? I’m assuming it doesn’t since they don’t show up in the UI anywhere. But while thinking about non-lemmy software posting to lemmy communities, I was wondering how lemmy would use hashtags.

My suggestion would be for lemmy to handle hashtags in a similar way to current microblogging software, by putting them in the tag field and allow lemmy users to add #hashtags to their posts. Lobsters displays tags beside post titles (though these tags are admin controlled I think). It seems like there is a maximum of 2 tags, which I think would be a reasonable limit for lemmy to display too. The UI could display the tags as badges, with some affordance to view any additional tags, and clicking a tag would show other posts with that tag.

As for why, I think tags on lemmy would serve two main purposes:

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