handling tags as "global feeds"

Curious what the takes are on e.g., geographically local posts being tagged likewise. On Cohost, this unofficial mechanism was to double tag: "#The Cohost Local Feed (Location) #location".

Some did one or the other - tag synonyms should in theory have sewn that up, but in practice, I don't think Cohost staff were going to have a chance to span "#The Cohost Local Feed (San Angelo) #The Cohost Local Feed (San Angelo, Texas) #The Cohost Local Feed (San Angelo Texas) #The Cohost Local Feed (Concho Valley) #The Cohost Local Feed (Tom Green County) #The Cohost Local Feed (Tom Green County, Texas)"

.... and so on, and their non-"The Cohost Local Feed" variants.

I think tagging local-on-Earth places with just the place name should be fine - maybe also "#local" with the place-name, to indicate local discussion, rather than talking about the place in a non-local context

@sirocyl how about just the place name, and if someone does the local feed thing we can have an obvious redirect in whatever central tag system. like "oh you're looking for #bayarea, not that thing you typed"

My thoughts are basically:

• Whatever ✨discoverability tag✨ wins whatever process by which tags are adopted by the community should be carefully (within reason) monitored by all staff to check for any hazardous behaviour. We have two years of data on now-foreseeable problems that can help us! However, we need to be ready to trade notes on new emergent problems as well. (Hopefully, this'll all fall in the category of just… …enforcing rules against harassment or what not, and won't require invoking the missing stair rules too often, but!)

• In thinking through all of this, I think there's an important distinction between, say, The Federated Timeline and a specific discoverability tag: the latter is never, ever opt-out in any sense. Lots of Mastodon instances default to "global" for post visibility, and lots of users will set their own default post visibility to "global" when possible. That vastly increases the risk of harassment or posts "escaping containment". Tags, on the other hand, have to be added every single time. (…I suppose unless you're so committed to Global Feed Tagging that you set up a userscript or post signature for that, but—)

• Also, my read on this all is that no numbers + not actively suppressing tags like this hits a good medium ground for how to handle "clout-chasing", generally. Sometimes, people have good reasons to want broad reach on their posts, and I honestly think we need a more fine-tuned but also opinionated approach than Completely Rejecting Reach.

• Re.: the absolute mess of Tags That Aren't Clearly For Categorisation Or For The Bit that emerged on Cohost: yeah, a more active approach to weeding that down (say, through tag synonyms or redirects) would be good. Tags played straight, tags used in the Tumblr-style "this is just postscript or explanation for the post" style, and a (hopefully organically) limited set of "hey, audience that's larger than some given subject area, take a look at this" tags make sense. Tons of redundant tags around those? Not as much.

• Also, for local tags, let's maybe name locales so as to avoid most "we're taking a hard stance on which place is more important" kind of stuff? For example, the name "Tri-Cities": likely none of those places should get the tag "#tri-cities", and all of them should instead be, like, "#tri-cities-tn" or "#tri-cities-bc" or whatever. (On the other hand, we should probably prioritise the higher-level jurisdiction for just getting the bare name — "#georgia" should be the country, "#ontario" should be the province, so on.)

@Katja So just to confirm, "#springfield" would be disallowed/discouraged, in favor of "#springfield-il", "#springfield-ma", "#springfield-mo", "#springfield-simpsons", etc?

@Maya If there were a way to do the requisite tag-wrangling, such that when a fully-ambiguous tag like "#tri-cities" is naked, something asks the user which; and when the combination of "#tri-cities #tennessee" appears, the two tags are combined, that'd probably be best. I think there's technical hurdles before that is possible, though.

@sirocyl Yeah, I strongly suspect that we would need both frontend and backend changes for that sort of automated tag wrangling. I'm not aware of a mechanism like that in any existing instance software.

@Maya I basically just meant the above re.: some future "tag synonyms" or whatever system. Outright asking people to tag any of their posts about The Largest Frankfurt By Over An Order Of Magnitude (for example) as "#frankfurt-am-main" before we have some kind of automated tag-wrangling feels intuitively silly.

(I should've made the scope of my recommendation clearer there at first, aaaaa.)

@Katja It's alright, I thought that's the direction you were going in, just wanted to make sure since it is a potential set of user-stories for an automated tag-wrangling system.