Useful, usable post tags (hashtags)

[gitcos]

Describe the Feature

Bluesky's current treatment of hashtags (as of Feb 2025) and the UI for them makes them not very useful, and as a result, people don't use them much. Because of this, Bluesky does not have the emergent crowdsourced topic-oriented feeds that made Twitter so useful for years. But we can improve a bit on what Twitter had.

1: Allow each post to have up to a certain number of plain-text tags, perhaps up to 8 or 10 maximum, in a separate portion than the main text. Such tags would not take up characters from the post length limit, and could be more easily treated as special by the UI - for example, you could make it easy for people to collapse/hide the tags section if they don't want to see it, without interfering with the post's text.

2: Clicking on a tag (web) or touching it (mobile) should immediately take the user to a feed of recent posts with that tag. That is the most critically important part of this feature request; without that behavior, tags are mostly useless and people won't use them. You can add extra features like "top" posts, or "posts by user with this tag", accessible from that page, but do not make users jump through those selections to see the feed of all recent posts with the tag.

3: To more smoothly combine the Twitter-like behavior many people are used to, with this new system, make it so that if someone types the same tag in their post text with a # prepended, it counts as having added that tag to the post. In other words, hashtags in the body would continue to work, and people could use them optionally. Also, tags in the tag section of a post could be displayed with the # character prepended.

4: In both the web and mobile UI, as someone is typing a new tag, show a dropdown/popup of matching tags currently in use with an indication of how many times each one has been used, or used recently. This will give people an indication of what tags other people are using that match what they intend, so that people's tag choices will converge on consensus spellings or word variations.

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Describe Alternatives

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Additional Context

If Bluesky implements all four points of this feature request, it will have an effective and usable post tagging system that improves on what worked well for Twitter. It would allow people to follow topics they're interested in more easily as well as to contribute their posts to topics in a way that other interested people will see, and it would also allow for very quick emergence of new tags to collect posts about a current event, breaking news, or a topic that sparks people's interest.

[ichmoimeyo]

Agreed - the lack of this feature means that I still mainly use Mastodon, with its hashtags and importantly the ability to subscribe to them via RSS.

PS:
... Inoreader PRO, this week enabled subscribing to BlueSky hashtags via RSS:
Introducing Bluesky integration
... Even Threads now has a decent way of following hasthtags(although I can't find a way to subscribe to them via RSS)

[ultrav71]

Very much needed!

[g-cos]

After we have post tagging that's useful enough that people actually do start using it, it would be even better to be able to view custom tag-based feeds such as "posts from people I'm following that do not have tag X" or "posts with tag A or B or C".

[foxyoreos]

wags tail vigorously in support.

Hashtags on Bluesky are important to visibility, but they're also important for filtering, and having them count against post limits provides a perverse incentive not to use them. Separating them out from the main text body would be a huge improvement.

Remember that hashtags on Twitter were essentially an accident - they were not designed as a tagging feature, the community came up with them as a workaround for Twitter's lack of tagging features. The inline nature of hashtags (while important to support, which this feature request would support) is a historical anomaly, not something that Bluesky should imitate without thinking through whether the feature makes sense. We didn't end up with Twitter's system because it was the best design - we ended up with Twitter's system because the feature wasn't designed.

Hashtag autocomplete would also be a massive improvement, especially since hashtags count against character limits. Which ones should you use? Which ones do communities monitor? You shouldn't have to do research to figure out which hashtags are used on the site.