### Milestone: Tags

December 09, 2021 — GNU social development team

> Due to the high density of technical aspects, we decided to keep this blog post more on the light side and focus on explaining the new functionalities. Check our Wiki Milestone entry for all the juicy details.

>WIKI Milestone entry

GNU social v2 has tags and lists. It allows you to:

- search for an `#hashtag` and see a stream of notes tagged with it;
- make lists of actors and mention them with `@#list_name`
- self tag and enter a list of people in your instance with the same self tag

It is limited with regards to federation of self tags and the `@#list_name` can't target remote actors even when they are inside your list.

## What's new with v3?

### Federated self tags

We now federate self tags and lists, so that constraint from v2 was moved out of the way.

In the future, the use of these tags can allow you to find people, groups and even individual notes that have a tag you're interested in. We only mean filtering, not magic recommendation algorithms.

### Tag Wrangling

Proposed by @licho in Tue, 02 Jun 2019 17:52:07 GMT:

> I like the tag wrangling feature of AO3, which I think would help for cases of synonymous tags like #introduction and #introductions

> https://archiveofourown.org/wrangling_guidelines/11

> Is it feasible for !gnusocial ? Or would it cause problems?

The answer is yes and will be released with v3. With the addition of Languages in notes and actors there was little excuse not to be feasible.

Whenever you post a note containing tags, you can choose whether to make those tags canonical. This means that, for instance, the tags `#run` and `#running` become the 'same', meaning that when you click on the link for the `#run` tag, you'll also see notes tagged #running. You can opt out of the behaviour by unchecking the "Make note tags canonical". An identical process occurs for people tags.

Internally, this transformation is accomplished by splitting the tag into words and stemming each word.

### Related Tags

In a tag feed, you can see tags that are often used together with the one you're seeing. This can be useful, for instance, for finding other content you'd be interested in.

### Improved Tag feeds

When you click on a tag, be it a note tag or a person tag, you'll see a feed of notes/people with that tag. You can also edit the feeds you see in your left panel, so you can follow a given tag.

### Mute Self Tags and Note Tags

If you don't like seeing a given tag in your feeds, for whatever reason, you can choose to mute it. You can mute a note tag or a person tag, in which case you wouldn't see any notes from people with that tag.