ITT we discuss thread categorization and tagging here on Discourse. Categories and tags have specific purposes and a number of different features. Their usage, maintenance, and development can all be discussed here.
Categories
With some help from @CaptainSparx, I have been reorganizing some of the categories here on Discourse, and I wanted to create this thread to share my thinking and open the floor for discussion. In short, vague categories were removed and categories reflecting specific things the community is doing have been created (WikiDeck and Luanti). Users are welcome to post whatever they like, but we should aggregate posts in General until the need for a separate space arises.
Matrix Room Parody
Discourse is to SMTP as Matrix is to SMS. Categories on this Discourse instance will often have a respective Matrix room. These are fast lanes for communications, as opposed to Discourse’s slow lanes:
SMTP
Discourse threads are analogous to an email server on which threads are publically accessible. In fact, one can interface with the platform almost entirely using the SMTP protocol. In short, categories are paired with an email address in the format {{ category }}.discourse@eom.dev, which will automatically post incoming messages from identified users to their respective category.
At present, technical limitations prevent outbound SMTP traffic from eom.dev. As a result, this is a one-way line of communication. In the future, users should be able to receive and reply to thread updates and direct messages from an email client of their choosing.
ActivityPub
Both categories and tags can be assigned an ActivityPub actor, which users can follow on Fediverse platforms such as Mastodon. At present, only one ActivityPub actor has been created for the General category. Personally, I view these actors as being better suited for categories than tags, but that will depend on how the latter are used on the platform (see below).
Tags
Tags are not currently being used on this platform. In the future, I imagine they will be used to mark posts with labels such as question, answered, feature request, etc., but these are to be determined. This thread can be used to discuss potential uses and guidelines for tags.