One of the topics that’s consistently come up when discussing groups and communities on Bluesky is discovery: how can users browse and find groups that fit their interests, needs, values, and identity?
Following the groups-as-DIDs pattern, I’d like to spitball a simple concept and see what people’s initial reactions are: self-tagging, for accounts.
Any account — whether a user, a labeler, or a group — could attach tags to itself as a claim of association (e.g. #furry, #swiftie, #music). These would be distinct from post tags: they attach to the account itself, not to individual posts. Tags would be declarative, so meaning emerges from usage rather than subreddit-style registration.
For groups, tags could be used for discovery: a group’s tags get indexed and surfaced (“here are groups that tagged themselves #music”). Nothing fancy needed there to start.
For users, tags would act as an optional signal of identity and affinity. These could be generic (e.g. #portland). But given the open nature of tags, users could — and probably would — use them as a creative vehicle for social signaling and in-group formation: slang or shorthand that mutates inside a subculture and signals who’s really in it (#protocolnerds, anyone?). There is a well-trodden history of this phenomenon in platforms such as Tumblr, whose robust tagging system allowed for uses and social expression beyond its intended purpose (see here and here).
These novel, user-originated tags could then be picked up by groups to gain discovery and foster community around exactly the identity that emerged organically. Unlike post tags, account-level tags would persist as part of an identity; they would give users a durable surface for individual and communal social signaling, and groups a path to genesis around it.
I’d love to hear thoughts on this. Does this feel like a useful standard to build toward, or does it strike any hesitations?
