Experimenting with tags in Leaflet

We're experimenting with tags in Leaflet!

To set expectations: this is intentionally simple in scope — not the single ultimate solution for content organization and discovery, but a fun surface area to explore and see how folks use!

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

What's old (tags) is new again (tags!)

We're fans of tags as a tool, a construct, a social coordination mechanism, a site for good clean (sometimes not so clean) fun.

Tags are a staple everywhere from classic blogs to Tumblr to AO3 to Instagram to Twitter and Bluesky, each with their own flavor, each giving people ways to self-organize and communicate and make it easier to find the others.

Leaflet, where longform blogging meets social media, feels like a perfect place to try adding some tag energy!

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

How tags work in Leaflet

Tags are global — add them to a post, and they'll show:

on the published post — icon at the top (click to open), list at bottom, so you can add many without cluttering the reader view

on a global page for that tag e.g. https://leaflet.pub/tag/music

Add tags while drafting a post, or during the publish flow. You can edit an existing post to add tags as well.

Click a tag from a post to see its global tag page and view other posts with that tag!

Tags can contain any characters, including spaces, no hashtag needed. They're completely separate from Bluesky tags.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Initial tag examples!

This can be used in lots of ways, and we expect this to be a little chaotic and evolve as we go. Some early examples:

links

atproto

music

ttrpg

art

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

More tags to try!

Some community suggestions we'd love to see you play with:

"year in review" for annual reflections, HT @tynanpurdy.com

"TIL" (today I learned), HT @bront.rodeo

"Hello Leaflet!" for people sharing their first post on Leaflet, a fun way to discover new blogs, HT @cozylittle.house

"weeknotes", HT @graham.systems

Also: tags for local scenes! Tags for "reading" and "learning"! And all kinds of other things…

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Tags for signaling and coordinating

We're excited about how tags can be useful as a minimal interface for experimenting with communities — publishing together, exploring related topics, coordinating around events, and so on.

One hypothesis we're testing is that global Leaflet discovery is fun but not as helpful as a way to find your people; things like tags, that help you explore and create more targeted clusters, could be!

Loose communities, like builders in the atmosphere, might use a general tag like "atproto" for posts about atproto products or experiments

A conference might use a tag like "Atmosphere Conf 2025", for posts directly relating to that event

We can use topic tags like "links", "music" or "making games" to make it easier to find posts on that topic in one place

Tags are nice for a range of social publishing participants — readers, commenters, critics, future collaborators — as well as for writers. Fun to stumble on; fun to hang around…like…a campfire?

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

A note about moderation…

We expect we'll need to moderate tags. Your tags are your data (that's how atproto works!) but Leaflet is not neutral infrastructure, and we'll exercise editorial control on our site.

We don't yet surface tags on our global Discover page. When we do you should expect Discover to be opinionated; we'll suppress tags that feel spammy, offensive (we'll follow Bluesky's community guidelines as a starting point), or just add noise / harsh the vibes.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

What tags are NOT

This is one of the more experimental features we've shipped, and we want to be clear about what that means.

We're not committed to this tags implementation being a permanent thing. You shouldn't make it load-bearing for your publication at this point. Tags are:

not private: there's no way to use just internally for personal organization, or scope tags to a single publication

not submission-based: there's no way for anyone besides us to moderate what shows on a tag page

not complex: for now, we have no advanced controls like muting, favoriting, or subscribing to tags

not guaranteed to live forever: again, we make no promise we'll keep this forever as a core feature

Long term we're not sure if tags are the right way to organize things on Leaflet; other features for communities might be better in many cases. But this is a simple thing we can use now to start sharing things with each other — let's see how it goes!

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Future improvements

There are lots of ways we'd like to improve tags, as well as related things we may (or may not) get to eventually, like:

Support for Looseleafs on tag pages (will fix soon)

Language or NSFW tags (probably better as separate settings)

Mechanisms for tag discovery (e.g. on our Discover page)

Bluesky feeds for Leaflet tags

Showing all tags a writer's used on their dashboard, default tags to add to all posts in a given publication, or related tags from within a post…

As always please reach out with any feedback. We'll see what we can do to help with some interesting tag experiments over the coming weeks!