[Discussion] How to handle colors for tags

[dessalines]

Hardcoding colors doesnt seem like a problem, because the label will be rendered very small and its not a big deal if the color doesnt match the theme. In any case I will remove it and we can discuss this later in an issue, otherwise the PR gets too complicated.

Another option would be an enum of possible colors like red, blue, green etc and then each ui can choose how to render that.

Originally posted by @Nutomic in #5869 (comment)

[dullbananas]

On Reddit, red is used for the "asshole" tag in r/AmITheAsshole, black is used for the "RIP" tag in r/Rabbits, and green is used for "optimistic news" in r/PoliticalOptimism. These are based on culture-specific color associations. Maybe Lemmy's tag colors could adapt to the viewer's culture, which can be guessed based on the primary language and maybe something else.

One way is to run a tiny NLI model in either the frontend or the backend to see what thing in a static list is most strongly entailed by the tag's display name, then using that for picking the color. For example, an NLI model would hopefully have outputs close to these for the "optimistic news" tag:

Premise (input)	Hypothesis (input)	Entailment probability (output)
"Optimistic News"	"Mourning"	0
"Optimistic News"	"Danger"	0
"Optimistic News"	"Good"	1

Then the color that the viewer likely associates with "good" would be picked. Or maybe a different color in some cases to prevent multiple tags having the same color.

There might also be tags that are strongly associated with a color because of physical appearance. For example, the "poop" tag being brown. Those can be handled by having hypothesis strings for each color name, such as "brown object".

[dessalines]

This is something we really shouldn't over-engineer. We just need to make sure that colors are enums and not hardcoded colors, so that all platforms and apps can pick their own theme colors.

[flamingos-cant]

I don't think hardcoding them would be too much of an issues, as clients can just ignore them, but I also don't think it makes sense. An enum imo makes much more sense.

I think the CSS named colours (just the base 16) would be good enough.