Why Feeds Fun normalizes tags — and how
Read this post if
- You want to use Feeds Fun rules more efficiently.
- You're looking for a deeper understanding of how tags work in Feeds Fun.
- You self-host Feeds Fun and want to configure tag normalization.
- You are interested in tagging and approaches to it.
Tags are the real source of power in Feeds Fun. They allow you to rank, filter, and sort news how you want, saving your time and energy.
However, tagging is not as simple as it seems. There is no strict definition of what a tag is, nor is there a standard for naming them.
We may agree that a tag is a short string that describes the text or part of it. But…
- How short should it be? Is
this-text-is-about-modern-politics-in-central-asiaa tag or not? - What about
nowadays-politicsandmodern-politics— are they different tags or forms of the same tag? - Which one of the tags
book-review,book-reviews,books-review,books-reviewsshould we use?
There are numerous questions like that, and no clear answers.
The situation is even more complicated because Feeds Fun uses multiple independent sources of tags, called "tag processors", each of which may have its own rules and conventions for tags. Some tags even come from the feed itself and, therefore, may take any form. You can find more about tag processors in our README.
September 2025 in Feeds Fun
Hey everyone! This is the monthly recap of Feeds Fun.
- We made 3 releases. Numerous stability improvements and bug fixes were introduced.
- Work on tags normalization finally gives some visible results — you should see far fewer tag duplicates now. Tag variations like
book-reviews,books-review,books-reviews,book-reviewnow automatically normalize to one formbook-review. - 2.5M news entries were loaded, 37 new users registered.
August 2025 in Feeds Fun
Hey everyone! This is the monthly recap of Feeds Fun.
Summary:
- We made 3 releases. Numerous stability improvements and bug fixes were introduced.
- States of all interface filters now persist between sessions and devices. No more need to reapply your favorite filters every time you read the news!
- 2.3M news entries were loaded, 43 new users registered.
July 2025 in Feeds Fun
Hey everyone! This is the monthly recap of Feeds Fun.
Summary:
- We made 5 releases. Numerous stability improvements and bug fixes were introduced.
- Greatly reduced the number of tags loaded & displayed in the UI.
- Improved parsing of OPML files produced by other RSS readers.
- 2.3M news entries were loaded, 100 new users registered.
Take control of the number of tags you see
In the recent 1.20.5 update (check it now!), we introduced the news filter option Show tags.
It significantly reduces the number of tags loaded from the server by excluding rare ones.
The general rule is:
If a tag is encountered in news less than N times, it is considered rare and excluded from the list of tags.
We consider that when dealing with thousands of news items daily, the tags appearing in just 1 or 2 news items are not particularly important most of the time.
Currently, the filter allows you to set the threshold to 2-5 tags, and, of course, you can load all tags if you want.
By default, the threshold is set to 2 (at least two news items with the tag should be present). That allows us to reduce the number of loaded tags up to 75% and the traffic up to 1.5 times!
In future updates, we plan to make filter settings persistent, so they save between sessions and devices.
Please, tell us what you think about this feature! We are eager to hear your feedback and suggestions on how to improve it further.
Stay Connected
- Site: feeds.fun
- Reddit: r/feedsfun
- Discord: Feeds Fun
- Repository: github.com/Tiendil/feeds.fun
- Roadmap: Roadmap
- Full changelog: CHANGELOG.md