Tags on the link aggregation site https://lobste.rs serve two purposes: to deliniate the scope of acceptable submissions, and to enable users to filter those topics they are not interested in.
As such, the tag creation dates are heavily frontloaded to the start of the site, and newer tags are applied more rarely. Usually it is because a newly popular language appears more and more in the submissions, leading to a portion of the users to demand a tag to be able to filter it out.
I have searched my dataset for the first occurrence of each tag listed on the filter page, and added the year-month of that occurrence. The data is visible in this Google sheet.
A summary:
- 2012: 65 tags created
- 2013: 9
- 2014: 7
- 2015: 4 (
elixir,kotlin,graphics,testing) - 2016: 7
- 2017: 11
- 2018: 3 (
osdev,transcript,wasm) - 2019: 2 (
a11y,email) - 2021: 1 (
nix) - 2023: 1 (
gleam) - 2024: 3 (
retrocomputing,editors,vscode) - 2025: 2 (
vibecoding,concatenative)
I have also calculated the proportion of submitted stories for each tag, compared to the number of users filtering that tag. The most impopular language is unsurprisingly Fortran, where 197 users are filtering 59 stories (334%). JavaScript has 4.6k entries and a 5% filtering to submission ratio .
Regarding the editor wars, 317 users are filtering emacs, as compared to 168 filtering vim.
Update 2024-10-07: added 2 entries for 2024.
Update 2025-03-27: there’s a canonical dump from the lobste.rs database here. Numbers have been updated to reflect this data.
Update 2025-05-27: added concatenative.