Originally freshmeat was a hierarchical system.  It was easy to browse to a desired category of software and see everything in that category.  Although theoretically tags can do everything a hierarchical system can do and more, when  freshmeat went to tags browsability almost destroyed.  I noticed that I spent much less time on freshmeat after that - exploring was no longer interesting, serendipity didn't happen anymore.

Tags are great for unstructured searches.  Please also set up some hierarchies, e.g. by using selected tags in a systematic way, or by directly implementing hierarchies.  There is no perfect taxonomy of software categories but it's possible to create one that is good enough for most purposes!  And it should be possible to combine hierarchical and tag-based searching, i.e. filter by tag expression, etc.

I've been postponing this since inception really.

There was a plan to map the inexactness of the tag system back to the classic Trove system, http://fossil.include-once.org/freshcode/wiki/Trove+map

• It's kind of implemented for the search function. You can restrict it by tags or trove tags already.
• And there is the (highly crude) browse by tags list.

There's still too few projects to make a hierarchical listing worthwhile IMO. But I also recall the original freshmeat, and that it was more interesting to discover similar and related software and packages that way.

So, that's still on the table.

• The tag-map still needs more work to get that going however.
• Perhaps a full taxonomy/relation backend would help there.
• And of course it wouldn't just benefit users, but make projects more discoverable to search engines.