I’m not sure how I’ll use tags in the long-run, but I’m currently using them to organize my thousands of messy notes into MOCs. The ultimate goal is to have topical MOC index pages, with links to all the separate notes, but I really don’t know what I want those topics to be. (actually, the ultimate goal is to move all of them to some sort of Archive, with only quality Evergreen notes remaining, but this is a first step). I could surely adapt the MOC topics as I go, but its a lot more effort (for me) to create and organize links than it is to add tags (and make use of the tag browser and tag-specific autocompletions)
So, one by one, I am adding tags to each note, trying to be consistent and concise with the ones that I use, but also letting the tag list grow as necessary. The plan is that at the end, I’ll extract the list of tags (likely screenshot and OCR of it in OneNote), organize them into similar groups, then do bulk find/replaces in VS Code for all of the redundant tags. Then, using the Markdown Notes VS Code extension, I’ll find all references for each tag, and do another OCR extraction of the names, and convert those to [[link references]] in Excel. (this part would be much easier if we could Copy page links from Tag and Backlinks Panes).
Its a seemingly ludicrous workflow, but I was utterly paralyzed for days by trying to set up MOCs and populate them with links. I’m making plenty of progress now, so I can’t argue with that. I’ll let future, semi-organized and enthused me worry about the rest).
As I said, I don’t know how I’ll use tags once everything is “organized”, but I do like what is written here about Topic vs Object tags - I’m currently using them to set up the topics and will likely later use them for objects, which are more specific.