Yeah I agree it’s confusing for newbies. The choice to make the tags separate from the comments plugin is partly to avoid centralizing plugin stuff, and partly to reduce the chance of accidental deanonymization/identity-linking - same idea behind why people get a new/separate comments plugin tag for each generator they visit.

The reasons I added the tag btw were:

To make impersonation harder/less-disruptive in galleries that people use to chat.

The tag was, in effect, already “visible” to non-newbies - e.g. by using the block button and seeing which images disappear, or via browser’s “inspect element” debugging tool, or by activating moderation view (which anyone can do) and double-clicking on an image. So by not displaying the tag, the interface was giving users the false impression that each image post was completely/independently anonymous, which is bad.

It wouldn’t be too hard for me to add a way for the comments plugin to be used as ‘auth’ for other plugins, so that if you have a username on the comments plugin, you could use it to “prove” who you are to other plugins like the text to image plugin, which could then sign/tag the image with your username. That would be one way to keep the plugins composable rather than coupled/centralized, and would allow people to opt-in to deanonymization/identity-linking.