So I've returned here after being gone for about a year. I didn't "leave" on purpose, just got distracted with some life stuff.

I'm happy to be back and to see the community is still as awesome as it was before. I'm also happy to see that on the technical side the site is still super minimalist and easy to use.

But what do you feel has changed here in the last year? Are there more users? Have the topics shifted? Are the opinions of users trending in a certain direction?

I'm really happy to be back and thanks for keeping me updated! :)

Hey folks.

May someone recommend a good web dev community out there for quality discussions?

Right now I'm using Vue for a project and I'm wrestling with architectural decisions. I'd love for a place where I can discuss different approaches' trade-offs and merits.

Many thanks. :)

Many of you might be familiar with the popular and massively growing antiwork/work reform movement that found a home in the r/antiwork subreddit. Well, recently, the founder of the subreddit was invited on Fox news for an interview and it went about as well as you could expect (We shouldn't support r/Cringetopia) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yUMIFYBMnc

Sub is now private, an offshoot called /r/WorkReform has been launched and everyone hates the old mods now.

I'm not sure if this goes here or in ~talk, so if it needs moved, that's fine.

I've been thinking a lot, lately, about why I use Tildes.

As noted in my bio, I left Tildes for an extended period of time, after getting embroiled in some heavy arguments that, in the scheme of things, didn't matter. Such arguments consistently make me feel worse; I get into them on this account, too, though I do try to use uBlock Origin and the tag filter to keep out of the threads that will most obviously affect me.

But I can't seem to leave Tildes entirely. Even when I log out on all devices, I keep opening the site. Even when I had no account, I kept typing til<Enter> in the address bar and coming back.

So, why?

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First, Tildes is what I love about the web. It's complete but uncluttered; it's featureful but not bloated; it uses client-side interactivity to improve the experience but does not break or reimpement default browser functionality. Overall, it's a good piece of software, designed to create, catalog, and discuss documents, like God Tim Berners-Lee intended.

Second, and more important, Tildes is a community. It's a community like my college dorm was a community; I know people here, and while I definitely don't like all of them, I recognize the personalities behind the names. Leaving, and diving mostly back into the world of Twitter and Mastodon where conversations are short, ephemeral, and deeply restricted, feels like losing relationships, no matter how damaging and negative some of those relationships are.

I don't know if gaining this understanding means I'll be able to - or even want to - drop the site again. We'll see. But I would love to know why y'all use it. Is it a community for you, too?

The recent rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans has been an emotional topic for me. The thing that makes me sad is, it seems the most I can do to de-escalate a violent situation I see on the news without putting myself in clear danger is to basically distract the aggressor from afar and comfort the victim afterwards.

What makes the matter more complicated is, if you look at the demographics of those who tend to commit these violent crimes against Asian people, they're often other minorities. It's so easy to fall into a trap of undermining the progress we've made in racial/social equality the moment we acknowledge that Asians are being targeted. For similar reasons, I view that our political system is entirely ill-equipped to handle this matter in a sustainable matter.

But I'd still like to turn this into something positive. Because I live comfortably as an engineer in the Bay Area, I was thinking I can donate to charities and organizations that are effective at bringing an end to this violence every time I see news about an Asian American getting targeted on social media. I plan on doing my own research as well, but I hope you can also give some suggestions.