Welcome to the alpha version of Tildes! If you haven't read it yet, please start with the announcement post on the blog, since that explains a lot of my goals and general plans for the site: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes

Also check this page for some info about some of the basic mechanics in place: https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics

Beyond that, there are some other pages on the Docs site with a fair amount of information, and I'm working on gradually adding more to them.

Please don't spread this too much yet

I'd still like to keep it a bit quiet for the first little while, so I can make sure nothing explodes and pay more attention to the site instead of having to worry about who's talking about it and where. It's fine if you want to mention it to some people, but please ask them not to spread it around much as well. If you do tell people, it's probably best to send them to the announcement post as an intro.

It won't have to be this way for long - this upcoming week, I'm intending to start trying to get some more public attention.

Things that are missing, coming soon, etc.

There's still a ton missing, obviously. Some functions have been disabled deliberately for now as well, because I'd like to see how things work without them before we start jumping to too many conclusions about what we "need" and how to use the site. I hope to have regular discussions about a lot of these ideas so we can figure out exactly how best to implement some things.

Make sure to check on your userpage (by clicking your username in the top right corner or sidebar on mobile) - there are a few things in the side menu on there that are useful, like the light/dark theme toggle.

There's a post here with some specific things I'm working on in the very near future: https://tildes.net/~tildes/a/high_priority_things_to_fix_add

If you just want to experiment, please use ~test

I set up a group named ~test that's specifically for trying things out and making a mess. It's the only one that you're not auto-subscribed to when you register (so that your home page isn't spammed up with the stuff from there).

Please feel free to test things out in there, try to break things, whatever. I may periodically wipe it just to get rid of a lot of the garbage, so please don't post anything in there if you're not okay with it disappearing at any time.

How you can help

One of the best things you can do would be to just post things. Getting the initial activity going on the site will be one of the most important steps, so please just post things here (and comment on others' posts).

I'd also appreciate any feedback, posts about bugs you discover, etc. You can just post anything like that in the ~tildes group as well.

Inviting other people

If you have other people that you'd like to invite, I think we should be able to start doing that very soon. I haven't given anyone their own invite codes yet, but it's something that I can do. If there's people you really want to get in right away, please let me know and I can give you some codes or otherwise help get them in. Message me here on Tildes about it, email me at deimos@tildes.net, or send me a message through Discord/Slack/whatever and we can figure it out.

Please expect some turbulence

Please keep in mind that, for the most part, this has been a one-person endeavor so far. I'm the developer, sysadmin, designer, writer, lawyer, manager, chair of the non-profit board, etc. I'm not very good at a lot of these things.

There will definitely be some roughness for a while, whether it's awful design/UI choices, the site crashing and staying down for a while until I can get it back up, etc. Thanks in advance for your patience, it's all only going to get better from here.

I'm excited to finally be able to let people see what I've been working on. Thanks for being here at the start with me!

Hey everyone, really happy to see people still coming back, and especially having extremely good discussions like this one about moderation. Here's my vague plans for the next few days:

Finish comment reply notifications and a couple other high-priority items

I've got comment reply notifications mostly done now, and hope to have that out today or tomorrow. Username mention notifications should be pretty simple to add on top of that as well. Other than that, I need to look into fixing a few strange bugs that have been noticed, and would also like to get through a few other things in the backlog (including doing a better job of getting the backlog listed on the issue tracker).

A significant feature I'd like to have soon is making it possible for other people to edit the tags on topics, as well as potentially allowing editing the title or even the link. For this to be possible though, we need to have a sort of log of the changes, so that there's accountability in who's making the changes and what they're doing.

Some more updates/additions to the Docs pages

The most important piece is to finish writing up some info about the "trust system", which is a lot of what we've been discussing in the "Community moderators?" post. This is going to be a really essential part of having the site be able to handle growth, so not having anything about it on the Docs site currently is a really big gap.

I'd also like to do a bit of writing/rearranging of some of the other pages before I get too much public attention, since they're pretty scattered right now and are missing some information that people seem to look for.

Invite more people and/or get some "larger" attention

Once those other updates are done, I'm planning to start actively looking for a bit more public attention, including possibly posting to places like Hacker News or reddit. We're going to need a pretty steady inflow of people to keep the activity level up, so I think really getting the site out there soon is going to be the easiest way to do that. I do want to have the updates/info mentioned above done first though, so that will probably still be a couple days.

In the meantime, I've topped up all existing users to 5 invite codes again, so if there's anyone you'd like to invite please feel free. You can get to your invite codes on this page, which is linked in the sidebar when you're on your user page.

Thanks again, definitely let me know if you have any questions, suggestions, etc.