Freshly minted user here, so here is a bit of feedback from the first hour of using ~s.

#1

Having topic-info line below the topic-text-excerpt block creates some usability friction, because if the the excerpt is large-ish, then the "xx comments" link is pushed way down, sometimes below the fold.

https://imgur.com/FUwKHo7.jpg

This is an issue (at least for me) because it interferes with efficient selection of topics to read.

You spot a promising topic, you open excerpt, skim through the top part, if it still shows promise, use the "xx comments" link to open it in.

Key point is that I would very rarely read the whole excerpt before deciding to see the comments. However with existing layout the "xx comments" link sits at the very bottom of the excerpt, requiring scrolling down, correcting for an over-shoot (if the link was below the fold) and then zeroing in on the link.

In comparison, if the link were to stay above the excerpt, it will be within few pixels from where my mouse is after clicking on the "open excerpt" triangle.

#2

If this were my site, I would probably just swapped topic-meta with topic-info, like so - https://imgur.com/fJ3tKxc.jpg.

The rationale here is that meta carries information that is less important and less frequently used/needed that topic-info. I know that I would be more interested in the comment count and the topic age than in tags.

#3

The topic-text-excerpt font size is too big. The index is nice, compact and has a very light feel to it. Then you click to expand the excerpt and it's like - WOAH, HERE'S SOME TEXT FOR YOU.

I'm new to Tildes, but I've been using Markdown-based comment systems
for more than a decade: both Reddit and GitHub. My programming blog has
been written in Markdown for the past 8 years. Overall I've probably
written several novels worth of content in Markdown in my life.

I've already noticed that Tildes has made a serious mistake in its
handling of line endings: All line endings are treated as hard line
breaks. This diverges from CommonMark and most uses of Markdown in
practice. If I wanted a hard line break, I'd put two spaces at the end
of the line, as specified by both CommonMark and the original Markdown.
Line endings should be otherwise be soft.

GitHub made the same mistake with its "GitHub-flavored Markdown," though
fortunately this mistake has been limited to issues. GitHub README.md
files don't have this behavior, nor does GitHub Pages. It the only other
Markdown system I've used with this flaw.

Why does this matter? If I'm writing more than a single sentence, I
never edit my comment inside my web browser. I edit it using my text
editor of choice, Vim, since it's far more comfortable. I don't even
have to copy-paste the text between applications. Instead, I have an
add-on, Tridactyl, that does this seemlessly and effortlessly.

Hard line endings just don't work well with long prose — exactly the
type of content that Tildes is encouraging — particularly when edited in
a proper text editor that knows about paragraphs and can do its own line
wrapping. Editing long lines is annoying and takes extra care. That's
why we have soft line endings after all.

I'm leaving all my line endings in this post so that you can see the
mess Tildes makes with it, with the ragged right-hand side due to font
differences. If I had written this in nearly any other Markdown system,
the text would have flowed into the page without issues. It is a mistake
for Tildes to do differently. This sort of compatibility issue is
probably going to be annoying enough to keep me off the site.

In today’s age, we have a wealth of knowledge available on the fly, and a wealth of misinformation too. Every day I see someone on the internet either mis-informed or ill-informed, even with google and research at their fingertips. What is something you wish the general public would actually take the time to learn about beyond a very surface level interpretation?
Many issues can’t be solved based on just surface level knowlege.

My biggest answer is politics in general, because it controls our world yet it feels like 70%+ of people don’t know what they are talking about beyond layman knowlege, and we’ve seen what happens when tons of people set themselves on a belief and even argue for it when they don’t know what they don’t know.

I don’t know anything about politics but even I can see that people are talking out of straight emotion most of the time.

So, i ask you nice tildes’ers Tilderds Tilderotatoes, what’s something you wish to inform us about that most people don’t read into very much? Can be political or otherwise.

It’s a broad question I know, but that leaves room for a lot of discussion.
Thanks for reading

A few years ago I got into improving my knowledgebase of personal security - theory and tools - but it didn't go much farther than reinforcing everything with 2FA and setting up a password manager, plus setting up a VPN and full disk encryption.

It seems like we're amidst a rising tide of data breaches due to, IMHO, laziness and cheapness on the part of many companies storing personal data.

So, recently I've embarked on my second journey to improve my own security via habits and software and teaching myself. Privacytools has been a super helpful resource. My main lesson this time is to take ownership/responsibility for my own data. To that end, I have switched to KeyPass with yubikey 2FA (still trying to figure out how to get 2FA with yubi on my android without NFC), moved over to Joplin for my note taking (away from Google and Evernote) and also switched to NextCloud for all of my data storage and synchronization. I'm also de-Googling myself, current due-date is end of March when Inbox is shut down.

So my question / discussion topic here, is, what are everyone's thoughts on the future of practical personal security and privacy? More decentralization and self-hosting? That's what it looks like to me. Blockchain tech would be cool for public objects like news articles, images etc. but from what I understand that has zero implication for anything personal. The other newish tech is PGP signatures, which I'm still having trouble implementing/finding use for, but surely that will change.

There is this topic but that ended up just being about encryption which I think is a no-brainer at this point. I'm more so looking for the leading edge trends.

I really enjoyed his character in the movie and found his story arc to be way more interesting than the actual movie itself. I think they should remake League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with his Hyde/Jekyll.

Even a follow up film about his character and maybe he tracks down “the mummy” again.

I'm downsizing my digital life. I deleted my account on reddit, on another phpbb forum and i don't have instagram/facebook apps anymore.

This subject got me thinking about my music.

I grab/buy albums in mp3 and i have so many that it's impossible to listen to everything. I don't pay for any service like spotify because i don't like. I prefer to download and/or buy in places like bandcamp where i can download the album.

I started reading about other codecs like flac and opus. The availability of albums in flac are way less than mp3 and it's a lossless format. If i focus on it i will be forced to downsize my music library.

The problem is disk space in my smartphone. I'm not an audiophile so i'm not able to hear the difference between flac and 320kpbs mp3. This is where opus enters. This codec gives half the size with better quality than mp3. Soundcloud uses it. A 96kbps opus is the same quality as 320kbps mp3.

Now that Android can play opus i don't see a reason to keep using mp3. The downside is converting flac files every time i want to put on my phone.

I could just convert flac to opus and just live with opus everywhere, freeing a lot of space. But i think keeping flac files is better for archiving because it's lossless. If opus for some reason disappears, i'll have a lossy format and would have convert to another one losing more quality.

How do you deal with music?

I'm curious as to what the Tildes Linux/BSD community (and I suppose other answers like Windows or MacOS would be acceptable, though they may feel a bit more dry) use for their desktop. I imagine that Ubuntu and Gnome will dominate the answers as you would expect, but maybe you'll surprise me. Personally, I'm on Arch Linux with i3-gaps. I use Arch because I enjoy the DIY aspect of Linux as well as the aur and slim nature of Arch. I'd also be lying if I didn't say I use it partially just because I like the "pacman" pun.

As for i3-gaps, I think that WMs are generally more customizable and good for 'ricing', plus they go with my workflow and are convenient in that they load faster and the likes, though I have to admit I have only ever used i3 (I've been considering trying out bspwm). So, what do you guys use? You can also of course share more information such as your shell or DM if you wanted, though I highly doubt anyone cares what display manager you us or anything.

Many websites like hacker news, lobsters and stack exchange put an indicator next to usernames to show that the user is new. This lets regular users know that this user may need some help fitting in and following the rules.

What does everyone think about such a feature on tildes?