Every once in awhile I have one of these ideas, but this one I think would be incredibly fun and interesting to have: ~electronics or (~tech.electronics || ~engineering.electronics), , programming || ~tech.programming. forgot momentarily that ~comp was a thing.

Not as a community for tech news or product discussions (we have ~tech for that) but for electronics research, electronic hobbies/diy, ideas, Q&A, etc etc. With our seemingly higher than average hard tech professional community on here I think this would be great and really bring a new type of content into our fold that could be interesting and and exciting.

I've brought up ~hardware before, but I think ~electronics is more widespread, could include anything to do with electronics: PCBs, computers/desktops, sound/audio, lighting, robotics, electrical work, etc.

While I was writing this I realized, and was quite surprised that we don't have something like ~tech.programming on here either, maybe that should be one as well to consider. ~comp is a thing, I post there.

Hacker News has a nice feature where comments have links to jump to the "next" and "previous" comment in the same thread at the same level. It's useful for jumping over a long comment thread without closing it entirely. Any chance this could be added to Tildes?

Early thoughts, but we have ~society, ~news, and ~enviro, but what if we were to consider ~policy? Legal policy, governmental law, environmental rules, guidelines, terms and conditions, online/offline community policies, etc.

Example (current) tag: https://tildes.net/?tag=policy

Brought on by posting this article as I had to decide between where it would it be better to put this in: in ~tech? in ~society? in ~news?

Both Medium and Substack include the author name in the site title (next to the favicon). Bearblog hosted blogs seem to be frequently posted, especially in ~tech, and only showing that it's from bearblog doesn't give insight into authorship. (Authors are being added to tags, but this is not immediately visible on mobile clients until clicking into the comments.)

Is this something that can be updated? If it's a technical limitation of some sort, I respect that. It would just be a "nice to have" feature. :)

Edit: whoopsie, already being discussed here: https://tildes.net/%7Etildes.official/2x3

This is tangential to this post here about NSFW/controversial content. Sometimes one needs to make a confidential post detached from their own identity (say for example about a psychological problem or advice on an event where the OP wants to conceal real identities), and most places one needs a throwaway account. I think it'd be nicer if we allowed people to make posts detached from their main accounts w/o having to create new throwaway accounts. It might be possible via allowing a certain number of "personas" (i.e. a couple names one can allocate and use as nicknames), or via allowing to post anonymously (i.e. hiding the poster's account name, not w/o one), or allowing personas but temporarily and randomly generated names. What's you thoughts?

Before posting this, I checked my user settings page, the site’s documentation, and GitLab. I also did some site:tildes.net Google searches and used the on-site search for the ~tildes group.

I saw that on GitLab there is a feature request for account deletion, but not deactivation, that was marked “Accepted” about 5-6 years ago (August 2019).

I also saw some posts here in the ~tildes group, including one from about 6-7 years ago (June 2018) with a comment that said an option for both account deletion and account "dissociation" was planned. Both of these features sound great.

In addition to account deletion and account dissociation, I want to also request an option for account deactivation.

I don’t want to ask for the Moon here, but I envision account deactivation as having the option to remove all your posts and comments from the site (as well as your profile), with the option of restoring them if you reactivate your account. (I don’t know how annoying or how much effort this would be to code. I’m just imagining what I would find ideal from a user perspective.)

Another wonderful bonus would be the option to set a timer limiting your ability to reactivate your account, e.g. don’t let me reactivate my account for 6 months.

In the past, I’ve done this on another site through an elaborate system where I:

1. Set up two-factor authentication.
2. Saved the two-factor recovery code on an encrypted pastebin in a password-protected paste.
3. Saved the password for the paste in my password manager.
4. Used FutureMe.org to send an email with a link to the paste to myself X amount of time in the future.
5. Deleted the link to the paste from my browser history.
6. Deleted the entry for the site from my two-factor authentication app so the recovery code is the only way to get in.

This works, but it’s an elaborate process and if something goes wrong with FutureMe.org or the paste bin site, you could lose your ability to ever reactivate your account. You have to be willing to take that risk!

I might end up implementing this wacky system again for Tildes. For a site like Tildes, if I permanently lost access to my account (due to FutureMe.org shutting down or suffering data loss, for example) and wanted to re-join the site at some point in the future, I guess the worst consequence would be losing my username. (Also, getting an invite again might be a hassle, I don’t know.) That might be unfortunate depending how much you like your username, but it’s not as bad as a site with follows and followers where you would lose all of those.

This is a community I've missed since leaving Reddit, but I didn't expect to find or create such a /~group here given Tildes is a much smaller community (I figured, statistically, there wouldn't be enough users with overlapping interests in Right to Repair / Electronics / 3D Printing / Makerspace / etc... for such a community to be present or to naturally form here.

With the recent post asking for advice on a soldering station, and the number of users that participated in that discussion, I've been rethinking those assumptions of 'not enough users / not enough interest'. Then I further reflected on the significant number of people we have here that have fluently discussed other technical areas such as Linux, Programming, servers / Homelab topics and I realize upon reflection that a fair many of our users here are pretty high on tech literacy...

So, as a prelude to requesting a new group like /~electronics or /~makers or some group name along that philosophical theme, I wanted to ask the community at large first as to how much interest there might be in this.

Do you, dear reader, have an interest in electronics repair? In a garage workshop or other space at home where you fix or build things? Makerspace topics like 3D printing? Right to Repair law? If you want to know how to replace your cell phone screen, or ask about soldering or Raspberry Pi or Arduino, are you interested in having a place here on Tildes specifically for these things? Please, if you have such interests, let's discuss here.

Pinging those who participated in the soldering discussion:
@AugustusFerdinand @PraiseTheSoup @teaearlgraycold @Banazir @chocobean @elight @Plik @lynxy @Akir @TheD00d @pallas @ShroudedScribe @em-dash @luks @Tannhauser @kmcgurty1

The other thread about potential spam on the site got me thinking, can/should Tildes hide itself from Google and other search engines (aside from just the main page) to avoid the tentacles of SEO from infiltrating the site? I'm not sure how feasible that is, but I know reddit has the option to prevent your profile from getting indexed by search engines so perhaps that could be applied to the site as a whole.

With the inevitablre result of the US election, for the next four years all media will be totally overwhelmed by one person. It'd be nice to be able to at least on Tildes shove all of that into one corner so it can be hidden.

While Tildes is quite US focused, there is still a lot of us non-us people here.

It's time to do away with the recurring weekly threads about US politics, about Israel and Palestine and other similar threads that clearly do not need weekly recurring threads.

Those who do not wish to see topics on those events should unsubscribe from the relevant keywords for their own browsing, as all of us with other interests unsubscribe from those keywords.

There is no flood of this content that makes gathering things in weekly threads relevant.

No content is drowning on tildes, as no group has issues with too many posts.

It's uninviting to folks who are actually contributing submissions to the site to be told they shouldn't be making these, but should rather make them in empty, dead posts. That is not fair to them, nor is it a good look for the site.

These dead recurring threads should be done away with. They serve no function. The experiment has shown they are not needed, are not used and are simply auto-generated robotic clutter.

Sniffing around in the topic history here, I see a single mention of "medium length/watch", which would fit in with what I have in mind. However, what I'm really angling for here is "very long read/watch" tags, as I've seen articles here that are at least twice the length of others with "long read", and anything by, for example, NeverKnowsBest, is going to be an order of magnitude larger than the 30 minute minimum for long watch.

"Very short read/watch" is probably fine too, but I imagine that anything that would actually fit that label is probably against the posting spirit of Tildes.

Hey there everyone,

I've been on here since near the start, and spend too much time finding content to post on here, but I just love this place. One thing I've noticed over the years is a severe lack of personal articles, blogs, or the similar and I think it's to do with the 'officialness' of a lot of the topics.

Would it be beneficial to just have a ~blogs section, to post links and thoughts on our personal writings? Even if that includes things like ~tech or ~cooking or whatever? Just to have a central place for our articles.

I don't mind posting my own in ~tech, but I can imagine the hesitation for everyone else as those areas feel more in-tune with "news" than personal thoughts. We have ~creative, but that feels more for artistic endeavors and projects.

Any ideas how we might be able to encourage more topics or links to personal (small-web) blogs (either your own, or someone else's) in the culture here? We seem to be becoming more and more a news aggregator, which is great because of the relevance and discussions (best on the web) but we have no real culture for small-web indie blogging.

It would be convenient not to have to open a topic to click the "ignore" link.

Being forced to open a topic to click the "ignore" link isn't going to make me give the topic a second chance. :-).

Thanks.

Not too much to say here. It's pretty barebones right now. Dunno if it's a major goal, but given the whole point of tildes was for it to encourage better discussions, it'd probably help if the reply feature was looked at a bit.

1. I believe that the formatting help should contain the word "Spoilers" in the header for expandable sections. It's probably the most common reason I find myself going to the help doc of a site, because most other things just follow markdown format these days, and yet that word doesn't exist on that page and I still consistently see people asking how to do it.

2. I like that you can resize your replies. I hate that it's possible to accidentally resize the box UNDER the sidebar making it impossible to get to the scroll bar or the resize "'grip" on the lower right corner.
   https://imgur.com/a/xDVTigJ

3. How much of RES can be emulated?
   The normal reply view, with most of the shown buttons pushed:
   https://imgur.com/a/GW5eNeY
   And the large editor mode for more substantial posts:
   https://imgur.com/a/XCdNEfN

It's a pretty clean interface that does 3 important things in my eyes:

1. Gives you LIVE previews. Matters more on reddit where it's easier to accidentally screw up your line breaks and get formatting you were not expecting, but for more complex posts it can be annoying clicking back and forth between the preview pane.

2. Quick buttons for common features. I know the markdown for most things, but buttons are nice, especially for "oh shit i want this whole section to be a quote/codeblock/spoiler" moments.

3. The "i'm going to write the wheel of time in this window" large mode which can help ensure somewhat decent flow for more complex topics.

Some of this matters more due to reddits nature as a community resource (games/hobbies/whatever all have large pinned threads, and hell their own mini wikis), but again just wanted to bring this stuff up as it's either kicked me in the teeth or prevented me from making larger posts/topics more than once.

Edit- and i suppose to make my case I had to edit this because I screwed up my line breaks and forgot how they get handled with numbered lists. If i could just see the preview and make the change i'd use it more, but since it requires just clicking off, scrolling down, checking my work, clicking back, finding my place, and editing, I find it just easier to post and uh...fix it in post.

I've seriously been thinking about this for.... four years. There might even be a comment somewhere in my long history of using this place about it.

But, I think tildes could be a fantastic and perfect tool as a bug/feature/discussion/news tracker for both software and hardware projects. The only thing that would need to change is displaying a number index on each post.

To the developers and tinkers out there, what else do you think would be needed feature-wise? Tags are quite versatile, and if we got the #tag.children visible only search working it would work great for setting priorities, etc.

Has anyone been able to spin up tildes on their own system? I tried about two or so years ago to work on this very slight modification, but never was able to get it going.

So this topic is something that could very easily just be bothering myself, but I figured I’d share before unsubscribing to ~misc. If this is the wrong group, I apologize, please feel free to move it to the correct location. I will also preface this by saying I only really view Tildes occasionally, and am not the most active user, so those two things might be contributing to this.

I am wondering if creating an official Politics group would be beneficial to Tildes. I’ve noticed that the majority of recent posts in ~misc is mostly regarding politics. I don’t want to necessarily just unsubscribe from ~misc, in case something non-political and interesting to myself ends up getting put there, but if that’s the solution I’m more than happy to do it.

I just figured that with the amount of activity going on there fairly regularly, either a dedicated ~politics group or a sub group (maybe ~misc.politics or ~news.politics?) would be better? That way other users similar to myself could unsubscribe to that instead of unsubscribing to the much broader ~misc group.

I personally do enjoy the way that Tildes is setup, and don’t see any bad interactions in those posts. It’s definitely more of a personal thing.

That said, I don’t want to make people think that I’m telling them how things should be run, merely throwing my two cents out there, no matter how worthless they are.

Thanks to everyone for posting, and to the mods/admin for keeping everything running smoothly. This really is a solid community!

It seems like Tildes is not going to ever get a block user function.

But it would be really handy if I could get a filter to auto-ignore any topics started by certain users. Would this be something that Tildes would ever implement?

Hi everyone, first of all, thank you for creating and maintaining this site - I don't think I've ever seen a more constructive and friendly general-purpose community online. :)

In the last few weeks, after getting access to tildes, I stumbled multiple times over an interesting article that I thought that would fit on Tildes. But I didn't see a button to post it on here. I assumed it has to be something related to rating or account age. I was wondering how long it would take. Maybe a month?

The volume of posts here is pretty low, so I never saw a reason to visit one of the groups - I only visited the front page. Only now I found out, that the button to post something is only visible if the user is currently on the page of a group.

I don't know if this happened to someone else, but I personally find it really unintuitive that there isn't a button on the front page to post a topic. Reddit, Lemmy, Discourse etc. all have it like that.

Did anyone have a similar experience? Or was this a concious choice?

Based off of a suggestion @lou made about special tags, I wonder if would we could make a tag that is automatically applied when a lot of comments are added all at once and then removed when it reaches a more normal level of behavior?

When viewing the desktop version of the website, there is a little orange notification to the left of my name when there are replies to my messages.

When viewing the website in mobile, there is no such indication, and I have to open up the sidebar to see if I have any new replies.

Could we get a simple, orange "dot" indicator to the left the Sidebar link in mobile to let us know when we have unread messages?

I apologize in advance for the imgur link, but it could look something like this: Example

Hey all,

I'm a professional game designer with about ten years in the video game industry. I've worked primarily with collectible card games and my most recent project is a mobile first strategy card game. I'm interested in talking more about video game design, design theory, and more.

Most of the design topics I've seen on Tildes are focused more on tabletop / board games and I was wondering if there is a big enough population of people interested in discussing game design more from the professional side of video game design.

Hope to have some meaningful discussion and I'm available to chat about relevant topics.

A pretty simple feature. Just seems like it would be handy to apply a tag to posts that provide non-paywalled or archive links for posts that are walled or 404'd. The idea just being that it seems too much to put an "Exemplary" tag on it, but it seems too significant to just get a vote.

Ideally this would add the free link under the "Link Description" scrape, but that's probably hard to do. I guess you could also promote the tagged comment to the top of the stack, but then it seems like you can game out the sort to promote your commentary rather than just the link.

I often browse Tildes on my phone, which automatically changes from Light to Dark theme at night and vice-versa in the morning.

The issue I'm having is that changing the theme on mobile is more difficult than on desktop, and I'd have to always be doing it manually.

Other websites can read the theme preference from the browser and automatically adjust. Some even give the users an option to choose which theme to associate with the Light and Dark preferences.

I'd like to propose automatic theme Change as a feature for consideration, since Tildes already supports themes, and customization of which theme is which for a later date.

Hey everyone,

I've been thinking about this lately, and I think it might be something interesting to test.

The concept is that when we submit artists, albums, tracks, etc we may add an additional tag or two for "FFO" or For Fans Of, for example if I were to submit a link to "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" (if it was 2010, happy thirteen years everyone), then I might tag it as "ffo.excision", or I submit a new artist, such as "Robot God", and I tag it as "ffo.black sabbath". A more known artist in the genre.

Genre tags are helpful, but this is certainly something that helps inspire people to listen or become interested in an artist because of their relation in sound to others. We could add them to the comments, but that doesn't inspire someone to look at the topic if it's unknown to them to even check the comments for things like that. I think if we limited it 1 or 2 tags, it could work out really well.