The recent history of social media has made me interested in the factors that make online communities successful/healthy, or toxic etc.. This is one of the appeals of Tildes for me. I'm also emotionally invested in seeing a healthy future for the Irish language, which has seen some interesting developments in the internet age but remains in a precarious position as a community language in the country. You can see how these two interests dovetail together. At the moment this is a thought experiment, but later, who knows...

Tips I've got so far:

I've heard that some barriers to entry can increase group loyalty by making members feels slightly "invested" by earning a place in the community

I've also noted that some of the most persistant subcultures operate online but also have a strong in-person element (eg: furries)

There's also the common observation that good moderation is crucial to user experience and therefore group cohesion

Then I got some pointers from the Tildes docs:

• Trust by default, punish abusers
• Focus on user experience, not growth metrics
• Favour deep engagement over shallow/clickbait
• Empower members to make choices
• The golden rule (apply charitable interpretations, don't tolerate bad actors)

So, people of Tildes: what factors do you see as crucial to building and maintaining a strong cohesive online community?

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

I have a long standing problem that probably has several good solutions, I just haven't been able to figure them out. So here I am, asking you.

I'm selfhosting some services, a mix of selfbuilt and open source software. But some things I don't want to selfhost. Notably backups and alerts/notifications. For backups I have a solution which works well in every regard except one - I don't always get alerted when things fail, because the way I send myself those alerts is failing more than the actual backups.

Currently I'm using python and gmails smtp interface to send myself email, but gmail disables my smtp access from time to time, and it's really easy not to notice not getting an email. I've tried sending the email regardless of whether the backup failed or not, but I've noticed several times that I still don't notice if the they stop coming.

Now on to my requirements/wishlist.

1. I'm already using s3 glacier at aws for the backups, so preferrably something in the aws space.
2. I would like to get an popup/toast on my phone when a message is being sent. And the ability to review messages later.
3. I would like as few moving parts as possible.
4. I don't want to write my own client.
5. I want it to be cheap, and if there's a cost I prefer to pay it at a place where I'm already paying, meaning aws (or possibly proton).
6. I want a stable service.
7. I prefer to manage as little as possible of the infrastructure.
8. I'd like a simple programmable interface that can't easily fail. E.g. http based.
9. It's no problem if messages are not received instantly, I could easily tolerate delays up to 24 hours.

As you may have noticed I'm pretty much expecting there to be something in aws that I can use, but aws documentation is so abstract, that I often don't understand what the point of something is or how I'm supposed to use it.

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like chrome, users and wicked. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was researching.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

This thread is an opportunity to vote between a couple of options I see for our spring schedule based on the votes received in the two voting threads.

Please vote for one of them by upvoting. If anyone wants to propose an alternative reasonable set of books based on the numbers in the voting thread, for the consideration of the group, please feel free.

Our next discussion will be the City We Became and we will be discussing in early December.

My nephew and I like to play games together, and we're always looking for games that we can play together. I was manually looking through my Steam library today and wondering how to go about finding stuff that we may already own that we could play together. Is there a tool for that? Or maybe something that could suggest a game for purchase that we would both enjoy based on our history?

Also feel free to drop any general game library organization tips here. I found this tildes thread from a couple of years ago and I've already seen some cool ideas and tools.

I am in the process of starting up my own food blog. I have no hopes or aspirations of being huge or making money, it will solely be a labor of love and an outlet for my love of food to share with the world.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a specific niche that will be targeting and was looking to crowd source opinions on what people would feel they would like in a food blog. I’m hoping to avoid suggestions like “less convoluted stories about your grandmothers tablecloth for 3 pages before the recipe” since I think we can all agree on that front.

Some of you may be thinking the world needs another blog like you need another asshole, and that may be true. However, part of my impetus was that many of the recipe blogs I find online have the same generic 30-40 recipes with minimal variation. Others of higher quality are moving behind paywalls. My goal is to try to include slightly more obscure recipes from all over the world, tried/tested/optimized for simplicity in cooking and flavor, or more unique variations on more common recipes. I also aspire to do some articles a bit more experimental / scientific in nature in the vein of some of J Kenji Lopez Alts articles a la serious eats but that is a larger aspiration for down the road.

I welcome any suggestions or sharing of your current favorite food blogs. I know the current social media trend is YouTube, TikTok, and the like. However as I find myself here with you all, you may understand my preference for sticking with the written word (and occasional photos). Cheers!

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

Not sure if this is the best place to post this, but I wondered about this recently. I took three seemingly-solo Youtubers as examples at different scales.

Penguinz0 has 16 mil subscribers, and as far as I know his uploads are just him talking into the camera, giving his opinion about recent things in games and pop culture (I could be very wrong about that, I don't know why he's popular). Looks like he uploads at least a few times a week, so that could be manageable.

Videogamedunkey has 7.5 mil subscribers, and he used to do weekly uploads until very recently, I think. Given that his humor and editing style is a big part of his content, I'd be surprised if he's got anyone else working on his vids.

Northernlion has just over 1 mil subscribers and uploads multiple videos daily, and (in)famously refuses to do any editing. He just basically streams on Twitch all day and uploads clips from that.

I would imagine the day-to-day running of the business, i.e. answering emails and phone calls, would be where having help is most advantageous as you grow, but it also probably depends a lot on what kind of content you make. How big can you get before it's too much for a solo operation?

I was watching this clip of The Daily Show where Desi Lydic highlights the change in how Dr. Oz has been portrayed over the years, and it got me thinking about the perception of public figures over time.

I remember watching CBS Sunday Morning segment in 1998 where Elon Musk was painted in a fairly good light as a sort of rebel taking on Microsoft. This was around the time that Microsoft was seen in a pretty bad light for the Internet Explorer anti-trust case.

Musk as he appears in the media I consume today is almost unrecognizable from the 1998 segment.

I also recall a time when Rudy Giuliani was seen in a good light (disclosure: I'm mostly going off of my memory of how he was perceived by the nation as Mayor of New York. I never lived in or near New York, so I can't really speak to how he was perceived locally).

I'm sure I could come up with other examples if I thought about it some more.

All of this has me pondering the nature of my own perception. I don't know any of these people personally, so I rely on what I see online and in the news to guide my image of who these people are. But when I see this stark contrast it makes me wonder what is real.

Did these figures change over time, perhaps corrupted by power and/or fame?

Have they always been this way, and I'm just seeing the media paint them differently over time?

Are they just in a Harvey Dent / Batman "live long enough to become the villain" situation?

Maybe all of the above?

I also think about this in context of aging. My views on the world have definitely changed over time. I think I've mostly grown in a positive way as a person. But I've also seen my own parents change their views and become disturbingly conservative. It worries me that I may also have a regression as I age. They are still mostly the same loving parents I grew up with. The only real obvious cause of their shift in views is the media they consume.

So I'm curious to hear other points of view on this phenomenon.

I think I won't post the link here to one of the posts about this because I think it's an unproven conspiracy theory and it isn't true.
But there is a particular story going around online that one or more security experts is claiming that the latest presidential election was stolen. The "proof" is of this type:

• I'm a security expert
• There is some stuff in the election results that is statistically impossible, especially in swing states
• There is a specific type of ballot where the voter has only voted for one candidate or issue
• Here are the numbers compared to the normal numbers
• Voting machines were compromised, and here's how

For each of those bullet points (and a few others I didn't mention), I have to go and research that data in order to determine if it is accurate.

• I could google the expert and check their reputation
• I could research how common it is to have certain types of ballot completions
• I may be able to get detailed information about specific counties and their historic voting patterns
• I could do a lot of research on voting machine integrity

The research on each of those bullets could be compromised by other misinformation, astroturfing, bad AI summaries, etc.

Or I could just send the link to everyone I know and hope that someone else does this. Or just send it because I don't like the election result and I wish this story was true.

It's easy to see why CNN reported that 70% of Republicans thought the 2020 election was stolen, especially since conspiracy theories were repeated to them on all their main news sources and confirmed their biases.

We had a fun thread last year about what came to mind when other people's usernames come up.

It ended up turning into a cool little online intro of the history of your username, if you have one. There are so many usernames I don't recognise now that I'm back with a steady internet connection after a long time away.

Mine is boring sorry - I switch usernames every 12 months or so for the illusion of control regarding anonymity. My main username used to be Iain M. Banks' Culture series related, so I do miss meeting fellow Culture fans, but this year it's just from a random number generator.

Does your username have an interesting backstory? I recently learned that @chocobean wasn't a chocolate bean, and @cfabbro wasn't a Computational Fabrication Bro, I'm sure there are plenty of others out there.