I think I was confusing about this before, so to be clear up front: Tildes will stay invite-only for the foreseeable future. There's a ton to figure out and build before we can even consider making the site open to the public. Staying invite-only will let us take our time on a lot of the systems and functionality, and build up a good "base culture" before worrying about a massive influx.

However, starting now, we can stop treating it as a secret. Please don't go out of your way to promote/spam it anywhere (and I'm personally still going to take it a bit slow today), but if there are people that you want to talk to about it, feel free. Please try to send anyone to the announcement blog post first, since that's the best explanation of the site's goals.

Edit: I've also tweeted the post from the official account, if that's useful for sharing or anything.

I've also given all the current users 5 invite codes, so you can invite specific people if you'd like to. You can access these on this page, which is linked from the sidebar on your user page. Keep in mind that the site is currently quite minimal and inactive and probably will be for a while yet, so it's best to invite people that you think won't be discouraged by that (and ideally will help by posting things themselves). If you want more invite codes, just let me know and I can give you more.

As always, thanks for being here so far, and please do tell me if you run into issues or have any feedback.

Since we're starting to get a decent number of new people coming in (and I'm hoping to keep that going), I just set up a welcome message that will go out to all new users when they register. I also went back and sent it to everyone that's already registered just to make sure everyone sees it, since I think the site hasn't been very good so far about explaining itself. A lot of you probably already knew (or figured out) the info in it, but maybe there's something new, like the tracking of comment visits if you don't already have that enabled.

More stuff coming soon, I've got a few things in progress and have also been talking with a bunch of people about the site.

Here's a quick list of things that I'm working on getting ready in the very near future. Please let me know if you have particular thoughts on any of these.

1. Fixing the site icons for link topics (currently just shows the blue dashed square).
2. Putting some information in topic sidebars - any thoughts on what would be good to have here? I think I'd like to have some of the more-detailed metadata about the topic once there's more of that being generated (for example for videos, this could show which channel it's from, how long it is, etc.), but that still won't be very much and there's a lot of space. Commenting rules? Something else?
3. Inbox/notifications for replies to your comments and topics, as well as username mentions. Any opinions about how it would be good to do this in a way that's convenient and not too annoying?
4. Collapse buttons for comment threads (possibly by being able to click the line as well, similar to the reddit redesign)