Recently, my COVID-era friend circle has drifted apart. It was a lot of little things that changed our priorities. We had / lost partners, went sober, got in-person jobs, got stressful jobs, made more / less money, etc. It was also the continual theme of realizing that after 3+ years, we hadn't necessarily broken the surface on our friendships with everyone in the groups.

I tend to feel relationships are generally a little ephemeral, especially in our age group (late 20s / 30s -- which is to say, anything can happen). You drift apart, and sometimes back again, and sometimes apart again, and it's just life. I feel pretty okay about it, although it's a bit sad. Given that we're at the five year mark, I thought it might be an interesting prompt.

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.

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!

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like 4chan, buttholes and tags. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was mortified.

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!

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

I am genuinely sick of seeing all the US political news on Tildes, especially because of the sheer volume of it being submitted lately and how depressing it all is. The creation of ~society was a decent compromise since at least it keeps all the politics topics contained in one group, but it's still not ideal, IMO.

I don't want to totally unsubscribe from ~society since, for the most part, I do actually enjoy reading about societal level events/issues around the world. I don't want to have to click 'Ignore' on every single topic about US politics, since there are a lot of them being submitted. And I don't want to filter out absolutely all 'politics' from my front page either though, which is currently my only other option since we can't yet filter tags by multiple criteria (e.g. filtering topics that only contain 'politics' AND 'usa').

So I propose that we start using a 'politics.usa' tag, even though it's a bit redundant, so that US politics can be specifically filtered out by people like myself that want to avoid seeing such topics. 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.