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    2. Comment Permalinks

      ~tildes Text 78 words
      I'm sorry if I'm just blind, but there doesn't seem to be a way to permalink to a particular comment in a thread or to "go to comment" from the Comment Replies in your profile. For larger threads...

      I'm sorry if I'm just blind, but there doesn't seem to be a way to permalink to a particular comment in a thread or to "go to comment" from the Comment Replies in your profile.

      For larger threads when someone responds, getting the larger context is quite useful so it'd be nice to "go" to my comment in a thread vs just responding from the inbox, especially if I want to reference other comments made in the discussion.

      8 votes

    3. Warrant Canary

      ~tildes Text 145 words
      Hey, Just a thought. I'm not sure what the legal standing of warrant canaries (i.e. being compelled to lie) are in Canada, but given the privacy level afforded by the site the key component to...

      Hey, Just a thought. I'm not sure what the legal standing of warrant canaries (i.e. being compelled to lie) are in Canada, but given the privacy level afforded by the site the key component to that privacy is trust.

      You're doing a lot to make sure private data is treated as harmful, and with the open source code being visible, but that's still not a guarantee that the server is actually running the code that will be open sourced.

      Tildes could probably benefit from a warrant canary given that it's a platform for user generated content and if it gets prominent enough it may be subject to LEO scrutiny. Compliance with LEO is a given since the website operates under Canadian Jurisdiction, but given the... nature of some requests (Gag Orders / Etc...) a canary could be a privacy positive move for users of Tildes.

      7 votes

    4. l2t mod guide copy

      ~test Text 568 words
      A couple of us were chatting about recent events and figured it would be a good idea to rattle off some of the things that go without saying. We've already had two ex-mods who clearly needed them...

      A couple of us were chatting about recent events and figured it would be a good idea to rattle off some of the things that go without saying. We've already had two ex-mods who clearly needed them said. /shrug

        1. CHILL. That should be your top priority at all times. This is the internet, it is not serious business. Don't let some dipshit issue on reddit that's going to vanish off of the page in three hours bother you, life's too short for that shit.
        1. Keep mod chat and this backroom confidential. Don't share this stuff with the rest of reddit. If you do, that shows you can't be trusted and we pretty much gotta axe you at that point. Even if you're just sharing petty bullshit, it's a trust issue, the content doesn't even matter.
        1. This goes triple for any other parts of reddit that have privileged access, such as /r/defaultmods. That not only makes us not trust you, it makes our mod team look like chumps to the rest of reddit.
        1. When in doubt about something, ask! Ain't nobody going to fault you for questions or because you're just learning the ropes. We weren't born knowing this shit so ask away.
        1. Be cool when dealing with other moderators. We're trying to weed this garden together, tempers may flare, if someone is having a bad day don't take them too seriously either.
        1. If there's a problem with a specific user and yourself, hand that shit off to another moderator to deal with, one who hasn't got anything invested in that mess. It makes it easier to be impartial.
        1. No special treatment. Mods gotta stick to their own rules, otherwise nobody is going to take any rules seriously. If there's something about the rules that's bugging you, post here and let's talk it over, and maybe change that rule for the better.
        1. Pay some attention to what the other mods say. Everyone's opinion is supposed to count, this isn't meant to be just a team of button clicking robots. Mods here all get a say in how things are run.
        1. No powertripping, period. That's just immature, you can do better. This is a stewardship, not ownership. Reddit owns this place, not us, and it's nothing without the admins that pay the bills and the users who come here to share music. Any credit that could be claimed by anyone in this place is spread far too thinly to justify a holier-than-thou attitude. If anyone gets to claim a boss attitude, it's radd.it - and he stepped down to avoid conflicts of interest. :P
        1. If despite your best efforts some shit does go down - especially if it's a conflict between mods - talk to a mod who's been here a year or more such as myself, astarkey12, multi-mod, boredop, or g_yore. Don't let things get to the point where someone has to leave the team before addressing concerns. When in doubt, sleep on it.
        1. Do not go begging for subreddit moderation invites from other members of our mod team, and do not be one of these crazy people collecting subreddit mod bits like they are some kind of new age pokemon. The more subs you mod, the less time you have to spend moderating here. We're not interested in part-timers. Having a couple other subs you moderate is fine, but not like 70 or 300!
      4 votes

    5. Basic comment reply notifications added

      ~tildes.official Text 163 words
      It's still very rough in quite a few ways, but lack of comment reply notifications has definitely been one of the biggest missing features, so I wanted to get this basic form of it out before I...

      It's still very rough in quite a few ways, but lack of comment reply notifications has definitely been one of the biggest missing features, so I wanted to get this basic form of it out before I worry about fixing some of the weirdness with it.

      A few quick notes on it:

      • Currently, notifications are only for replies to comments. You won't get any notifications for replies to topics, username mentions, etc.
      • Currently, you can only view the unread notifications. Once you mark one as read, it'll be gone with no way to see it again. It's still stored and viewing read notifications will definitely be possible in the future, just not yet.
      • There are some strange interactions between the comment visit-tracking and the notifications still, I'm not totally sure how I'm going to handle those yet.

      Let me know if you notice anything else, I'll probably apply some more updates to it before long to fix some of the strange aspects.

      9 votes

    8. Vague plans for the next few days

      ~tildes.official Text 447 words
      Hey everyone, really happy to see people still coming back, and especially having extremely good discussions like this one about moderation. Here's my vague plans for the next few days: Finish...

      Hey everyone, really happy to see people still coming back, and especially having extremely good discussions like this one about moderation. Here's my vague plans for the next few days:

      Finish comment reply notifications and a couple other high-priority items

      I've got comment reply notifications mostly done now, and hope to have that out today or tomorrow. Username mention notifications should be pretty simple to add on top of that as well. Other than that, I need to look into fixing a few strange bugs that have been noticed, and would also like to get through a few other things in the backlog (including doing a better job of getting the backlog listed on the issue tracker).

      A significant feature I'd like to have soon is making it possible for other people to edit the tags on topics, as well as potentially allowing editing the title or even the link. For this to be possible though, we need to have a sort of log of the changes, so that there's accountability in who's making the changes and what they're doing.

      Some more updates/additions to the Docs pages

      The most important piece is to finish writing up some info about the "trust system", which is a lot of what we've been discussing in the "Community moderators?" post. This is going to be a really essential part of having the site be able to handle growth, so not having anything about it on the Docs site currently is a really big gap.

      I'd also like to do a bit of writing/rearranging of some of the other pages before I get too much public attention, since they're pretty scattered right now and are missing some information that people seem to look for.

      Invite more people and/or get some "larger" attention

      Once those other updates are done, I'm planning to start actively looking for a bit more public attention, including possibly posting to places like Hacker News or reddit. We're going to need a pretty steady inflow of people to keep the activity level up, so I think really getting the site out there soon is going to be the easiest way to do that. I do want to have the updates/info mentioned above done first though, so that will probably still be a couple days.

      In the meantime, I've topped up all existing users to 5 invite codes again, so if there's anyone you'd like to invite please feel free. You can get to your invite codes on this page, which is linked in the sidebar when you're on your user page.

      Thanks again, definitely let me know if you have any questions, suggestions, etc.

      11 votes

    9. Question about replies to comments.

      ~test Text 81 words
      I finally read through your post (sorry it took me so long!), and got there because under my name it said "1 new message" or something like that. I clicked on my username to check it out like you...

      I finally read through your post (sorry it took me so long!), and got there because under my name it said "1 new message" or something like that. I clicked on my username to check it out like you suggested, and noticed that people had replied to some of the comments I made. Are we supposed to get notifications of replies (as well as direct messages), or is that intentionally not a feature yet?

      (Sorry if this has been answered elsewhere)

      1 vote

    10. Thoughts on handling political content on Tildes

      ~tildes Ask
      (0) Background This is coming off a discussion in today's thread on forming new groups around whether or not to add a group for politics. I expressed there that, given my moderator experience on...

      (0) Background

      This is coming off a discussion in today's thread on forming new groups around whether or not to add a group for politics. I expressed there that, given my moderator experience on /r/ChangeMyView and /r/NeutralPolitics, I opposed making such a group given how Tildes currently stands.

      (1) Political discussion is nearly always garbage.

      I don't think anyone needs reminding of this, but political discussion almost uniformly fails to achieve anything positive in almost any social media platform. Your uncle's facebook rants? Garbage. Political sniping on Twitter? Garbage. The endless repetitive point scoring and outrage fest on most political subreddits? Garbage.

      So, we have to ask, why is this content garbage?

      (2) People want to be heard, but nobody wants to hear.

      I do not think political discussion is garbage because of bad faith trolling. That certainly exists and does not help, but usually it's not hard to ID the trolls, and excepting egregious stuff like doxxing or threats, to ignore obvious bad faith absurdity.

      The much bigger issue is that what people want to do is to be heard and validated in their political views. This is not merely that they want to proselytize or to win converts, but that they're seeking validation and a sense of rightness or righteousness in their statements.

      This desire is toxic to a neutral forum, because invariably on any divisive issue, you will not merely be heard and validated, but will be challenged and denigrated. Indeed, often the challenges and denigrations themselves are the same performance in reverse. Members of each team trying to dunk on the other and earn validation for how hard they owned the other side.

      (3) To overcome this, a successful political forum must have a purpose other than mere commentary.

      On /r/ChangeMyView and /r/NeutralPolitics, we have been able to build forums which have large amounts of productive and non-hostile political discussion. The key to this is that neither forum allows for being heard, or general discussion, as its reason for being.

      On /r/ChangeMyView we limit posts to views people genuinely hold, and are open to changing (CMV rule B). This requires that OPs cannot come to troll or soapbox. It is by far the most frequently used rule of ours in terms of removing submissions, almost always on the soapboxing side.

      On /r/NeutralPolitics, we limit posts to neutrally framed questions about political subjects, which can be answered with facts. By doing this, we narrow the scope of discussion away from soliciting feelings (which is an invitation to people posting just to be heard) and towards bringing forth factual information, where people might learn something.

      I don't know what purpose a political forum on Tildes might have, but to succeed it must have a clear purpose, and that purpose must be one which excludes people posting merely to be heard.

      (4) In addition to a purpose beyond being heard, a political forum must have extreme civility rules.

      Both CMV and NP have extremely similar rules in this regard, and they are absolutely crucial to the success of the fora.

      In general, any comment or post which in any way denigrates another user should be removed. This is an extremely broad civility rule that is well past what most subreddits do. Calling another user a liar, or accusing them of bad faith posting is banned on both CMV and NP for example, even when such accusations are true.

      The prohibition on what even may be seen as justified rudeness is I think the key to a civility rule. It immediately removes from the moderation process any discretion around the substance of the politics, and makes it a neutral rule which can be applied evenly to all parties.

      It is also necessary because nothing productive ever happens after bad faith is accused. Almost uniformly, once someone is rude, if there is a response back to them, the response will be rude in kind, usually more severely. People love to try to get the last word in, and a clear, objective rule banning "they started it" spats is also an important component. CMV's wiki has a really good overview of how we enforce this rule there.

      (5) Conclusion/TL;DR

      I don't know exactly what political content should exist on Tildes. I do know that a general politics group will not work, and that rather a politics channel should be focused on a discrete purpose other than just discussion.

      I would almost certainly ban link posts from any politics group, since inherently they're going to act as just headlines for people to pontificate on, without guiding discussion towards a particular goal. I would also obviously enforce civility, and have much stricter moderation of it than I might on a non-politics forum.

      Edited for formatting

      27 votes

    11. Let's see how well Tildes handles a *real* submission...

      ~test Text 1928 words
      Welcome to the /r/ListenToThis Best Of 2017! Here there are no scores, no judgments, and no opinions - just obscure music shared by redditors, collected and arranged for you over the course of...

      Welcome to the /r/ListenToThis Best Of 2017!

      Here there are no scores, no judgments, and no opinions - just obscure music shared by redditors, collected and arranged for you over the course of several months by our dedicated mod team. This list is meant to complement other best of lists on the internet, many of which are linked in the sticky comment below for further discovery.

      Set #1 includes everything - the best of the best tracks and a corresponding all-inclusive album playlist.
      The other sets are the same content, broken up into genre groups so you can listen according to your tastes. There is a sampler (1 track per album) and a full-album (every track from every album) playlist for each group. We’ve also included a listing of the albums by set in this post as not everything is available on Spotify, Tidal, etc. We tried to prefer an artist’s Bandcamp or Soundcloud, but if nothing else was available, you may see Youtube, Spotify, and iTunes links. The final count this year is 226 artists out of more than a thousand submissions.

      What did we miss? Share your favorites in the comments
 and happy listening..

      -- the /r/ListenToThis hipster facista

      Set 1 - The Full Smash

      Best Tracks on Spotify & All Albums on Spotify

      And, on the other services:

      Set 2 - Pop, Indie & Related

      Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

      Google Sampler & Google Albums

      Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

      Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

      Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums

      Apple Music Sampler (thanks /u/suckitnewtabs)

      Set 3 - Progressive & Related

      Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

      Google Sampler & Google Albums

      Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

      Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

      Apple Music Sampler (thanks /u/BlueRoseImmortal)

      Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums

      Set 4 - Hip-Hop, Trip-Hop & Instrumentals

      Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

      Google Sampler & Google Albums

      Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

      Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

      Apple Music Sampler (thanks /u/firewire_9000)

      Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums

      Set 5 - Punk & Related

      Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

      Google Sampler & Google Albums

      Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

      Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

      Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums

      Set 6 - Electronic & Related

      Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

      Google Sampler & Google Albums

      Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

      Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

      Apple Music Sampler (thanks /u/firewire_9000)

      Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums

      Set 7 - Metal

      Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

      Google Sampler & Google Albums

      Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

      Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

      Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums

      Apple Music Sampler (thanks /u/BlueRoseImmortal)

      Set 8 - Jazz, Soul, Funk & Related

      Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

      Google Sampler & Google Albums

      Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

      Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

      Apple Music Sampler (thanks /u/firewire_9000)

      Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums

      Set 9 - Afrobeat, World & Classical

      Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

      Google Sampler & Google Albums

      Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

      Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

      Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums

      Set 10 - Americana & Related

      Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

      Google Sampler & Google Albums

      Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

      Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

      Apple Music Sampler (thanks /u/firewire_9000)

      Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums

      Disclaimer: The Spotify playlists are the masters. They were auto-replicated to all of the other services, and there will be some missing albums on those services. The Youtube playlists may also get a bit wonky. Unfortunately, we don’t have the resources needed to fix every hiccup or keep track of what’s missing on every service. Apple music doesn’t provide an easy import mechanism either, though if someone wants to create Apple lists, we’ll link them here. Also, Google Music and Youtube simply can’t handle the All Albums playlist, so they are omitted.

      Links to Other Best Of Lists

      Please share other noteworthy lists you've found online in the replies to this comment.

      4 votes

    12. What's in a link? A recipe for using the web to find a spectacular amount of information about music submissions.

      ~music Text 1238 words
      This discussion is old hat for the l2t mods, but I'd like to get it written down here on tildes so when the time comes to develop these features we've got a record of all the tricks ready to help...

      This discussion is old hat for the l2t mods, but I'd like to get it written down here on tildes so when the time comes to develop these features we've got a record of all the tricks ready to help whoever wants to code it all. It's surprisingly easy to do this now.

      First, we're only going to concern ourselves with legal, legit streaming links. That limits the number of sites we need to support to the following...

      1. Youtube 2. Bandcamp 3. Soundcloud 4. Spotify 5. Google Play

      Sure, there are others, but they don't offer free streaming, so they aren't particularly useful for widespread music sharing on social media sites like reddit and tildes. Even on reddit, very little of the music shared ends up coming from pay-for services - it's almost entirely coming from youtube, bandcamp, and soundcloud, in that order. So those are the APIs we need to be dealing with in order to extract useful information. It's also worth noting that over time, some of these will die, and new ones will arise to take their place, and they will change their APIs from time to time breaking services built on top of them.

      Yes, sometimes youtube has pirate streams of music. That's their problem to solve, not ours. The closest we could come to 'helping' in that regard would be verifying that the video posted is on the artist and/or label's official channels. This is not easy, but it is possible. Frankly, I don't think it's worth the effort. It's hard to code and will have a messy false positive rate. A lazier solution we've used in listentothis for years is simply having a blacklist for channels that spam/rip/repost artist's music without permission - and we can get you a copy of our blacklist and whitelist if you like, so that isn't starting from scratch.

      Getting all the music information about an artist is a two-step process.

      The first step is querying the metadata provided by the sites listed above through their API calls. The relevant information we need for this is simply the name of the artist and the name of the track (or album, if it's an album link). There's plenty of other information available (some of which we will want, like the youtube views and various popularity metrics such as plays, scrobbles, listens, monthly listeners, heat indexes) but that information isn't needed unless you intend to start dividing up the music into sub-categories using other ~tilds or #tags. Eventually we will want to do that (subs like listentothis can't really exist without the popularity numbers) but that's a problem for further in the future, once tildes is a lot more active. For now, let's just concentrate on making the sidebar of a music submission take people's breath away.

      The second step is using the name of the artist and the name of the track (or album) to lookup information about that artist in public databases.

      The motherlode of music data resides in Musicbrainz. This has become the de-facto open-source database of record - you might remember its humble beginnings when it was cddb and freedb, embedded in most cd-ripping tools to provide lookups of the artist/track information. It's grown into a wikipediesque monster since then. It knows almost everything there is to know about every artist who has ever released so much as a single or an EP, and does well even for obscure and new independent artists. It's also being updated by-the-minute with new artist information.

      Musicbrainz has a public API, and they allow dozens of queries per minute, so it would be possible to use their free service - but I think that's the wrong way to do this. Musicbrainz does allow you to set up your own copy of their database, and provides scripts to download nightly updates of the data, so it's possible to run this locally. For a hassle-free setup, they do provide a virtual machine that's ready to go, just download and boot it up on your network. The VM also has their full API and web services (looks exactly like their official site), so with the VM you can query it locally through the API just like you would using the remote site (and you could have a failover between the local copy and the official site). Running just a local copy of the database rather than the VM, you won't get the API. The database is around 30GB right now and grows very slowly. Musicbrainz local copies also provide the option of querying their SQL directly, without the need to use the API.

      What data can we get out of this monster database?

      1. Artist search with a confidence rating for best match
      2. Complete discography and artist bio in excruciating detail
      3. A fantastic collection of every relevant link to other sites
      4. The most relevant collection of 'genre tags' available anywhere

      Let's also not forget they come with an army of developers and a great support forum. I think the case for using musicbrainz as tildes' prime music authority kinda makes itself. :P

      There's really no need for another data source. Musicbrainz doesn't do popularity numbers yet but they are planning to do it soon. The Listenbrainz project is, basically, an attempt to reinvent last.fm as an open-source service. Last.fm itself isn't likely to survive, they've been struggling financially for several years. Listenbrainz hopes to allow people to import that data before the site goes under.

      So what do we build out of this mountain of data? Easy - the laziest submission process for music anywhere on the internet.

      I think the goal here for the users is to be simply pasting a music link into the submission form, and letting tildes do all of the rest of the work for them. The tags and the title can be auto-populated by the lookup, and then tweaked by the user. That'll give a sense of uniformity to the titles, and it makes submitting on mobile almost effortless.

      Once the submission is created, the sidebar can be populated with the musicbrainz information. I think a good start would be to show the name of the artist, the name of the album, the name of the track (if applicable), and the release year - possibly even the record label and genre tags (big bucket generic tags like rock, jazz, folk, nothing overly specific). I'd follow that up with the relevant artist links to their own website, their official bandcamp/youtube/twitter/facebook, and possibly the links to discogz and lyric wiki if present. I'd close it with the artist's bio - just a blurb, that ends with a 'read more on wikipedia' link.

      If/when we have all of this working, we can worry about the next step - finding a way to determine the relative popularity of any given submission. That's a far, far harder problem to solve.

      Here's a quick link listing to all of the relevant APIs and their documentation for easy reference.

      1. Musicbrainz XML API
      2. Youtube API
      3. Bandcamp API
      4. Soundcloud API
      5. Spotify / Echonest API (second only to musicbrainz for raw amount of data)
      6. Google Play API

      Edit: Also, we can run a local copy of the Discogs database which will give us even more. If we have Musicbrainz and Discogs local, that's almost everything without the need to have Tildes connecting to other sites.

      14 votes

    14. Topic-tagging updates

      ~tildes.official Text 163 words
      A couple of fairly minor updates to topic-tagging (that mostly came out of discussion in this thread the other day): When you're entering tags, you now need to separate them with commas. Spaces...

      A couple of fairly minor updates to topic-tagging (that mostly came out of discussion in this thread the other day):

      1. When you're entering tags, you now need to separate them with commas. Spaces will be kept as part of the tag, instead of working as a separator. So you can tag something like music, soundtrack, full album and get 3 tags out of that.

        (Side note that I doubt anyone cares about: spaces are converted to underscores internally, so using a space or an underscore in a tag is now the same)

      2. I added a tags field to the "new topic" page, so you can tag while you're posting the topic now, instead of needing to do it separately afterwards.

      Most of you have probably already read it (especially since I spammed you all with a message that has a link to it), but there's a bit more info about topic-tagging here as well: https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics#topic-tags

      10 votes

    15. Spammed everybody with a welcome message

      ~tildes.official Text 127 words
      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...

      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.

      13 votes

    16. One more "private" day

      ~tildes.official Text 120 words
      Alright, I'm going to take one more "private" day. I want to work on a few more of the high-priority items, and write up a bit more on the docs site related to questions that people have asked me...

      Alright, I'm going to take one more "private" day. I want to work on a few more of the high-priority items, and write up a bit more on the docs site related to questions that people have asked me so far, and information that still isn't very clear.

      I'll make at least another post or two later today in ~tildes with specific info for features, then let's plan to start trying to get some public attention tomorrow (edit: to be clear, the site is staying invite-only, just attention for the announcement post, I mean).

      If you want some invite codes today to quietly invite a few more people, just let me know and I can give you some.

      15 votes

    17. Some updates for today

      ~tildes.official Text 262 words
      Just a couple quick notes for today: Updates I've made a few minor updates to layout and such here and there. I also changed the site's default sorting to "newest" while it's still pretty...

      Just a couple quick notes for today:

      Updates

      I've made a few minor updates to layout and such here and there. I also changed the site's default sorting to "newest" while it's still pretty inactive, since that should make it easier to see the new posts. I'm planning to get an update in pretty soon that will remember which sorting settings you change to (on an individual group basis), so you should be able to adjust that soon if you want to.

      Still working on the things I mentioned in this post, hopefully should have a couple of those done in the next day or two. I know the lack of reply notifications is especially painful and hard to keep conversations going at all, so I'm trying to get that in very soon.

      Invites + "going public"

      I'm inviting some more people directly today, so there will probably be various new faces showing up. If any of you have others that you want to invite, definitely let me know and I can contact them myself or give you some invite codes.

      Currently, my plan is to start going more public tomorrow or Wednesday, trying to spread the announcement post out a bit more and get more people invited. I'll probably give all of you some invite codes at that point too, whether you want them or not. If you have particular suggestions for where you think I should (or shouldn't) try to get attention on the post, let me know.

      Thanks, it's really great to see some people getting started using the site.

      17 votes

    18. Info about site mechanics + some short-term plans

      ~tildes.official Text 431 words
      Hey folks, thanks for trying things out so far. I know it's in a bit of an awkward phase right now where everything is inactive, but this should improve as more people join. Unfortunately I've had...

      Hey folks, thanks for trying things out so far. I know it's in a bit of an awkward phase right now where everything is inactive, but this should improve as more people join. Unfortunately I've had some bad timing today with fun things like a surprise early-morning trip to the vet, so I haven't been able to pay as much attention today as I wanted to.

      Anyway, a few updates:

      Site mechanics

      I did manage to spend some time writing up a page that explains some of the basic site mechanics, which is here: https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics

      Hopefully that helps explain things a bit better, since so far you've just basically had to try things to figure out what they are. Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts about the info on that page.

      Issue tracker

      There's not much there yet either, but I set up an issue tracker here on gitlab (which is where I'll host the site's code eventually): https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues

      I'm not expecting anyone to register on there and submit issues or anything, but that will be kind of the "formal" location for issues and plans (and I'll transfer things there that get reported on the site itself).

      Invites and other plans

      So far, I've only invited people that already knew what I was working on and that I've been talking to about it. Today and over the weekend, I'm going to start inviting some more specific people that I'd like to have involved but I haven't previously talked with about Tildes. While doing that, I'm also going to be working on the things mentioned in this post yesterday: https://tildes.net/~tildes/a/high_priority_things_to_fix_add

      If any of you have suggestions for people you'd like to invite (who won't be turned off by an inactive site), please let me know. I can contact them or give you some invite codes.

      Early next week, I'd like to start trying to get some public attention and expanding more quickly. This will probably include posting the announcement blog post to some places, as well as giving you all some invite codes. I don't have very specific plans yet though, so again, please let me know if you have any suggestions.

      Thanks again, and please keep posting a bit just so we can get some base activity going - if you read an interesting article or anything, just take a minute to post it here as well. Like I said, I know it's a bit awkward for now, but it will get better.

      11 votes

    19. High-priority things to fix/add

      ~tildes.official Text 169 words
      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. Fixing the site icons for link topics...

      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)
      10 votes

    20. Welcome to Tildes!

      ~tildes.official Text 718 words
      Welcome to the alpha version of Tildes! If you haven't read it yet, please start with the announcement post on the blog, since that explains a lot of my goals and general plans for the site:...

      Welcome to the alpha version of Tildes! If you haven't read it yet, please start with the announcement post on the blog, since that explains a lot of my goals and general plans for the site: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes

      Also check this page for some info about some of the basic mechanics in place: https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics

      Beyond that, there are some other pages on the Docs site with a fair amount of information, and I'm working on gradually adding more to them.

      Please don't spread this too much yet

      I'd still like to keep it a bit quiet for the first little while, so I can make sure nothing explodes and pay more attention to the site instead of having to worry about who's talking about it and where. It's fine if you want to mention it to some people, but please ask them not to spread it around much as well. If you do tell people, it's probably best to send them to the announcement post as an intro.

      It won't have to be this way for long - this upcoming week, I'm intending to start trying to get some more public attention.

      Things that are missing, coming soon, etc.

      There's still a ton missing, obviously. Some functions have been disabled deliberately for now as well, because I'd like to see how things work without them before we start jumping to too many conclusions about what we "need" and how to use the site. I hope to have regular discussions about a lot of these ideas so we can figure out exactly how best to implement some things.

      Make sure to check on your userpage (by clicking your username in the top right corner or sidebar on mobile) - there are a few things in the side menu on there that are useful, like the light/dark theme toggle.

      There's a post here with some specific things I'm working on in the very near future: https://tildes.net/~tildes/a/high_priority_things_to_fix_add

      If you just want to experiment, please use ~test

      I set up a group named ~test that's specifically for trying things out and making a mess. It's the only one that you're not auto-subscribed to when you register (so that your home page isn't spammed up with the stuff from there).

      Please feel free to test things out in there, try to break things, whatever. I may periodically wipe it just to get rid of a lot of the garbage, so please don't post anything in there if you're not okay with it disappearing at any time.

      How you can help

      One of the best things you can do would be to just post things. Getting the initial activity going on the site will be one of the most important steps, so please just post things here (and comment on others' posts).

      I'd also appreciate any feedback, posts about bugs you discover, etc. You can just post anything like that in the ~tildes group as well.

      Inviting other people

      If you have other people that you'd like to invite, I think we should be able to start doing that very soon. I haven't given anyone their own invite codes yet, but it's something that I can do. If there's people you really want to get in right away, please let me know and I can give you some codes or otherwise help get them in. Message me here on Tildes about it, email me at deimos@tildes.net, or send me a message through Discord/Slack/whatever and we can figure it out.

      Please expect some turbulence

      Please keep in mind that, for the most part, this has been a one-person endeavor so far. I'm the developer, sysadmin, designer, writer, lawyer, manager, chair of the non-profit board, etc. I'm not very good at a lot of these things.

      There will definitely be some roughness for a while, whether it's awful design/UI choices, the site crashing and staying down for a while until I can get it back up, etc. Thanks in advance for your patience, it's all only going to get better from here.

      I'm excited to finally be able to let people see what I've been working on. Thanks for being here at the start with me!

      53 votes