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Complaints about Tildes and comparisons to other sites
I was inspired to say this in a different conversation, but having said it, I want to say it more loudly/noticably.
A few, not many fellow newcomers to Tildes have made comments comparing it unfavorably to Lemmy/Kbin or Squabbles. We have options and there will likely be many more. To steal a good quote from a totalitarian dictator, Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom.
Tildes vs Lemmy/Kbin or Squabbles reminds me of the disagreement between the Ents and the Entwives. Some people prefer gardens. Some people prefer the wilderness. Some like both. I am grateful that Deimos created this nifty site for me to play in.
http://www.tolkien.cro.net/talesong/ents.html
https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/wiki/philosophy/index
After some 30 years of the internet, I have learned one constant:
"Once you have 'broad market appeal' you also have let in all the village idiots."
Tribalization hasn't helped.
Once you make everything "us vs them" there's no room for nuance, and it makes it a lot easier for hostile/destructive people to swarm over everything. The "you're not wrong you're just an asshole" quote from The Big Lebowski is probably the most elegant way I can summarize internet from the 2010's to now.
It's when the village idiots start running the shop that the real worries happen.
Oh, and went sites decide that they want to enter into the stocks game as a company.
Not forgetting when megalomaniacs accidentally buy something and systematically destroy it.
Look, we're full circle to the village idiots...
Talking about tildes being a more respectful place while calling people "village idiots" isn't exactly compatible.
Honestly just makes me want to leave this place.
What are people saying against Tildes? Maybe I've been lucky but I haven't seen a lot of pessimism. The most negative theme I see is the fact that it's invite-only, which is clearly a conscious decision made to prevent an Eternal September scenario.
As I said, it's only a few, and I wish people would just make their choice and either stay or leave quietly.
Edit, for those who care it was in this thread... what I think was a valid concern/question, followed by a comment negging Tildes. https://tildes.net/~tech/17lb/how_do_i_migrate_almost_twenty_years_of_email_off_of_gmail#comment-990a
I believe I'm the OP from that thread you're referring to. Having not had a chance to fully explain myself I guess I can follow up here.
To be specific, I was uncertain of the moderating behavior I've been seeing since joining. The fact that people can have their titles/posts modified willy nilly by a mod seems totalitarian to me. Who cares of someone mistyped something? Shouldn't they have the right to change or rectify it themselves?
What I enjoy about tildes today is that it fosters open discussion. But I worry how open it truly is if moderation is so heavy handed. Even for something so minor as writing style. It just really irked me that a moderator would go out of their way to modify the spelling of 20 to twenty. This isn't a publication to be held to some formal standard, it's supposed to be an open forum.
I'm happy to be wrong because I like what I see so far.
Edited to add: It honestly feels a bit dramatic to create a whole thread around this. If we remove the existence of the alternatives to tildes for a second. I (as a newcomer) still find it quite irksome to be held to some standard of quality control that is not transparent to me. What I wrote online is very personal to me, and random edits: not just moving a post to the appropriate community, not even correcting a typo... but changing the way I type? That would feel very much like an attack on me.
I think it helps to think about it from a slightly different perspective. When you post a topic, it's not really the same as you just saying something—you're effectively creating a space for the Tildes community to discuss something. Unless you delete it, that topic will probably exist for the rest of the site's life and could be something that people continue to find in the future through search and such.
There's value to having standards for formatting and quality in the way we label those spaces. Sometimes title adjustments might be relatively minor things like capitalization, and sometimes it might be as significant as completely rewriting a title to de-sensationalize it or make it more accurate. All title changes are shown publicly, and if anyone ever abuses their ability to edit a title, they'll lose that privilege (or even be banned, depending how egregious it was).
There are endless problems on Reddit (and other sites that emulate its moderator capabilities) related to the inability to edit the titles of posts. Titles have typos and most of the comments are joking about the typo instead of the actual content, titles are sensationalized or have blatantly false information in them, titles are written in ALL CAPS or do other things to make them stand out more from other users' posts (like using emoji), and so on. On Reddit, the only thing anyone could do about it was to completely remove the post, which would often destroy discussions that had been ongoing for hours.
Everything else about the post could be perfect, but if there was something wrong about the title it meant the only options were to remove the entire post or tolerate the bad title and all the problems it continued to cause. Being able to fix titles is a clear improvement.
Over at Metafilter, when a moderator needs to participate in that mode (as opposed to just a MeFite), they leave a little comment in small script, like:
A few comments removed. Let's not derail the conversation; take it to MetaTalk if you want to discuss this further.
And when they have discussions about, say, tagging, they do it like this and nobody asks anyone to leave.
I'm not suggesting tildes should be like reddit or metafilter, but I would suggest that people in general feel ownership over their writing. It's why when editors did things by hand they started using any ink color except red - because red marks were like teachers' marks, and teachers' marks meant you did it wrong and that makes the writer feel bad and resentful and resistant to the feedback.
Using my post as an example, not because it's interesting but because at least I'm not pointing at someone else... here. The mod (as we're calling them over on the other thread now) changed the title capitalization and changed all my tags. My tag was "fender guitar" and their tag was "guitars.fender"; I didn't add a paywall tag because I provided a link around it, they decided it belonged; etc. The mod did this before they read the article, because it was almost instant. I was surprised, bemused, wondered what "national day" was, and decided it didn't really matter. But the mod could've left a note, like:
OP, added a few tags for the source, author, paywall, and other things, plus we keep the post titles in sentence case so I fixed that too!
The result would've been that I didn't feel I did wrong but that I had a helper, and the note would've informed me but also (more importantly) everyone else who stumbled on the post, so we could see that these changes are just the way things are done here, a part of the culture, and there wouldn't be a subsequent trainwreck when the edited person has to ask the Mod why.
@cfabbro this might be as good as I'm going to be able to give, for a further explanation of my thought.
Yeah, that's reasonable. But I think it's worth also keeping in mind that Tildes is over 5 years old, and those actions are completely routine to us. A comment in every thread about it would feel pretty unnecessary too, especially when it's already shown in the topic log in the sidebar.
I do think it would probably be good if we did something like send an automatic message to a user the first time it happens to one of their topics though, just to explain the intentions behind it better (and that it doesn't mean they did anything wrong).
You theoretically could include a "reason" for each item in the topic log (or perhaps just re-naming, as tags seem self-explanatory). But I gather you feel like that would feel pretty unnecessary. I don't have strong feelings on the matter at all, just sharing an option which occurred to me that bridges both ideas discussed. Keep up the good work :)
I understand what you're saying, and things could definitely be improved here in how we do things so the topic changes don't make people feel offended, or wronged, or ashamed of making "mistakes". However, what you're asking for would also require a lot of additional labor to accomplish. And TBH, we're all already rather overwhelmed and stretched thin just keeping up with all the new content being posted by new users, much of it without any tags whatsoever. So unfortunately what you're asking for, to explain every change we make, would be impossible right now.
As for telling people to leave Tildes. That is absolutely unacceptable. And if that happened then that likely explains why all those comments were removed by Deimos, which should tell you his feelings on the matter too.
As for the specific changes that were made to your example post, I will try explaining some of them so you can hopefully understand them better:
fender guitarvsguitars.fenderThe reason for tags being hierarchical like that is so that people can more easily find related topics. E.g. Browsing ?tag=guitars will show all the tags, even those with a sub-tag like.fender, whereas had it been left asfender guitarthe only way for people to find topics about that would have been to visit ?tag=fender_guitar specifically.paywallis added to paywalled submissions so that people who don't want to see them can just filter them out using the topic tag filters. You adding a mirror in the comments is very much appreciated (and I do it myself too), but that doesn't change the fact the article is still behind a paywall. And adding paywall tags doesn't usually require us to read the article either, since we often already know which sites are paywalled through experience. And the only time I don't add paywall tags to a paywalled article is if the OP included a share code which allows all the users who click on it to get around the paywall for that particular article.Anyways, I hope that helps. And like I said below:
Would it be ok if at some point you and @mycketforvirrad (and others who have done so too) write down how you approach tagging? I assume you guys have a system to keep them consistent. Sometimes I also want to tag my own posts more thoroughly to reduce the work for you but no idea where to start.
We have a system of sorts, but it's not a formal one by any means. It's largely an improvised, ad-hoc system developed over quite a few years of just tagging everything, seeing how others have tagged things, seeing what works (and what doesn't) in terms of browsing/searching for tags, and with many many unspoken rules.
But I suppose I could try to formalize it a bit, or at least write out some of the basic principles, best practices, and give some general advice, and examples. The current Tildes "instructions" docs about the hierarchical tags are incredibly unhelpful, and actually very misleading IMO, due to containing quite a bit of speculation/theorycrafting from before we gradually settled on how to do things... so I should probably just completely redo them. I'll let you know when I take a crack at them.
If it is a space for the community (which I think is a great idea), and it can be edited for that reason, why is the OP able to delete the post?
Here was an old discussion we had about it: What if we eliminated "ownership" of link topics?
Yes, this can be disconcerting if you're not used to it. Tildes does things sort of like Wikipedia at top level. Some things can be edited, like which group a topic is in, the topic title, and the tags. It's true that only a few people can do these things. I can edit other people's topic titles (though I rarely do) but not the tags. There is a topic log in the sidebar where you can see who did it.
For the actual text of a discussion topic and comments, you won't see anyone changing your words, though there are other forms of moderation, like locking topics and deleting comments.
If you disagree with an editor's decision then you can sometimes edit it back, or you can ask about it. I remember one case when a tag was changed on one of my posts so that it was wrong, so I changed it back.
Most of the time, I think the edits are pretty good. Sometimes I will be lazy and post a link in ~misc, without any tags, and let someone else decide where it goes.
Thank you for the reassurance! I'll keep this all in mind moving forward
Most of us with editing privileges are pretty open to suggestions. We're not trying to step on toes here. We're generally just trying to keep things consistent and organized, is all. So if you disagree with anything we have changed (which can all be seen in the Topic Log on the sidebar), just let us know. If you had good reason for doing something a particular way, submitting the link to a particular group, or wording something the way you did, we can always change it back for you (if you ask nicely).
And if you're confused about a change we have made, feel free to ask us about it. I can't speak for everyone, but I am usually more than happy to explain why I do things, and often even preemptively explain why before I make a major change, E.g. like when I recently changed a submitted link.
p.s. We can't edit the body of Text Topics, and unlike link submissions those are generally left alone since they're considered more as 'user owned' rather than link topics which are more 'community owned'.
cc: @MsPiggleWiggle
I appreciate what you're saying, but that's not what I read in that thread. Take another look at it, and try it with the eyes of someone who hasn't been here for very long. See if the dialogue matches the site's aspirations.
Anyway, I'm not interested in trying to change anything, I'm too new to feel that invested. Just speaking in support of the others who got shut down or who felt like some of this could be done better, because that mirrors my thoughts... but tildes isn't my place to change.
Is there something in particular about that thread that you are referring to? A lot of the comments were deleted by the users themselves, or removed by Deimos (Tildes admin). And of what remains I don't see anything particularly problematic after a quick skim, although some people were perhaps being a bit overly blunt when trying to explain things, IMO.
Let me think about this and maybe get back with you, possibly in a direct message. I don't want another back-and-forth like what happened there, except this time focused/piled on me, in which Newbie asks questions and Old Guard shouts it down. And I really don't want to focus on the 2 people who asked someone to leave the community but a detailed discussion necessarily does just that. And honestly, if most people think everything was fine, then it's me that's not fitting and a detailed navel-gaze doesn't accomplish anything in that case.
Yeah, no worries. I wasn't trying to get you to call anyone out. I just lack the context for understanding what exactly you're referring to in that thread since a lot of it is not visible anymore. So I was unsure if what you had issues with was part of that removed content, or something else about it. Feel free to PM me if you want to discuss it further in private though. I promise I won't shout you down, or tell you to leave, and will simply try to answer any questions you have, and address any concerns you have, as nicely as I can. :)
The kind of moderation you’re talking about is for ensuring consistency. Consistency aids usability for all. When tags and titles are enforced to a standard, they become more usable and searchable for everyone.
I think usability trumps the (perceived) very small negative experience of having your post edited.
In a way, the conversation was, "An unknown and unwritten rule is that if you write "20" I will change it to "twenty" without giving any reason, and if you ask why I will say "because", and if you don't like that then I invite you to leave."
There's the action; the way the action was performed; and the discussion about those two things. Even if the action was ok, the second is jarring, and the third was disappointing.
I don’t think there was anything wrong with the way the action was performed? The people who edit tags on here have a thankless job and do it tirelessly. The end result is great, tags are highly searchable and titles have a consistent style that’s easy to read.
It might not be immediately apparent why that’s the case, but mostly everything we do here has been discussed to death and there’s a rhyme to the reason. I agree people could have done a better job explaining why in that thread, but I also think the original question could have been less accusatory and more knowledge-seeking and it would have been much more productive.
Tildes has been a community for a long time. Of course it’s going to evolve over time, but many people who’ve been here for a long time have a vested interest in making sure it changes for the better and not for the worse.
I want to support what you're saying as it mirrors my own thoughts.
Additionally I was disappointed to see that the conversation devolved to the point that maybe 2 people suggested folks should just leave tildes.
To be clear, I was not intending to criticize you. I think you raised a good question/ concern. The person who replied to you with his preference of Lemmy over Tildes in a way that I thought was rude was what prompted this.
I have seen moderating for malice/trolling. I have seen moderating tags for consistency. I have seen moderating titles which I am less happy about but as I weigh costs and benefits I'm not going to complain too much. I have not seen revising comments or posts by stealth, but some get removed, especially if they are in reply to something labeled for malice.
No. to be fair, my comment did come off as negging.
I don't remember whether it was Chip and Dale or Heckle and Jeckle who did the polite back and forth you, no you, no you thing? I was very young. But that was what came to mind lol.
That triggered a memory that wasn't Chip 'n Dale or Heckle and Jeckle, but Looey Tunes' Goofy Gophers.
If our mutual historical time-frames align, I suspect these are the personified animals in your memory:
https://youtu.be/3o8zQBF8NmI
I am nearly 100 percent convinced you are right.
Haha!
Maybe I missed it because I only skimmed, but that doesn't seem like negging to me. It's someone asking for clear code of conduct for titles, which is absent from the UI, if mods are going to be OCD with title formatting edits. That's extremely fair.
I'll do a little negging myself, though.
As a new member, I find the constant gatekeeping comments around these forums very off-putting. "If you don't like the exact vibe of tildes, leave quietly."
Communities evolve. As a platform gains popularity, new people bring new subcultures. When I migrated from Digg to Reddit, there were the same frequent complaints. Narwals and Bacon comments everywhere.
Your community is going to evolve. Your interpretation of what your community past and present probably doesn't match others views of the same community.
Pearl clutching isn't going to make the evolution any more pleasant for anyone.
Hi. I'm also quite recently a joiner to Tildes. While I've noticed a number of comments mentioning Tildes etiquette, I don't think it is fair to call them pearl clutching. There's no moral outrage here, simply a desire to keep the place's identity intact.
You are correct that an influx of users will gradually affect a community's nature, but that doesn't mean that this change is necessarily good or sought after. I see those posts more as the old guard showing newcomers the ropes. There's no fault if someone doesn't think that the Tildes posting culture fits them, but it doesn't have to when there are plenty of alternatives. No one's at fault here.
Exactly, the entire chain of comments below me essentially called me trash for not liking the way things were, or implying I should just leave if I didn't like that people could modify my post titles with no warning or reason.
Thankfully, here we can disagree without one of us being downvoted to oblivion. : )
Indeed glad to not see the downvote button!
No, the comment I labelled negging was a reply comparing Tildes unfavorably to Lemmy. I agree the question was reasonable and as the site grows we should formalize these standards and make them visible criteria.
Hmm, I'm on mobile web, but deep linking doesn't seem to be working. I think I found the comment you're referring to. A one off single sentence comment by a non-OP does not seem to warrant any discussion IMO.
If you read the thread, there are opinions on both sides of that question. But I hear what you are saying and will bear it in mind going forward.
You’re promoting such comparison discussions by posting it more prominently, though. :)
Comparison discussions are actually very good, especially when done with a healthy mindset and good faith. They help negotiate innovation in products by exporing the nitty gritty of all aspects, every pro and con. It's a healthy exercise which must be encouraged. Stack Overflow hates it for some unknown reason I've never been able to understand till date.
I enjoy it here and plan to stay, firstly.
However, the gate-keeping and internal virtue signaling is intense here. There is a philosophy that the site aims for, publicly, and it causes users to regularly police the content and usage of the site by other users.
If more mods were necessary, they'd be here. It just doesn't seem necessary, and if it were it's not the general users responsibility. It bogs down conversation, and discourages people from participating.
That's my only real complaint. Things change over time. It's gonna happen. To what end, who knows? Let's let Deimos dictate that.. lol
I would argue that it's absolutely the responsibility of all tildren to uphold the philosophy of the site. There are so few mods because we try to self-police ourselves and each other in order to keep things calm and productive. If someone isn't here for the in depth discussion and content, I'm not sure why they're here at all. It would be like going to a pool hall and complaining that they can't bowl there. Tildes is quite clear about what it is. I'm not going to tell anyone that they should get out if they don't like it, but I'm definitely going to suggest that they try to engage with the raison d'etre.
I love this framing of it - thanks for putting words to what I was thinking and feeling.
I do think the focus on quality content and discussion is an important element of the site to keep, but I agree that telling people to assimilate or leave isn't warranted. I think the way to do this is for us to be clear to newer users about what we are and what we value here.
The culture and vibe of the community will almost certainly change over time, and new users can and should contribute to that change. As long as they do that by engaging with what we are now, i.e. understanding where we are now and why, that's likely to be a healthy process.
To draw another analogy, if you move into my place, you absolutely get to talk about what you'd like the place to look like and help make it a place that's more comfortable for you to live in. But the onus is on both of us to make sure you understand why this place is the way it is, and start the discussion from there.
There are almost 10k new users here, a not insignificant number of which don’t know (or don’t care) what the site’s founding principles are, and many of whom are demanding changes or behaving in ways that don’t necessarily align with those principles. So all the old users being gatekeepery, and vocal about what they feel the virtues of the site are, is understandable, isn’t it?
This happens every time we get a big new wave of users though, and usually simmers down as all the new users either acclimatize to the culture of the site, or leave because it doesn’t suit them.
I haven't seen much of this on Tildes at all, but I have read negative comments about Tildes on other sites, mainly criticizing the invite-only policy and the fact that you can't create your own communities.
There is a ton of comparing being done on other sites like Lemmy and Squabbles, mainly about Reddit, but also between the different sites. I think the issue here is that people are looking for a one-stop-shop Reddit replacement, but there isn't one. Each of the sites seeing major growth in users have their own strengths and weaknesses, so people aren't managing to find their "one true" destination.
I've decided that I will probably frequent several sites, and there's nothing wrong with that. I love this place for good mature discussion, but I'll probably need to go to other sites for more niche interests and some occasional mindless entertainment. I imagine other people will eventually find their new home or homes and the comparisons will die down.
r/redditalternatives has a few passionate boosters of other sites and of the concept of the fediverse. I'm happy for them, but it's not my jam. I would imagine that especially people who belong to groups that are subject to bullying on the wild free internet might find their way here if they are thoughtful discussion minded people.
I think I like the fact that you can post an article or a comment and people don't feel the need to comment, they read it, vote and move on.
I did have one post that I wrote about something I had done and had a refreshing and positive discussion over a few days about it. Then we all moved on and that is what I like about Tildes. No drama.
I do think I would appreciate a certain amount of the "fluff" that comes with many of the other sites, things like silly comics or memes, sprinkled in here and there. But on the whole, I'm very glad it's not just endless pages of these things, and much more discussion focused. I feel like I get a lot more out of this site, in that way.
I think one financial/economics blog handles it very well. It aggregates news daily and includes what it calls an antidote. The antidote is one cute photo of an animal. See for example https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/07/links-7-5-2023.html
The biggest thing I’m missing on Tildes is discussion about about my local or regional community (like my city, or even state). And an app would be nice ;)
There is an app, surfboard. It’s really good too.
Check it out, it’s “beta” but IMO 100% ready for use.
https://tildes.net/~tildes/174c/introducing_surfboard_for_tildes
Blatant gush incoming…
…which as of today supports nord theme, for which I am stupendously grateful. Keep up the good work!
Not just one app but two!
https://tild.es/15xb
I'm still waiting for the Android one/many to release.
I've even added to Patreon to help as a recurring donor.
Tildes serves different purpose to Reddit and decentralized options as ActivityPub, I have seen people complaining about Tildes comparing it to Reddit and they have to be reminded that Tildes is on its own and not an alternative. When people ask me for a Reddit alternative I recommend something else, not Tildes.
I take your point, but Tildes has a lot of what I liked about reddit only more and better. I doubt I am alone. Edit I hung out in the various books subreddits, and r/law, r/scotus primarily.
I don't find it more as some type of content is not allowed. But find it better for specific purposes.
What I do kind about Tildes is that discussions often seem very self-referential - not that we just talk about Tildes (although it's very frequent). Rather, a lot of posts seem to just be there to generate talk between users (as if, no matter the topic, just having Tildes users speak is a value in itself) rather than discussing with a specific aim or problem in mind (e.g. recommendations, a piece of news)
I don't care much about the conversations about Tildes, either, though I do appreciate that they happen. To be fair, though, this is happening because of all of the new users and will certainly calm down after a while.
It's like emacs vs vim vs nano vs notepad++ vs eclipse vs Visual Studio vs VSCode :-)
Reminds me of r/MapsWithoutNZ. Gets me every time. Imagine you're from there and every time..!
Sublime Text has become my new absolute favourite editor.
vim editor best editor! I'll fight over it!
(sent in a silly tone of voice)
I'd fight alongside you, but I forgot which key I have to press to get into arguements-mode.
:%s/^.*/vim is best/
Mash the "Escape" key a minimum of 11 times, then
:q!to quit without writing any of the panic-trying-to-use-commands that accidentally got inserted into the text document, then open it again and start over. Or just switch toNotepad++.vs neovim vs kakoune vs helix :-)
It's so refreshing to open a discussion and not see 100 posts of the same joke slightly reworded, which wasn't even clever in the first place
I haven't even seen a Joke or Noise label at all. But when the inevitable happens, we have ways to deal with that.
Those labels aren’t visible to anyone but Deimos. We tried having all the labels publicly visible in the early days (though not revealing who used the label), and it turned into an absolute clusterfuck. People were constantly assuming the person they replied to had been the one to apply the label, resulting in them responding angrily to that user, and accusations of label abuse were flying left and right.
I put a noise label to your comment just because.
But yeah, I can understand that situation, but I couldn't imagine it before. It is the best decision, but even without the label we can see it in the outcome.
At the end, all features are to make the community better, and to find out those labels would be polemic pretty sure was hilarious at the time.
Just FYI: currently, all users have only a 0.5 weighting on the 'Offtopic', 'Joke', and 'Noise' labels - which means it takes two users to label a comment as off-topic, jokey, or noisy, for the label's effects to take place.
I could add a second 'Noise' label to cfabbro's comment, to show the results - but that would collapse this whole comment-tree and you wouldn't be able to easily navigate to this reply of mine.
Well then, that made my lie even more easy to believe, because I put no label. After I wrote it, I thought my lie won't work because it cause no effect. But now I know my lie was successful because only one label won't affect anything. Good to know.
By the way, that's a good system.
I like the way that we can have disagreements here and not have it devolved into a shit throwing contest, for lack of better words, that tend to happened on other sites, like on Reddit or Twitter. Or just for fake internet clout. So the slow curated growth is really a breath of fresh air.
Exactly, this place feels distinguished and kind. It’s almost like we know the kind of future that we are trying to build.
I fully agree with you. I'm on Lemmy as well and I really enjoy both platforms. Lemmy already felt refreshing. I fulfills most of the reasons that I used Reddit for and it already has better quality comments than Reddit, but it can't be compared to Tildes. Tildes is not even remotely trying to be Reddit and I think it should stay that way. Tildes is special.
I'm really pleasantly surprised by how great Tildes and it's community is. Everything in it's design is well thought out. Every detail in the very pleasing minimal interface has a purpose and the focus is clearly on having good conversations: No distracting colors, images or even thumbnails. The comments that you've already read collapse automatically so the new ones are easy to find. There is only text. And that's the only thing you need, because it's all about quality conversations and community.
No experience has come this close to my experiences on an old forum I used to visit all the time when I was young. I really missed that feeling, so I couldn't be happier to be part of this little magical place.
Thank you @Deimos, for carefully building this place. It seems very clear to me that you've put a lot of passion and love into this place!
I agree. This website has "something" that Kbin and Reddit don't/didn't have. This place seems to know what it wants to be, what it's for, and there is an actual community here. It's kind of like the old web forums we used to have before Digg and Reddit took over, except it's not using their software. This place seems to be kind and people talking with one another. It has a community feel that I really really enjoy that other places, namely Kbin, don't have. On Kbin, I see a bunch of random posts (including shitposts) and people I don't know posting... It seems more uncontrolled. Tildes seems to be controlled and well cultivated. I like it.
The only issue I have with this website is the number of categories. I wish we had more than ~talk, ~anime, etc. I can think of a few I'd like to see, but then this place might devolve into more of Kbin/Reddit. That said, for general conversation on a broad range (not in-depth) of topics such as ~anime, I really like this place.
EDIT: This place has a nicer layout/UI as well. It's simple but well-designed.
Have you seen this thread? There are plans for more groups but Deimos and others into planning and policy don't want to create groups that will sit empty where it feels like talking into a void. https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/177q/lets_add_and_rearrange_some_groups_a_few_notes_about_other_short_term_plans
I saw it but I already forgot about it. They have ideas but none that interest me. I do like the idea that Deimos et al. want groups that people will use and not leave empty though.
I like Tildes. This is a good place. I’m excited to be a part of it and see how it grows. 😁