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Introductions | July 2026
How do you do, fellow users?
I've just arrived. Hi-ho! Anyone else new here as well? What do folks usually do around these parts? Any do's and don'ts for new users?
Edit: Woah thanks y'all for the warm welcome! Can't reply to everyone but I really appreciate all the advices.
There's about six active users who are less new to this site than me, but still, welcome! As @chocobean said, the docs are a great place to start, especially the philosophy and policy sections.
I would also recommend looking at the list of groups and then you can select what you are interested in for a more tailored experience.
If I were to boil the whole experience here down into two guiding principles:
look for the good in other users and approach comments as if they are from a good intention, even if you disagree with them. This is easier here than on other link aggregation sites because of the smaller population.
say what you mean, and mean what you say. The site is better for it.
Welcome aboard!
Edit: two guiding principles, sure, but what about an addendum?
Addendum: you can make jokes and have fun. For example, I made a joke higher up in this very topic about another username. Jokes are great and build community. But in general top level responses should be on-topic and in the spirit of the post. By that I mean, if it's a serious topic, don't make a top-level response that is a joke or other type of less meaningful comment.
That said, there are labels for comments: Exemplary, Offtopic, Joke, Noise, Malice. Other than Malice, it is not bad to get any of the other labels. Malice is used for bad actors and should be used sparingly - it notifies the site owner. Exemplary should be used for only the very best of comments and should also be used sparingly. Offtopic, Joke, Noise should be used at will to correctly identify things that are offtopic, jokes, or noise comments, and it is not a mark of dishonour to receive any of those labels.
Final edit: the correct demonym is "Tilderen".
Thank you, that addendum is exactly the kind of thing I want to look out for. Often times there are community practices that are not or could not be put down as hard rules, and it's 'unspoken rules' like these that more easily tripped up new people.
Piggy back off of aphoenix : we don't usually endorse short meme type responses here, such as "first" or "this" or "also his wife" type of old tired jokes -- they're situationally acceptable in less serious threads, or in smaller text (see formatting) alongside a more in-depth response. Some of us also like to hide long rambles inside Spoilerbox.
Typically, video posts don't get a lot of traction, especially if unaccompanied by explanation text comment from OP. When linking to a file or video, I appreciate members who mark it (video) (pdf) so I'm not surprised when I click, but surely not mandatory by any means.
Try to tag your posts, but don't worry if you can't beyond a few, Cfabbro and Mycketforvirrad will be along shortly, and please don't be offended if your choice of tags get changed or reformatted.
Emojis are
less selmonlyseldomly seen herethancompared to kaomoji.What else ...... If you can track down longer original source posts that would be preferred over shorter summary click bait ad filled paywalled sites.
Please also check out Three Cheers for Tildes phone app and Tildes Re-extended for browser experience: they're community made and quite excellent.
Edit: lol selmonly. Also also, if you edit your comment and someone has already responded, maybe use mark ups and edit section like this instead of changing the original text so others can follow the conversation a bit better thanks
To piggyback your piggyback, not just tags. Sometimes titles or entire article links get replaced. Posts are community owned.
The only lowbrow joke I can appreciate here is deciding on a demonym for the user base. I've never repeated one of my suggestions and there's a deep well of terrible names to pull from.
Have you ever used "Tildebeasts"?
👆This!
Click to expand spoiler.
>:D listen here ----Same
Damn, got me by 7 weeks. Were you in the first round of invite codes, or did you have a man on the inside?
I was invited by Deimos in the first week.
As you can tell, only serious conversations are allowed here... Tildoes... Heh heh heh...
We have one admin here, he removes anything high conflict, and there is almost zero tolerance for intolerance.
What happens when Deimos go on vacation? I think we probably have a few users who have been granted different privileges but that's pure speculation on my part.
I think Deimos gets alerted whenever the community tags something with malice. He runs this in addition to his day job, so I don't think vacations factor into it, the only issue would be if he is out of pocket, then it can take him a few days to respond. There were plans to automate this, but it never eventuated. @mycketforvirrad and @cfabbro can edit titles, there are more users who can edit tags, no one else can delete topics, or ban users that I am aware of.
I’m not even sure if Deimos actually exists. I think it’s just a name that gets passed from one person to the next, like the Dread Pirate Roberts.
mycketforvirrad: you can ask Deimos questions on any day you want except Tuesday
cfabbro: why not Tuesday?
mycketforvirrad: because you are Deimos on Tuesday
...a conversation that actually happened... right now... in my head.
We have....Tildes fanfiction?!?
One of the funnest things I've read in recent memory. Still laughing about it. Thank you.
Deims nuts lmao gottem
The first time I've seen "out of pocket" mean "out of contact" vs "inappropriate" in the wild.
I feel like there was a discussion about this but I don't remember if it was here, but out of that context I can't remember hearing/reading it
I've only ever heard "out of pocket" used as a business expense type. as in
"The miserly payroll department wouldn't let me claim for my out of pocket expenses".
Yes that too (more medical expenses), but to describe a person I've only ever heard "he's out of pocket" to mean "that thing he did isn't ok"
After some research the last time this came up, it's partially an American racial language divide influence by the media you watched as a kid too. I'm white but most Black folks will recognize the above phrasing. However I think the "out of touch" is also more a business and tech in particular usage which also makes it more of a regional divide with the tech industry.
This is half remembered and partially an informal survey of my peers so take with a salt cave of salt
I'm with @trim having only heard it used in the "unavailable at the moment" sense.
How fascinating. A linguistic version of "where do you keep your ketchup", which I remember from this episode of the podcast Reply All back in my podcast era.
Yeah I'd first heard that usage in the past two years ish, but I'm in the Midwest, not working in corporate America, and when I did work for a large corporation it didn't come up the few times I visited corporate HQ in Boca (ew). My parents didn't use it, either.
I also watched diverse shows growing up and the "unavailable" usage never came up in media I watched. But "out of pocket" as AAVE has been around a bit.
And of course I went rabbit-holing on this. As a Gen X antique and corporate/legal worker, I'd always heard or used the phrase "out of pocket" to mean someone was unreachable (or with reference to expenses).
This Reddit thread provides the most charmingly plausible (though unprovable) etymology:
Yeah the "expense" use is the oldest, and the "unreachable" is older than the "wild behavior" but it's much more limited IME to corporate culture (and thus folks around that).
I'm going to have to double-check the AAVE etymology meaning wild or unacceptable behavior with my spouse, who paid for college by playing pool...
Yeah I didn't get it from pool, just TV :D (and later just friends and social usage)
ETA I forgot that American football will reference being in and out of a pocket but I think it's pretty separate and just refers to the QB being successfully within the group of defenders.
Ummm excuse me? We're called Tildensians. Just ask around.
Welcome to the party. Assume people argue in good faith, don't be a dick, and you'll be fine!
If all else fails, the website has some reading you could do about the rules. Generally though, people do fine here if they're just kind to each other.
I prefer the term tildoes.
Tildepolitans for me.
and here i thought we were tilderinos!
Tildists! Come on!
You and even this OP is wrong, it's clearly Tildilians.
Tildopes
You say Tildaedoes, I say Tilmaedoes.
I'm 100% a Tildoe.
Excuse me, in the Upper Mount Tildens region, we prefer Tilderanians. But don't ask about the Tilderinos or Tildosians.
Thanks, I read the rules and they all seem pretty reasonable. Though I also wonder if there are anything beyond the rules, like maybe not just what we should avoid but also what we should do more of? Of course the usual practice is to lurk moar and find out but I figured asking anyway shouldn't hurt.
As already mentioned, I would start by posting interesting content in https://tildes.net/~news/1uym/offbeat_fridays_the_thread_where_offbeat_headlines_become_front_page_news or https://tildes.net/~society/1uzu/weekly_us_politics_news_and_updates_thread_week_of_july_6...
Tildes is setup so you can ignore these threads if you want, or if you revisit them Tildes will highlight what is new. So anything that I am unsure about goes in one of those threads.
Aight, it does look like we could use more posts. I'll try to add whatever interesting things I happen to come across when there're chances.
Tilderinos
Tilderiños
Muy caliente, I can back that
Tildenistas
Why not Tildesinos?
Hi-diddly-ho!
Are you calling me a diddly ho?
Were this site not text based, this is where I'd put an image of Ned Flanders greeting you.
Tildren, in keeping with our youthful hijinks?
Tilders (my fave demonym, short and to the point)?
Til-diddly-umplings, because Flanders-isation is always funny?
You're all Tilders to me!
I prefer "members" ='..'=
Hiyoo!
There is also the newly coined "Tidles"
Hey there, I’m balooga. Glad to meet ya! This place is pretty chill unless you catch me on one of my soapbox days. A word of caution: All of us are fae, except for one. She’ll definitely let you know who she is though.
Welcome to Tildes! Always love new faces! I'm Apple, I like writing, video games and eating fellow apples :D
Tildes is fairly chill and laidback. You can check the sidebar at ~tildes for links to some useful links expanding on rules and such, but the main thing to keep in mind is to keep things civil, or more aptly: don't be a jerk. Usually if posts or comments get too heated they'll get deleted, but that's thankfully a fairly rare occurrence. We all try to act in good faith here.
The nice thing above all else: Tildes is a genuine community. Hang around here long enough, and you'll begin to recognize usernames and people. It's a feeling of connection I haven't felt since the days of forums. I hope you get to experience that sense of community here too!
Also, out of curiosity, how do we pronounce your name? Lots of vowels!
Oh no, so I shouldn’t be referring to you as “Cannibal”? Oops.
You are right and they are wrong, and Cannibal_Is_Ticapple is the right way to parse it. I don't know why they are ticapple, or what ticapple is, but that is clearly what the username says.
Like tic tacs . Without tac.
You should not attempt to bite the TiC apple.
Hello Apple! Imagine speaking while being shy and awkward and it would probably sounds like my name :)
I enjoy puzzle games and manga, I don't usually comment much so might just pop up here and there if the topics come up.
Hi uaeaaie! That's a lot of vowels :D any origin stories? Welcome
I guess I'm not new around here anymore :) obligatory https://docs.tildes.net/ and feel free to submit silly news by commenting on our casual Friday reoccuring thread tomorrow
It's shortened from another long-lost username I used to have :p Most news are pretty distressing so there being a place for silly news seems like a great idea!
I've mentioned it previously, but don't have the time right now to hunt down my old comment. If you're a bit burnt out of modern news, you can use filter out topic tags you don't want to see which you can then toggle these filters on and off.
I mainly engage with Tildes as a friendly community outside of things political and/or current news. I added in some filters to help weed out those topics, and it has been fantastic. I'll occasionally disable those filters, but I usually turn them back on in short order.
Also, Tildes gets a lot less traffic than many other sites, so I'd highly encourage you to post things that you find interesting. I post here way more than I did when I was primarily using Reddit.
Edit: fixed grammar as I was typing this real quick.
Hi, I’ve posted lots of links here for many years. This year I used AI to write code to semi-automate it, in case you’re wondering about how the quotes happen. There’s no AI involved in choosing which links to post, though, and I tap each quoted paragraph myself.
All the links I post here are also archived to my personal links website.
There’s a little-used bio on your settings page that I recommend filling in if you want people to remember who you are. It shows up in the sidebar on your profile page.
Interesting! I've always appreciated those article distillations of yours. I'm quite curious how the choice excerpts get selected for the quote... I assume you've got some sort of "Identify the paragraphs which best exemplify the thesis and pertinent details of the text, to use as pull quotes; ensure that the selected excerpts do not exceed n% of the full text length." prompt in there? Would you mind sharing that? Have you ever had it fail and post something malformed or irrelevant?
Where you find your links in the first place? Are you on other link aggregator sites trawling for cool stuff to share? I don't post many links because Tildes is my main home on the web these days, so I seldom come across stuff that isn't already here.
I've been here 8 years and never picked up on that. Guess I don't look at people's profiles very often! I don't have many personal details I want to share with the whole entire internet but I finally added something to mine so it's not just empty. Thanks for the tip.
I wrote a bookmarklet that lets me click or tap paragraphs to select or unselect them. (The software has a pretty generous limit on the amount selected, so it's mostly self-restraint.) Then I save it to to a post on my Links website by pressing a button. (I also wrote a Chrome extension that does the same thing, because some websites block bookmarklets from running.) After it's saved as a post, I can edit it before posting it to Tildes. Since Tildes doesn't have draft topics, this serves as a place to save drafts.
I find the links on various other websites I visit, including blogs that I'm subscribed to using an RSS reader. On most days I will visit Hacker News and Bluesky. I have a bit of an Internet addiction.
Oh nice, I assumed the AI was doing the quotes for you but it just wrote the JS so you can pick them yourself. Slick!
Fascinating!
What architectural choices did you make? E.g. Go & Sqlite on a digital ocean droplet? Python & MySQL on a more traditional hosting provider? Pregenerated html with an apache?
It's hosted on exe.dev, which is a fairly new startup that I highly recommend for hobbyist-level hosting. For $20/month you get multiple Linux VM's and some AI credits that you can use with their coding agent. They have quite a few LLM's you can try and they add new ones fairly quickly after they're announced. You can buy more usage though them, but it's at API prices, so it can be fairly expensive depending on which LLM you use.
To try it out, I asked it to vibe-code a personal links website, not intending to use it much. It wrote something that was bare-bones but worked, using Go and Sqlite by default. A bit later I asked it to do a rewrite using Deno since I'm more comfortable in TypeScript, and it snowballed from there. There's quite a bit of UI that you can't see on the admin-only pages.
I was spending quite a bit of money on Claude for a while while adding various features to the website, then tried out Chinese LLM's to save money. Recently I connected my ChatGPT subscription to my exe.dev account, which seems to give me more-or-less unlimited GPT-5.5 usage. (There are three-hour limits but I never hit them.) So at $40/month total for both subscriptions, it seems like a pretty good deal.
Edit: turns out ChatGPT has a weekly limit that I didn’t know about. (it’s in settings -> usage).
Interesting! So are you using openclaw or codex or something else to vibe code?
I’m using Shelley, which is a coding agent written by the folks at exe.dev.
Hi! I came to the site on an invite from somebody close to the boss and while it didn't take right away, I came to really enjoy Tildes after watching other platforms abandon the social side of it.
Great community, thoughtful people. You get to know the usernames and it passes the time in waiting rooms. Great for 40 year olds ;)
Welcome new people!
Tildes is a wonderful corner of the internet. The humans here are some of the most thoughtful and interesting people you could hope to meet!
My addition to the advice thing is, sometimes tildes will ebb and flow. There are days, or weeks, where there are either too many threads and comments to read, or very few.
When I first joined I thought the periods of down time might be signs of the site dying, and the activity signs of growth.
But it's just like that! I got used to it and I enjoy the very organic feel to it. You can see the community actually buzz around a few topics and the activity around it. It's not reddit, insta or TikTok where you'll get basically infinite scroll every day!
Some have said this too. I think it's in the rules. But there's a culture of not commenting unless you have something to add too. Which can be weird coming from other social media.
I read a lot of the life and support threads and will comment if I can, but many of them I don't feel like I can add to, either because someone else has already posted an excellent reply or I just don't have the knowledge or experience to give good advice.
Anyway, hope you like your stay!
Hello and welcome to Tildes! (ᴗ͈ˬᴗ͈)ꕤ.ﾟ
I'm both Tildes-ancient and old, so it's wonderful to see a new person interested in what we have to offer.
Think of the place as a little like the "Stone Soup" story. It starts simple, but we all bring a little something and it quickly becomes a rich and delicious melange of people's knowledge, opinions, and experience. You don't have to make every post its own essay, just contribute a bit when you can, with thought and intent.
One caution that often comes up, and could stand a more explicit framing. Don't post the text of entire articles. Fair-use excerpts are fine. Tildes is obliged to operate under Canadian copyright law. Copyright actions are a source of stress and expense that isn't bearable for a shoestring, one admin operation. [If you love Tildes and you're able, please feel free to donate. There's no algorithmic engagement for ads and data monetization here, Deimos isn't going to flip the site for billions, and it's not free to run servers.]
That being said, you may, at your own risk, post an archive or other link to otherwise paywalled or restricted content. Archive links are a courtesy to encourage reading the source material for a discussion, not something you're obligated to provide. People can become very opinionated about including archive links. However, there are also artists, writers, and others here who rely on royalties and payments. You're entitled to your own ethical stance about this.
I have now flexed my creaky writing standards enough to post my first kaomoji. /u/chocobean and /u/DefinitelyNotAFae are among my favorite bad influences, and we could all take lessons.
✧◝(⁰▿⁰)◜✧
Is Canadian copyright law stricter than US? Seeing that there aren't many episode/chapter discussion threads in ~anime, I wonder if there is any restriction to posting links to fan translations.
IANAL, so I can't give you a definitive answer. Generally, posting links to external sites is acceptable...
I mostly lurk around and post on occasions, though I'm using/posting on Tildes again more often nowadays.
A general rule of thumb is that unlike on Reddit for example, "low effort" posts are to be avoided here.