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The four best Reddit alternatives: As Reddit melts down, users are fleeing to lemmy, kbin, tildes and more
https://lifehacker.com/the-four-best-reddit-alternatives-1850562547
Tildes scores a mention:
Tildes
Tildes is another website trying to be the new Reddit. It’s still in an invite-only alpha stage, so you’ll need to ask somebody for an invite.
Tildes is not federated, so there’s only one place to sign up. And it has yet another name for its communities: They are, of course, tildes. (A tilde is the “~” character, and in the old old Internet, a lot of personal web pages had a tilde at the start of their names, a continuation of an even earlier tradition.) On Tildes.net, each tilde can have tags, so there is ~health and it contains the tag “fitness.”
How to sign up for Tildes: Find someone who has a tildes account, and ask for an invite.
Because they're not really doing a deep dive into each site to see what they're about or what their culture is beyond enough for a small blurb. They're seeing these sites being named across Reddit as alternatives and threw a blog post together. I doubt they read many comments or posts here.
I also doubt they went here.
I read the article and it's like they're explaining what each of the websites is but in a sense, not explaining it at all. It's very weird, I feel like an AI was asked to describe each website.
Exactly. People were talking about AI text here on Tildes because the comments are just too good to be true, but this right here is what AI text is really like right now. It's great at a quick brush, a short summary, but it will lack insight, and process context switching... poorly.
Reddit was a lot of things but at it's core, it's a forum of forums. That definitely is what Tildes aims to be.
Replicating social character of Reddit isn't a goal here, but that's also somewhat out of the admins hands. Right now they control it as the user count is small and they're the primary moderator. But if the site ever grows popular, then site character will develop on it's own. Admins can steer the ship with features, but they can't really control how people ultimately want to use the tech.
Don't want to be too pedantic, but at its core it's a link aggregator. it didn't have a forum to discuss in for the first few years.
Then there is also the modern "core" that the admins clearly want to drive the site towards, which feels a lot more like an imageboard with a forum feature attached to it.
It started as one, but there's just as much content generated by user posts as there are links. You cannot say it's simply a link aggregator when text posts are so prevalent.
I as an individual agree with you. I think the admins these days are out to try and prove you wrong, however.
I’m curious what makes you say that ?
Doubly so once it's a one-click install on a VPS. Deimos isn't interested in making that happen, though, because it doesn't benefit this site and right now that's the priority with his limited time. Nice to haves for other websites are at the bottom of the list.
If we make sure the mod tools kick ass, and that the 'group' is the 'user' of the software - not the individual - I think it'll do some good out there.
They're called groups, not tildes. So the author clearly didn't do much research, or reach out to Deimos via the press@tildes email address before writing this.
Reddit is a link aggregator, and Tildes is a link aggregator. They are the same kind of website. Tildes is no more similar to Reddit than Hacker News or Lobsters or even Lemmy, though; they're all link aggregators. It's once you look past that that the (many) differences emerge.
Also, Tildes was set up by a former Reddit employee based on the things he didn't like about Reddit and its culture, so I think it's fair to say Tildes is trying to be a better version of Reddit in some sense. Maybe not "the new Reddit".
Because everything about this website screams "Reddit" in spite of the denial of the more prominent users.
You can cite Deimos' ethos and the site rules and suggestions all you want but
this place demands comparison to Reddit.
I think the objections to those comparisons are more about comparing it to the culture and format of modern Reddit. It's undeniable that the format of Tildes is near identical. However, compared to modern Reddit, it doesn't have user-created groups (one of the, if not the major draws of Reddit), doesn't directly support images, is designed to avoid facilitating useless noise comments and posts, isn't meant to hold your attention for hours, doesn't have a mobile app on purpose, etc.
When you get into the semantics of it, sure. This place could be considered a "Reddit alternative". However, I feel like it's a bad idea to message it as such to newer users throughout this whole exodus, because I feel like it gives the idea that this is another place to come and doomscroll for hours, upvoting memes and getting into quarrels. And I feel like that messaging has lead to a number of users coming here expecting something else, and then suggesting that Tildes add all of these things that were deliberately left out and misunderstanding the established culture here.
Part of the reason i got some comfortable so fast here is because it felt and also looked like old reddit. A lot of people talk about the toxic and repetitive culture on Reddit, but when i joined reddit a decade ago i saw, and read in depth discussions, just like i do here now.
I haven't been to Reddit since the blackout, but my interactions were through old.reddit and RiF exclusively. Sure there were image and video posts still, but they weren't auto playing in tiles like reddit or their native app.
To me, Tildes feels more like a slightly expanded version of HN (topically) than Reddit.
The only "problem" I have with Tildes is that sometimes I want to "check my brain at the door" and look at something silly, but that's not really Tildes' fault.
I just need to find a place that satisfies that need.
There's a few things I'd wish for on tildes too, but I understand the site's direction and community isn't necessarily rushing towards that (or at all, in a few other cases). I feel most of those would be solved as the site gets more active. I just hope the moderation can keep up.
It 'demands' comparison to Reddit in the same way Redit demands comparison to 4chan. they are both these days anonymous imageboards with a variety of groups and quality of comments that go all over the spectrum.
But I think you need to describe more than the core functionality to really "understand" what a site and their core communities are. Just like how there are commonplace actions on 4chan that you wouldn't get away with on 99% of Reddit, there are commonplace actions on Reddit that are not welcome here. And that shapes a community's identity more than anything (feel free to consult Voat or Gab for examples). This site could re-design itself to look like 4chan tomorrow, but it certainly wouldn't feel like 4chan.
Usenet was v1. Reddit was v2. If we are all very very lucky, Tildes might get a shot at being v3.
I still believe decentralization is V3, even if alternatives as ActivityPub or Nostr are still in development.
I think that's v4. v1 was decentralized and eternal september ate it alive. v3 is the first 'node' of a v4 that can self-sustain its community without falling back into noise all the time. Hopefully someday we'll have lots of other Tildes nodes out there to play with. Solve the moderation problem and perhaps when they federate they'll be more apt to stay that way instead of fragmenting into 2-5 angry silos like Lemmy and Mastodon did.
I'm not sure federation can ever avoid fragmenting into at least a few different silos if the option exists.
I think it might be split generally into one for kids and one for adults, as those two don't tend to get much overlapping areas of interest. The juvenile forum, and the 'serious business' forum. I can't see much value in trying to integrate them, either. I'd expect most nodes to line up with each other on either side of that major division.
It's already more than that. Beehaw dedeferated from lemmy.world given problems they saw there. Alt-right instances have been blocked by the other Lemmy instances. Several instances have already blocked lemmygrad and there's at least been some desire by users to block lemmy.ml to avoid the tankies.
Seems like some political leanings and groups that don't want to deal with each other will cause some splits as well.
I'm not sure if the moderation problem can be solved. At least not without some financial incentive. Like any other front facing job, it's a very thankless one that exposes you to the worst of human nature. It's hard enough finding someone who wants to be paid to do that outside of some very young folk wanting any sort of money (likely as a part time gig). I don't know how many quality moderators want to go into that unpaid, for potentially part or full time.
This too. Lemmy and kbin are the same type of forum as Reddit. I've been active on Lemmy since the blackout. The difference is the Fediverse, but they're functionally mostly the same.
Pretty lame list when it doesn't have squabbles.io which is 1000x more relevant an option than Discord.
Discord is a chat service not a message board. The ephemeral nature of it is why it can never replace Reddit, or any other hub of information.
Discord has forum channels as an option as of 2022. Still, not including Squabbles seems lame.
I run a Discord server using the forums feature. It's really not the same. The whole application UI is designed around short messages. Forums are designed more like posting letters to each other.
Yeah. I use the forums on Discord more to organize topics, mainly chat for specific movies and media where we don't have to worry about spoiling people who haven't seen/read it yet. They're basically hyper-specific mini-channels, just more easily organized and accessed than threads.
At least for some, it seems to be close enough. I know my kids are using that but don't touch other web forums or Reddit. It may not be what some of us think of as the same but does seem to be enough for some of the youth.
Yeah it fulfills a purpose that Reddit fulfilled for people and that forums fulfilled for the generation before that and what Usenet did for the generation before that.
I'm actually much more comfortable with the idea of my kid spending a lot of time on Discord than on Reddit to be honest. Provided you can vet what kinds of communities they're in I find it can be much less toxic.
That's only one way to look at it. People looking at discord as an alternative are considering the community aspect above all else. They want a seemless hub where they can create or join specific communities and gather a decent population of users to engage with.
No other reddit alternative as of now does that as well as Discord at the moment. Sacrificing archival purposes is just that, a compromise at worst and maybe even a feature at best. There's definitely been enough examples of why you may not always want your random comments to be immortalized in the google search engine, and it's less hassle to avoid that than to invoke Right To Be Forgotten
So much knowledge is wrapped up in reddit that to call Discord's lack of archiving a feature means you have no idea what makes Reddit important and hard to replace.
I'm simply saying that people value different things. What may be important for you is Google-ability. What others may want is simply a place to browse pictures or ask questions (because they aren't going to search nor read the sidebar). Discord replaces some of those reddit features for some users.
The problem with squabbles is that we don't know where it will go if it gets big. I like the site but I think it might be a Reddit 2.0 waiting to happen. It's closed source and the dev can take the first sell offer he will get, maybe not, maybe he is the savior of the forum like software. We don't know and that's why I'm reluctant to invest a lot of time in it.
This is what's keeping me away from any of the "mainstream" alternatives right now. I don't want to fall into that trap again. I've experienced a lot less toxicity, clickbait, ragebait, etc. since I deleted my reddit account. I don't want to jump into something similar with the potential of reintroducing that nonsense to my life.
Just one week after quitting reddit and moving over to Tildes has done wonders for my mental health. I always knew how toxic Reddit could be but really struggled to leave.
I am so glad to have Tildes as an alternative. I mean, ACTUAL discussions happen here. THOUGHTFUL discussions. Reddit is just nasty and often makes me feel worse about life. So I'm kind of thankful that it's imploding.
Whenever I get a comment here I'm genuinely excited to read what it is because I know it'll be worth reading. The last time I was able to do that on a large public subreddit was probably over 5 years ago.
It's hard to put into words how much I missed being able to be kind online and get kindness in return. I thought I'd have to stick to private discords for that exclusively.
Yeah I basically went into 'read only mode' on Reddit when I realized that any time I saw that orange envelope it gave me a sense of "Oh jeez what moron is picking a fight with me this time?" instead of "Oooh a letter!"
Really glad to see so many fewer comments asking me to join the discord lol. I kid though, glad to see you over here making better comments
Oh at some point long ago I made the active choice to use reddit to post just utter dogshit. It's a habit better left in the past. Much like reddit.
I kind of miss the metareddit of old but the magic has been gone for years. I learned a lot about how to manage communities, how to spot trolls, but that chapter of my life is long since closed. I just simply don't have the energy for circlebroke type things anymore. The energy I have is limited and its better spent on anything other than hating.
I would still be interested in a tildes users discord though. I think people here would generally be very nice to get along with in a chat format.
It has been tried. It did not work out well and stoked a ton of drama on the site due to the formation of cliques and out-of-band gossip.
ah. Yeah that's the classic discord group problem isn't it? Moderating chat is really damn hard. You kinda have to embrace the conflict because if your group is over like, 10 people in size at least 2 people are gonna dislike each other.
It was more like the Discord became a place for backchannel gossip about discussions happening on the site, talking about members behind their backs, and overall just festering resentment towards the site and various people in it.
lol, I think a little bit of levity is fine. Gotta stay grounded somehow.
I wouldn't mind Squabbles but the layout, last I checked, wasn't great. To be honest, I'm not huge on Lemmy or Kbin either.
Yes, the dev can sell the source off but even if it were open source, he can still sell the site off regardless. Sure, if it's open source, you can fork the code just like some did with the old Reddit code but we see how those turned out.
With things like Lemmy, if one instance goes away or is being sold off, there are thousands of other instances you can pick from. If they implement things like export/import profile as Mastodon does, it will take you 1-2 clicks and you can teleport your whole profile to the next instance.
True. With Lemmy, I also want to avoid the software altogether given the devs. Some may be fine with that. I'd rather go with Kbin at that point or just stick to Tildes and a few other places.
Honestly from my experience it already seems to just be a reddit 2.0. The only difference between it and reddit is that its run by different people, and the admins tend to moderate less, leading to quite a few alt-righters joining.
moderate less? Have they SEEN reddit? the problem with reddit is not enough moderation, not too much. Staying far away then.
Seriously. Discord is not a good option at all for a reddit replacement. It's not even trying at all to be something even similar. it's a chat room, not a message board.
I've really been enjoying Squabbles, I divide my time primarily between here and Squabbles, I got my invite to here from a Squabbles user. It is much smaller in population than Lemmy/Kbin and the users there have also been very adamant that they do not want to be the next Reddit. Their enrollment has really slowed down, currently at almost 20,000 users.
So far I think Squabbles and here will be where I go instead of reddit. Lemmy is just too confusing/annoying to me (granted I didn't give it a long try but that tends to be a quick turn off. It's also why I never got into Twitter).
I spend a little bit of time on Lemmy, mostly because it has app support and Tildes and Squabbles don't have a full app, yet. I'm worried that the major Lemmy instances are going to end up just as toxic as Reddit, especially with how hyper fixated people are on the platform, which is bound to attract a less than enjoyable group of people.
well the nice thing about this site is it isn't too bad to use even without an app on mobile. So it would be nice to have an app but it's not too bad without it.
To be honest I think the only thing an app would provide that just browsing online doesn't is being able to quickly jump back into things. It's convenient to have an app hold your place in the comments section. I've thought about just figuring out a simple way to wrap tildes.net in a web view and have links open externally, because that and maybe notifications for replies are all I care about.
FYI, opening external links in a new tab automatically is something you can enable in your settings.
Oh yeah, I agree. I have a web icon on the home screen of my phone that I'm using as we speak.
also, they already have a pretty good app, so they're ahead of the competition. (jerboa is not that good)
The app is read only at the moment, but it is looking good so far.
actually looks like there several WIP apps, and Tiff for Squabbles announced an open beta with login support, I'm using it right now and it's pretty good only downside I see is that the font size is a bit small and the scrolling is also a bit laggy
Pulse scrolls fine for me, but still has a way to go to be useful as it is read only currently.
yes pulse is fine, I was talking about Tiff which supports login
Cool, I guess. Not sure how much it matters though. It's much cooler IMO when Tildes is mentioned in reddit threads where people are fed up with the state of Reddit because it's reaching people that actually might join for good reasons.
Also, I know this post is meant to highlight the Tildes mention, but I have to say that the push to the fedeverse by Reddit users is kind of dumb. It might work for a bit, but the general public is not ready for federated websites. It's still too clunky and confusing for the average internet user. Also why Mastodon didn't really make serious gains on Twitter when Elon took over there despite people desperately wanting an alternative. I'm all for a decentralized future to help avoid censorship and ownership over all public spaces. But it's not there yet despite some gains in accessibility being made in the last couple years.
I found this article on Reddit, and figured I'd share it here - to show how Tildes is being described out in the big wide world.
Yeah. It's interesting to see, I suppose. Not trying to say it's not worth sharing. I do like that people are more serious about sharing reddit alternatives on that site now though.
The Fediverse having enough friction to keep much of the general public out might prove to be a feature rather than a bug. What has the “general public” ever done for us but upvote lazy memes and pun threads?
I mean, maybe. But it's being billed as a Reddit alternative and a place for the masses to go. If that's the case, you take the good with the bad. Most people want something big like Reddit and want the same discussions and information to carry over to any new site (like what happened with the Digg exodus to Reddit back in the day). Small communities like Tildes are great, but it's not what a lot of people looking for alternatives want.
How many people who used Reddit actually liked everything about Reddit though? There are entire subreddits on Reddit, often hosting some of the site's most active users, dedicated to snarking on other Redditors and ruminating about how much they hate the site. I would think of an alternative as an alternative way/place to spend your time and not as a drop-in replacement for functionality.
Think of a community where a WalMart Supercenter shuts down. You probably don't want to waste your time just looking for another WalMart. You might prefer going to CostCo, which isn't really the same at all, but still scratches your desire to get anything you want at a low price. Or, alternatively, maybe you'd prefer to go to a collection of different Mom & Pop shops and no longer expect to get groceries, home goods, hardware, and clothes all in one place but end up preferring the more personal touch and better tailored offerings of a bunch of local specialists.
I think a lot of people want the overall reddit experience even if they complain about it. People want a one stop shop for tech support, a knowledge base on anything they can think of, reviews of products, and news about politics, gaming, sports, and everything else all on one site.
I like small communities like Tildes and prefer stuff like this. But honestly, I see the appeal in searching for something on Google and having a bunch of results from one site like Reddit where I know people will have asked a similar question to me about an issue I'm having.
Yeah I agree people want it, but I'd say it's in a similar way that I want to drink heavily without having a hangover, or I want to have lots of free parking in my city while still having a walkable downtown. Some desires are inherently in conflict with each other and people tend not to be great at optimizing for overall satisfaction or long-term well being when there's a quick dopamine hit to be had by doing something else.
We lose some stuff when we lose the scale for sure, and that's a shame. I've said before that the vibrancy of subs like /r/AskHistorians went down a lot as Reddit crappified because I think a lot of the good people who used to post there stopped browsing Reddit. But I don't know if that can be replicated today. Online culture has changed and there are just more bots, more normalized trolling, etc. So we can recreate the functionality, but I don't think we can roll the clock back to the cultural milieu that made a lot of the good parts possible.
I don't entirely disagree with you. That said, that 90-9-1 stat that I've seen thrown around... does it actually matter if the majority of the userbase (ie. lurkers) doesn't migrate? The general public can stay on reddit with the bots and ads, but if the contributing communities actually move (which is a big if), is that a big loss?
Only the people who create the content and comments matter. If you get them, you get the rest, because without them, the rest get bored fast and stop coming back. One doesn't need all of reddit's hundred million users. One just needs a slice of reddit's 1% - the content creators. Exactly the kinds of people reddit loves to marginalize lately.
I think it depends on what the purpose of the alternative site is. If they're trying to be the new Reddit and don't get enough people to come over, then a lot of the people who do move over will eventually get bored and they'll have a content problem. People want to move away from Reddit as the defacto community site online.
If people don't leave Reddit it still stays as the 9. With Facebook et al as the 90.
hm ? it does have upvote and downvote buttons, you just need to be logged in to see them
So far here and Squabbles have the been the easiest places to use. I just scrll and read and comment with ease. The fediverse feels opposed to UI., or any type of user QoL.
I am going to need a NSFW home. :( I enjoyed Reddit being once place for all of me and my interests.
I feel like as soon as you add pictures, the level of engagement drops. You see, you snicker, you scroll. It's actually interesting as a site though and seems to have some traction. Will continue to see how it develops.
NSFW would be a great addition, but somehow if we can keep the sellers (onlyfans) on Reddit! Tildes could be like original Reddit a safe place to share and build confidence and self esteem (the original intent).
I never saw anyone calling "groups" tildes. Is that a new thing?
Back in the Old Days, some people wanted to call groups "tildes". It was never official, though. Deimos had already created the website, with the naming convention that they were "groups".
However, to this day, some people call groups "tildes", because:
they honestly think that's what they're called, or;
they think that's what they should be called, or;
they're just being lightly humorous.
I suspect the author of this article falls into the first category.
Oh that’s interesting. I always assumed the groups were tildes, since they have a tilde character in front of them.
At least on the frontpage below the post, like on this one it says “~tech”. So tech is a group, or tilde, and the site has many groups, so logically it is tildes. Is that really not intentional?
Here are Deimos' thoughts about the name in the Tildes documentation. However, in that page, he doesn't directly address the issue of what he decided to call the individual spaces on the Tildes website, or why he chose that name.
And... after spending about 15 minutes trawling through old topics in ~tildes, specifically looking for an answer to this question... I found this relevant comment by The God of Tildes Himself (back in May 2018):
cc: @lou
But what does Deimos think about some of us calling Tildes users Tilderinos?
Saw that one a few times in the Valheim server...
I don't recall him ever speaking on the subject.
If he does think thats bad then i wonder what he thinks about "tildos" lol
Related, did we ever land on how we refer to users? Personally I say “tilderino” because I’m not into the whole brevity thing.
Nope.
You might remember those censuses/surveys we had in the early years, one of which included a question about what demonym people on Tildes wanted for themselves. In case you don't remember the results:
Since then, everyone has just used their own personal preference, from "users" to "tildoes", and everything in between. I haven't observed any particular name being more popular than any other. Most people just call us "users" - which I personally think is boring. But it is what it is.
Tildoes! Hmm I like that one. I think it rhymes with something, though I can't exactly recall. it's as if it's in the tip of my tongue.
It rhymes with "dildoes". Deliberately. Some bright spark came up with it, in the Old Days. It's very clever, and extremely cringeworthy.
How about "tildren"? Anybody? No? Ok.
Five years on tildes and this is the first one I like!
Actually... just this once... I think I agree with you. "Tildren" does have a nice ring to it.
I have not seen that one around. I believe that's original with you!
Originally bad ideas are a real specialty of mine, I'm sorry to report. But I'm good for a guffaw now and again, at least.
If you're German it would be Tilder.
In the same way that. . .
. . .no matter how kind your child is German children are kinderI actually really like this one! I have always favored tilderinos or tildestrians, but I think I’ll switch to tildren.
I'm more of a "les enfants tilde" person, myself ;)
"What about the Tildren? Won't anyone think about the Tildren!" was low hanging fruit. :)
Actually, "tildren" is growing on me. But we need a singular version: one ______, many tildren.
I'm thinking "tilder" fits the bill: one tilder, many tildren.
There is no singular, for we are inseparable. Uncountable, even.
“How much Tildren is there on Tildes?”
Even an uncountable indivisible substance has a singular unit of measurement: weight has the gram, fluid has the litre, and so on. So, we'd need a unit of Tildren: "There are 20,000 litres of water in the tank." becomes "There are 20,000 ______ of Tildren on Tildes."
Tillions? Tiltres? Tildres? Tildings?
"There are 20,000 tillions of Tildren on Tildes."
"There are 20,000 tiltres of Tildren on Tildes."
...
But I still like "tilder/tildren", which corresponds to "brother/brethren" and "sister/sistren".
Tile/Tiles? Kind of fits the imagery of many tiles making the Tildes logo.
I like the idea of a demonym that has nothing to do with the name of the site or the concept of users. Something like one of the collective nouns for animals (e.g. flock of geese, parliament of owls).
That's nice, but how would it work in practice?
"Lots of ________ enjoy reading articles in ~news."
"I've heard that ________ have no sense of humour."
"Us ________ are great!"
What would you fill the gaps with?
Could be anything, in the same way university students can be referred to by their sports mascots. So we'd need a Tildes mascot that seems emblematic of the site's vibe. It would have to be something prone to fussing over minor details while ignoring important things happening around it I think.
Not you, too!
https://tildes.net/~tildes/search?q=mascot
Hmph. I think I'm going to choose not to be insulted! ;)
You know what, one of those suggestions in your search reminded me of a toy someone gifted to my kid.
I could get behind that as the unofficial mascot. We can be inchworms, I guess.
Tildworms… Wormdes… probably going to stick with boring Users in my head.
I love the word loam. It's related to soil, which is where worms live. And, given the site community's penchant for niggling over linguistic and categorical details perhaps he can be named Loam Chomsky.
Caterpillars. Totally wins the mascot race. :)
And each group would then be a. . . "pillar of the community"
Literal LOL! I love it!
My vote is on Ditors. Or maybe ~ditors.
I'd like to know more about this tradition
My guess would be that the author is referencing how home folders have worked on Linux and other Unix-based systems for a while. You can use a ~ as a shortcut for your home directory, so if I go to ~/music it would have different content than if you went to the same directory, because when I type it I'm actually going to /home/myusername/music but you'd be going to /home/yourusername/music instead.
Could be something else, though, just a guess!
There’s actually a second way to use a ~, e.g., ~user will bring you to /home/user (at least, in BASH).
This why a lot of university professors’ course sites (hosted as some part of their login) look like this (…. I’ve always assumed, anyways)
What's a bit interesting is why the tilde glyph in particular is used to denote 'home' on Unix/Linux systems. If you believe Wikipedia, it's due to the commonality of the Lear Siegler's 1976 ADM-3A mainframe terminal, whose keyboard layout placed the tilde on the Home key.
Extensive researchGoogle Images shows that ADM-3A keyboards do indeed have a ~/Home key, but whether this is indeed the source or just a coincidence isn't clear.(And as a side note to the side note, the way you do textual strikethroughs in CommonMark is with tildes. So there's another use for you.)
The Tildes Site Design doc talks about some of the history of the tilde symbol:
The first couple of instances that come to mind for me are:
There used to be a number of websites that would offer people free web space, sometimes with the condition that the host would be allowed to inject a code to show a display ad at the bottom of the page or something.
A decent amount of those assigned user spaces urls with a tilde like this, so for example I could choose the name codefrog and end up with whatever HTML pages I create under a directory like
http://pages.tripod.com/~codefrog/.Indeed, my first ever published web pages were on such a site in the late 90's.
I also used to often see the same pattern with personal spaces on college and university websites. Professors publishing whatever they were interested or working on, and occasionally students.
It's also common for universities to provide basic webspace to its students and differentiate the users via tildes. Back in the old days, it was a lot more common for students to actually use that webspace for stuff (my university provides it to this day, including FTP for upload). Thus, to share your awesome creation, you would share a link to http://my-university.edu/~myusername/awesome.html or something like that. The original Google paper is still hosted on Stanford University Webspace via user ~backrub (the original name for Google), but I assume that is for archival purposes.
I assume back in the day, early versions of everything that came out of a university was hosted on university webspace before it grew too big. Maybe the first version of Facebook was http://harvard.edu/~mzuckerberg/facemash.html or something like that.
That google paper is a trip to read. Especially Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives criticizing ads in search engines.
That’s cuz everything back then was running on some flavour of Unix. Unix home directories are usually /home/<username> but you can use ~<username> as the shortcut.
Certainly, but do you think it really was a straight 1:1 mapping of directories to the path of the URL or was there some form of virtualization going on? Maybe they just kept the convention to make it simpler to understand from the perspective of the underlying UNIX system
Many disagree Discord as an alternative but over the years I have already seen younger generation starting from Discord than Reddit, compared to how people moved from forums to social agregators.
Been 10 days clean off Reddit and landed on Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon and Tildes.
I'm using kbin as my mindless scroller but it often is slow and I hate not being able to hide submissions. I love clearing up my feed, at least I can block 'magazines'. If they can nail down the speed it's a decent alternative.
Tildes has been great when I want to sit and read actually good discussion without [much] bickering.
Tildes is my favorite and Kbin a close second. There's one called Discuit that looks really promising and is really snappy that I hope takes off as I like it more than Squabbles but it is pretty bare bones at the moment
Exciting times for content aggregation
Melt down… what meltdown. Seems like Reddit is more or less back to normal. If anything, they’ve made it more IPO-friendly.
There's still the pending 7/1 lack of 3rd party apps that hasn't hit yet. There may still be an eventual removal of old.reddit.com as well.