I'm not sure what would be best to do with groups going forward, but what I can provide you is this data point from my perspective: I am using the Ignore Post feature waaaay more since the big influx of Reddit refugees.

On top of that, I'm wishing there were an Ignore Subthread feature where I could "chop off" a branch of discussion (including all children, present or future), without totally Ignore-Post-ing the whole post away. An example of where this could be used would be ask/survey posts where the top level comments are whole subtopics unto themselves.

Not in response to your numbered questions, but in general:

1. Thank you for all of this. It feels like a bit of a haven.
2. I am convinced you, cfabbro and mycketforvirrad are just sentient LLM, and that somehow I'm ok with my new overlords.
3. I have donated some cups of coffee to the effort.
4. Fellow CANADIAN!
5. I think logged out users should just get an "everything / front page" view. I prefer opt-out to opt-in, only because it lets people experience/decide what they are actually opting out of. It's like setting up a computer for the first time and changing your settings to suit you.

First of all, thank you Deimos for all the work you've done out in the open and behind the scenes the past few years. I think a lot of users are discovering once again the appeal of smaller, more thoughtful internet communities thanks in no small part to the foundation you've laid here. Here's hoping we can maintain and continue to attract users at sustainable rates, so that we don't see activity slowly peter out here again.

As to the actual questions you raise here, my opinions would be as follows:

1. A resounding yes that this is an experiment that should be tried. I think its clear from following a lot of the discussions here that people want to have smaller community spaces where they can feel more at ease posting about their niche topics. I've seen multiple posts over the last few days expressing a desire to post about their interest, but feeling that they could not since there was no group that seemed relevant enough to post in. I'd argue that isn't actually a barrier and that people should post anyway, but nonetheless if that is stopping people from posting then it is worth experimenting with. A separate yet relevant point is that having more independent groups can do a lot to break up the homogeneity of the site I think. I think having a more independent (just for example) ~lgbt group could do a lot to make it a more attractive community for lgbt users who might be considering joining. With the current structure, it can feel a lot more like a lgbt sub-forum on a tech forum, for example.

2. I think it makes sense for logged out users to see something similar to what we have now, like an "all activity" page. Perhaps it can be curated to like the 5 most active groups or something along those lines. I know this is similar to Reddit, but I think that aspect of the Reddit model actually worked. Its nice for logged out users (especially people gauging whether they might want to join) to have a general overview of the types of content here.

3. For logged in users, I think ideally this could be a user setting. I know I would have a hard time adjusting to having to view groups individually, but I suppose it could be a worthwhile experiment. I wouldn't mind it so much if I had a way to view a "grouped together" activity page when I wanted to. Sometimes I just want to see what people on the site are talking about more generally.

4. For existing users I don't see the harm in having people opt-out of the existing groups to curate their experience more. I wouldn't go the route of pre-subscribing based on activity since that may inhibit people branching out, at least initially. There's probably no wrong answer here.

I'll just add too that I think this would be a great time to get a discussion going about new groups (maybe in a separate post). It's clear from the past few days that there's a huge appetite in the community to change up the group structure a bit, which makes sense considering that the current set of groups was more or less chosen for a completely different userbase. I'd personally be very interested in getting one or two more sub-groups going, to demonstrate the viability of the hierarchical group structure we have here. I also think have some dynamism here would energize the new users, as it would demonstrate that Tildes can and does adapt to new users.

I would maybe pump the brakes on making any drastic changes to the site until it’s certain these people are actually gonna stay around for long

While I'm definitely into more groups, and more independent ones, I also have to bring up something that I'm not sure where I would side on it:

Not allowing groups for individual things. This means you can have a ~baseball, but not ~Yankees. You could have ~television, but not ~breakingbad. You could have ~tabletop, but not ~dnd. It feels like by making sure there are no specific-interest groups, but more generalized, it'll discourage tribalism to a considerable degree.

Of course, this is me thinking out loud and like I said, I'm not sure where I stand on it. It feels like an idea worth talking about, though.

Also obviously with that would mean no brand-specific groups, etc.

So I'm one of your many Reddit Refugees, and the idea of more specific groups feels like a natural next step towards a growing site. You can still keep broad, default groups for logged-out folks, and let niche groups dive deep into their interests at the same time. Being able to opt-out of default groups is nice too -- I like most of the topics being discussed, but I'm not interested in sports, so turning that off was a benefit.

My time on reddit was, far and away, browsing content related to Magic the Gathering. I've had some great interactions with folks within the Tabletop Games weekly thread, but it feels inappropriate for me to, say, make a deep-dive post discussing the deck I played at my local tournament last week, since that isn't relevant to the bulk of users here. But if there was an opt-in group when I could post it to? I'd feel at home.

Hell yes. Cultivate a little chaos and let's see where this goes.

Discussions are about to get larger and noisier. Let's add the delta mechanic and see if it can help. That's an improvement to the conversation we know works from /r/changemyview. They don't need to do anything other than be a delta count on a comment - let's see if the concept of 'this comment changed my mind' stands on its own and worry about the rest later. It's easy to add as a label and it may help with the signal to noise problem we're going to see when all of those folks start moving over here.

I'm one of the reddit refugees, but I think I understand the intention behind Tildes and how it differs from other sites. Its something I wholeheartedly support and I would love to help the community grow while protecting its core DNA.

I echo the desire for being able to participate in discussion around my local city (Vancouver, BC) without polluting the global postspace. But I also would be wary of going down the path of distinct subcommunities, as I worry it would be too fracturing for a space like this.

Additonally, I feel like post "merging" would be a nice addition as the activity levels starts to rise. I'm an experienced python developer, and if I can find a way to get the Tildes VM to build on my M1 mac one of these days, I'd love to contribute something like this!

I think there are too many groups, and that this can cause some mild anxiety about "am I posting in the right place?" and that fewer groups would help with that. More, but smaller, groups tends not to help those conversations happen. It tends to mean that OP tries to get a few discussions started, has almost no engagement, and then gives up. And they don't know if those convos failed because the site isn't interested in those discussions, or if there just wasn't enough traffic for them. I feel like some social media sites die because they fragment the userbase too soon - Imzy is a great example.

The benefit of a smaller number of groups is that it's easier for a benign controller to monitor the culture of those groups. I'd really hate for a niche topic group to exist and to allow eg slurs to be routinely used, developing a culture that's at odds with Tildes.

The disadvantage is that some topics feel like a poor fit for the existing groups, and people may not want to flood those groups with a weekly discussion about their particular topic. (But I'd say we have the tools for users to be able to ignore those discussions, so it shouldn't be too annoying.)

Reading other posts I'm aware that I'm in the minority here. I don't have particularly strong opinions about this.

I'll speak as someone who's been here since 2019. I do think that these decisions are highly dependent on activity level. We've seen a LOT more activity here over the past week than usual, but I have a feeling it'll probably temper out given a month or so...

1. Logged-out users should be able to see everything, for sure. I think there should be an option to switch between viewing individual communities in a forum-style listing with the top couple posts from each, or just everything mixed together. My next point goes into more detail about this.
2. I think both are good. Personally, I'm subscribed to what I like, so I preferred the mixed style before. But now that there's a lot more activity on the site, maybe the option to default to a forum-style list with a one or two recent posts from each board would be good to have as an option for people who are subscribed to more. Again, I think this is very dependent on activity - with activity levels as they were before, I would caution against the forum-style listing. But if this amount of activity is to be sustained, an option for more separation would be good.
3. I think the list of what old users are already subscribed to should remain, and we can opt-out if they want. If new communities are added in the future, we would have to opt-in just like anyone else.

Overall, like I've said, I think this is dependent on the level of activity. I agree with what others have said - I would wait a bit to see how many new users stick around before making any sweeping changes. I do like how Tildes feels like one community rather than a bunch of different fractured ones, and I don't want us to lose sight of that - so I'd really only like separation of communities do the degree that it's necessary to avoid cluttering up peoples' home pages. If communities are to be separated more, perhaps cross-posting functionality could help with this, as well as a way to view posts from all communities (not just the ones you're subscribed to.) But as long as communities stay interest-focused and small in number, I think we'll preserve that sense of community.

Lastly, thank you for your hard work Deimos - and everyone else who have helped moderate and maintain this community over the years! This is by far the coziest place to interact with strangers on the internet, and I hope it stays that way.

What should logged-out users see on the homepage? Just a list of links to individual groups, and they have to pick a specific one to see any posts?

I think a 'default page' front page would be fine here.

Should logged-in users still have a homepage made up of all their subscribed groups mixed together (Reddit-style), or should we lean further into the separation by requiring groups to be viewed individually (forum-style)? (I think I'd want the mixed style to be available long-term, but maybe starting without it would help establish the individuality more strongly?)

Strongly prefer reddit-style.

How should we transition existing users over to the opt-in approach? Should we effectively treat everyone as a new user, and get them to select the groups they're interested in from scratch? Or should we do something like use their activity (voting, posting) to pre-subscribe them to some groups?

I think no changes, personally. Grandfather everyone in to the same ones they've not yet opted out of.

With the promotion of groups, and potentially new groups, I think it would be a good idea to think about group moderation.

Here's my unsolicited (sorry) idea: Moderation and curation should remain separate. If you need more moderators, do it cabal-style where you can add/remove people as you see fit. This would be entirely separate from groups.

Curators would be responsible for helping a community stay useful to its members. They could manage tags and pinned posts within groups, maybe with some additional tools such as merging threads or pinning comments. This could also be something that's voted on, maybe even with term limits? I kinda hated how subreddits, something that should belong to the public, were effectively owned by individuals on Reddit, so some sort of approval/renewal process seems like it could be important?

This proposal would change Tildes rapidly and radically.

It's impossible to predict the impact it would have, but I believe it is safe to say that, if we accommodate Reddit groups into Tildes, we would import not only the good but also a lot of the bad that comes with that format.

To me, this feels, essentially, like deciding if Tildes must remain, or if another website, which will inherit the same domain and a lot of the same philosophy and design, should take its place.

Is that a natural evolution of Tildes, or the expression of a laudable desire to accommodate a huge group of wonderful people? Is that something we would wanna do from a design perspective? Or just an emergency measure with long-lasting consequences?

IDK, dude. I really don't know. I love what Tildes is, and also what it was. I wouldn't wanna lose that.

Tough call. I'll get back to you after I read and interact with other comments. Right now, my answer would be no. But that's a work in progress.

EDIT: anyway, if these changes take place, consider this my application to contribute as a mod, or in any capacity that you see fit. I'm on Tildes 24/7 already. And we're gonna need a lot of help.

I'm new, so I'm still getting used to the paradigms of this platform.

I agree with the current system where the limited set of subscriptions kind of ensure we don't isolate ourselves from the rest of the server. I also really like the tagging system, which helps categorizing posts within the sub and I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) everyone can add or edit tags on a post, which is great for discoverability and reduces duplicate posts since it basically acts as a "crosspost" within that subscription.

That said, one thing I'd like to see is the ability to "subscribe" to a tag, as it would help me target specific posts within that subscription if I don't want to see everything from that community.

I think Reddit's default sub system worked pretty but I'm actually lover of r/all -- or whatever it is that rif defaulted to when you're not logged in. I like seeing what's hot right now, no matter the subject and it also helped me find new subs.

Raw everything feed that presents posts with a fixed algorithm that takes into account the "sub" size/activity/votes/etc would be my cup of tea as the default. If it's a hot video games day, so be it, push that stuff to the front if it's popular.

As for the default subscriptions... Kinda hard for me to say without seeing how active this site gets. Probably easiest way would be just straight up ask new (and old) users to just choose from a list -- and provide a "default" option that's based on 'X' number of the most popular subs at the moment.

I'm of two minds with adding further, more niche groups. On one hand, I think it would be quite neat to have a Usenet-style hierarchy from the current groups, and I have some thoughts as to how that could look (might flesh this out more later). On the other hand, I don't want Tildes to be a place to migrate a specific niche community or communities to: I frankly don't want an /r/AskBibleScholars (as an example) on Tildes: not for not wanting that community, or for not wanting theology discussions (actually, I think a theology group would be nice in a more fine-grained group system), but because I don't think subgroups on Tildes should foster their own culture and/or overwhelm the site (this is a hard balance to strike of course).

Regardless of segmenting the groups: I really would like a ~health.mental. I think it's absolutely a group that can stand by itself a la the subgroups in ~games and it provides a split for a subject that has a natural split.

I don't think we should let people create custom groups by any means, and I would be pretty strongly opposed to a bevy of new top-level groups. The current top-level groups work well and have worked well for a while. (Well, okay. I think ~misc has become a de facto ~politics and think that's somewhat too ba. With politics and videos filtered out of it a single page of the group goes back to 2020: and the majority of those are in fact missing a politics tag. I don't have ideas on how to fix that, or even, if it's a thing that needs fixing: maybe that instead speaks to the current top-level groups being good enough to not usually need to put stuff in ~misc?)

I also have three specific questions I'd like input on, related to how it could be implemented:

1. Logged out users should definitely see everything, firehose-style. They should get a sense of what Tildes as a whole is rather than any individual subgroup.

2. I think I like Reddit-style the most. I check Tildes somewhat daily-ish, and there's not yet enough activity that I would miss something interesting that's not on the first or second page. And even if there was: I might prefer that, because then if I check it twice the frontpage might be different?

3. If any new groups are added, you should subscribe them to that, and make an announcement post so people know what's going on. I don't think you should prompt existing users, even existing new users, to go through the activity page again (? i don't actually remember what the signup process is): but I also don't really have a strong opinion one way or another. I think for new users I would prefer everyone to be subscribed to everything by default and then unsubscribe as needed since there's so few groups, but that's just me.

I don't have very strong opinions on the layout for logged-in users, but I will say that the biggest reason I joined the site was that I could read all posts logged-out. This allowed me to decide if I was interested in actually joining before requesting an invite. So, I'd very much like that aspect to remain the same.

Hey apologies if this has been said before - but I have an idea for the tags vs ~ system.

What if there was a fluctuating rotation of ~AAA.BBB groups?

What I mean is take the top number of tags in a group and turn that into an official subgroup.

(thinking in the past here)
~tv: A new season of Game of Thrones/LOST/whatever drops and the posts blow up. Say the LOST tag becomes 15% of the ~tv group tags, or is in the top 5 tags for ~tv. ~tv.LOST is created and is home to all of them. Now it's the future, LOST ended and the posts died down, but The Last of Us season 2 dropped. ~tv.LOST drops off and ~tv.TLOU replaces it as one of the 5 trending tags.

I know the idea is for things to not get too subdivided, but equally they should contain a massive blow up in a group from taking over everything.

Not everything will have a constant rotation like TV shows. ~Music might have a consistent tag of ~Music.New where people week after week talk about the latest albums, In sports NBA/NFL/NHL might have a consistent following on and off season. News would also be a good example: War in Ukraine would be trending for a while, Debt Ceiling, Trump court battles, Reddit Blackout would all come and go.

I guess part of what I mean is with a rolling system of top (or trending) tags, I don't make up some niche thing that it turns out no one cares about but it's forever on the list. But say I do start posting about something and a significant part of Tildes joins in, then that gets added to the list and maybe replaces something that has died out.

I'm fully in favor of switching to opt-in for new groups, but I don't want to be auto-removed from the ones I'm already subscribed to. If they become too noisy I can unsubscribe myself.

As new groups are created I'd like a good way of surfacing them. Something separate from a post, that might get lost or overlooked. A dedicated list of new groups in the sidebar or something might suffice.

I'm curious what this increased separation means for mods. Currently they can pull up the home page and get a birds-eye view of every active topic on the site. I imagine it's quite a bit harder to keep up with everything these days, which is a separate conversation, but just in terms of group opt-ins, I'd guess mods will either have to subscribe (and keep subscribing) to everything, or split up and have certain mods watching certain groups. And every time a new group is spun up, somebody's got to be designated to keep an eye on it. I'm not a mod, I don't know about this stuff... but is that ideal?

IMHO, embrace the differences you have by making tags more useful.

Having a top level tier of general categories is a good way for new users to make broad decisions about the content they want to see. That seems like something that's been consistent about many different communities, forums, newspapers, news websites, etc. (World, Local, Opinion, Sports, Classifieds, etc.) and curating those broad topics is a good thing organizationally.

The next tier down of tags should allow the user to have more control and customization. Right now all I can do is filter out specific tags, but there should also be a way to promote tags I'm especially interested in my feed, or create lists of tags I care about that I can toggle to show only those items.

The tag list is just the inverse of the current filters. Promotion could be style changes for any tags I list as promoted, algorithm changes to give them a higher weight while still seeing other popular topics, etc.

I do love the idea that things are posted in larger communities, and the posters are expected to use TAGS to separate out their discussion further.

I haven't been here long, admittedly I guess I'm one of those refugees. Even still, my very first thought upon using Tildes was this:

Why can I not subscribe to tags?

Imagine, I could unsubscribe from ~hobbies if I want, but I COULD subscribe to the #gardening tag. While, yes, people will be expected to post their gardening question or thought in the right group, people can then start to aggregate the topics which are truly important to them as the member count starts to scale upwards. I might want to subscribe to tags such as #coffee, #espresso, #bonsai, etc. and I would be able to engage in these discussions without having to search.

Tildes could then start to build tag suggestions (either based on post, or maybe even allowing the community to recommend tags!), or even just a top list of tags, so new users would be able to easily find relevant discussions they want to take part in, while not really breaking down the ideas of groups as they stand right now. This would also start to allow the fine Admins running Tildes to recognize when a discussion is SO BIG that it truly deserves it's own group, so we aren't creating a ton of groups that are unnecessary and bloat the site.

Very late to the party, but I feel like I should add my voice to the choir...

Also a very new user chiming in, but I have spent a lot of time these past couple days reading everything I can and trying to really internalize some of the things the old-timers are saying about the website.

Tildes is not Reddit, Tildes should not become Reddit. I think there is definitely merit in some of the Reddit-esque ideas, but, as many others have said, I don't think that they should be leant into too hard.

To be clear, I would also support some slight separation between communities. Or more depth to the hierarchies. After all, I do really miss seeing /r/conlangs on my home, and don't feel now as if it has a place here... ~hobbies, ~humanities, ~creative? I don't really know! Which leads me to also lend my support to the crossposting/multiposting idea that others have had. Being able to take a link or an article or a question and post it to your favorite community and also say, "you know, I think this group and this group might also like to talk about this" and bring your post to those places as well. Like a cross-over episode!

What some people have said about having multiple comment sections under one post is very interesting. Or maybe it could even just be a sticky note above the other comments, like "see what ~here and ~there are saying about this!" to link to those comment chains.

The "bubbling up" idea is super cool, too, and is something I would love to see implemented! It makes me think of being on r/all and seeing some really niche subreddit balloon to the top of the page because some big event or crazy news is breaking. It helps people to discover new communities and interests and learn what people with more expertise think about those niche things.

In all, I would hate to see Tildes change itself too much. This culture that is here and is so lovingly cared for by the long-time users is just so special. Thanks for opening the doors to all of us newfolk.

For question 3, my only issue is that the groups are too generic. I don't really care about everything that might fall under ~technology, but I also don't want to unsubscribe because there are things in ~technology that I am interested in.

Edit: So maybe someway to "subscribe" to tags within a community rather than using the search function, or fracturing communities into smaller groups. For example:

Subscribe to PC gaming sub community:

~gaming.pc

Subscribe to Marathon tags within gaming:

~gaming#marathon

This would require code changes, but I think it would help if topic listings had a collapsed representation for similar topics.

I think we're reluctant to create topics because every topic takes up the same amount of vertical space on the front page. If there are five Reddit topics then they take up 5x the space of one. As a result, we start worrying about the topic mix getting unbalanced.

Suppose that instead, the topics in each group showed up as a collapsed cluster, sort of like articles in Google News? There could be a stub summarizing all activity in the ~game group, which you click to expand. Users could decide which groups they want to see expanded, collapsed, or entirely hidden by default.

This might also help people to think of ~game as a "place you enter." You can see ~game from the outside, but all the topics in it are represented as a single object. It's sort of like seeing a city on the main map in a video game.

In an old-school forum, you have to click to see what's in each group, because you can't see much from the outside. (On Tildes, the ~game group is represented by the ~game link in the sidebar, which doesn't show you anything.) On a Hacker News style front page, you see lots of topics but they're in random order and drop off the front page quickly.

A clustered representation is in the middle; you don't see everything from the outside, but you see enough activity to tell if you want to see more. Showing a headline or two of the most active topics in a group seems like enough to represent the group? This could be dynamically adjustable.

In addition to showing permanent groups differently, I also think some kind of temporary clustering would help reduce the need for megathreads. I'm thinking of creating a megathread for continuing Reddit drama (like I did for Twitter) and having a way to put all the Reddit threads in a cluster might be a nicer alternative?

Having two kinds of clustered representations is a bit inelegant, but I do think there's a need for temporary groupings of some sort. A temporary cluster doesn't seem like the same sort of thing as a permanent group that has its own subculture.

Took a lot of reading/scrolling to get to the comment box this time!

I've also been receiving a decent number of messages from Reddit moderators that are investigating whether they will be able to migrate their community to a different platform. I've had to tell them that the current structure of Tildes wouldn't easily support it, but making the groups more independent would change that.

I've been on Tildes since May 31st, 2018. I also help moderate several subreddits, one of which I think would fit very well into the culture and mission of Tildes: /r/NeutralPolitics. Other mods have also been around Tildes a bit (/u/unkz, and recently used our invites for other mods) and we are exploring recreating /r/NeutralPolitics (and maybe /r/NeutralNews, but ~news already exists here), but these subreddits are heavily moderated communities with strict rules; something that is only enabled by custom bots, automoderator, and moderator powers. I would love to see this type of group/community recreated here on Tildes, and support the creation of groups and powers that enable that.

New user here, but long(ish) redditor; thanks for the work you've done (i LOVE the purple interface)

1. Maybe by default the most popular posts of the day, and/or posts from the 'default' communities only is my thought. This way it kind of functions like r/all but it also doesn't spam with more niche communities.
2. What could be cool is if there was a system where, by default, it was your mixed view of all your subscriptions, but you could also replace it with a more curated feed. I think Reddit has this but I forgot the name for it. Basically if I'm subscribed to a lot of the default, but I don't need ~tv on my front page but still subscribed, I can just remove it from my "curated feed", if you will, without being unsubscribed.
3. Short term, I feel like having them select groups from scratch to be subscribed to, then implement some kind of trust-based system (iirc you mentioned something like this awhile ago; this is also present in other forums too) based on their activity, which can also be used for a "Suggested Communities" side tab or something.

I have a question about moderation though. If everyone is a moderator with equal privileges, are there no checks and balances to prevent brigading of a group of users / a power user (with a high trust factor, for instance)? I understand (and support) the desire to not have powermods but I don't fully understand/support this kind of anarchy-moderation, if you will.

Just chiming into say I very much appreciate this post and agree with what largely has been said here. I think more independent communities would very much be a good thing. I too want to spam game (and other niche) subreddits without spamming "everyone."

There are also a lot of niche communities that were on reddit that people may wish to re-create here. I think independent communities are a great idea.

The only thing I miss that was a big part of my enjoyment of reddit was the multireddit feature, being able to compartmentalize subreddits myself by any arbitrary reasoning. And you didn't even have to be subbed to them to add them to the lists, either.

I had a videogame one where all of my videogame related subs were gathered together into one feed, a Magic The Gathering one for all the mtg subs, a music one for all the bands and genres I was keeping up with, a text-only one for if I just wanted to read something or had limited internet and didn't want to try loading images.

I think the front page should always gather together the entire site, it fosters a sense of community (what I think Tildes really prides itself on) and exposes people to interests they might not think to go looking for or would expect to find interesting.

I do like having more granular interests able to stand out without being lost in the crowd or clogging up the feeds of people uninterested, but I've also really really enjoyed seeing this place have a more tightknit feel.

In my honest opinion, I would really like this. I know this isn't trying to be a reddit replacement, but I really want to participate here and one of the issues I'm trying to get over is that the groups are so massive that most of the discussion isn't relevant to me. Like ~sports is great, but I only watch baseball, so most of the stuff in it is irrelevant to me. Same with ~games, I only play a certain subset of games so most of the discussion isn't really all that relevant to me.

I think it would be a great idea to have sub groups under the current ones, for example you have ~sports, and then underneath that you have ~baseball, ~football, etc etc. This way, you can join a subset that's more relevant for you, or you can stay subscribed to ~sports and you'll get all the top posts from all the subsets.

Some groups are harder to do this for, for example ~books can't really be split up but then again it doesn't really need to be because all discussion can typically fall under one umbrella.

Maybe don't let users start their own groups because that would just fraction an already small userbase, but I like the idea of making sure I'm seeing more relevant content in order for me to engage.

As far as separating the posts go, I really think ~wrestling could use its own grouping. It's in a category of it's own as it's more tv than sport. There are lots of discussion topics to be had on the progression of wrestlers' characters which would be out of place in a sports category. I opt out of ~sports because I don't follow any of them and don't want to see baseball/football/hockey posts in order to see the wrestling ones. If it was possible to subscribe to https://tildes.net/~sports?tag=wrestling and not ~sports as a whole that would be the next best solution to making ~wrestling.

I see there are people who want to make wrestling posts but don't want to disrupt the community or don't know where to post. That alone is a big enough barrier to get someone to leave the site. It has for me personally several times over the past 5 years since I've found tildes.

Not a necessarily suggestion, but I sometimes feel bad commenting (especially on older posts) knowing that it’s going to push the post back to the top.

I do however, like being able to see high activity and popular posts across all topics.

Maybe an update to the sorting would be another way to address some of the issues mentioned above, without necessary hiding content by default.

Perhaps simply make two front page style tabs: one for All and one for Subscriptions.

It might be nice to be able to easily check into what other groups are doing without going directly to them or having to subscribe to them.

I'm brand new, but I don't think things need to be changed much. I haven't really played with the tags yet but that seems like an elegant solution to organization problems.

If I just want to discuss games, I go to the games group. If I don't care about Diablo, I can block that one. If I have some super niche thing I want to post about, I can tag it properly and make my post guilt free, since everyone else can easily choose to engage or ignore it.

I really don't see a need for the level of specialization reddit had. It was honestly getting ridiculous. They had a sub for wacky work stories, then another for just retail work stories, then one for specifically stories where someone mistakes another customer for an employee. I don't know who gets really excited to only read "I don't work here" stories, but they can probably get by with a tag instead of a whole group.

When it comes down to it, I'm (currently) a visitor in this space, and so I don't want to chime in on the potential direction for the site to go. I think it's important for regular/frequent users to have the primary say here, and that maintaining the existing culture is critical for keeping the long-timers happy.

I do want to offer my admiration for your handling of the influx, and influxes before it. My favorite social media site for the past few years has been Counter.Social, and with Twitter's implosion, we've had a similar influx of users, and a struggle to keep our existing culture and connections intact while still finding ways to work with the fresh folks. (Similar to how Tildes is not a Reddit replacement, CoSo is not a Twitter replacement.)

It's a hard time, and y'all are doing great. Big hugs.

For me the main thing that’s missing is more groups: the groups here are cool, but one of the main reasons I don’t use tildes more is because the majority of my discourse communities are not here.

On the one hand it is kinda nice in some ways that the user base is still small enough to be a single community, but on the other hand, many of my interests are not reflected here at all so far. I’ve waited 4 years for a 3d printing or maker group to appear, or a gardening group, or a bbq group, (the list goes on) and I’ve all but given up hope on that at this point. User-created groups isn’t on your road map and most of my interests are apparently not even on your radar. It’s been 4+ years and the site is still invite only. I have a pile of invites nobody wants to accept.

I don’t know. Maybe tildes just isn’t for me at this point. Maybe it never will be. It just doesn’t feel like home to me with the current group situation

Hey @Deimos thanks for the post. I'm pretty late on this, but I love the desire for feedback. For your three questions:

What should logged-out users see on the homepage? Just a list of links to individual groups, and they have to pick a specific one to see any posts?

I think it's fine as it is. Let them see everything as though they were subscribed to every group.

Should logged-in users still have a homepage made up of all their subscribed groups mixed together (Reddit-style), or should we lean further into the separation by requiring groups to be viewed individually (forum-style)? (I think I'd want the mixed style to be available long-term, but maybe starting without it would help establish the individuality more strongly?)

I'd much prefer Reddit style here. And while it's only slightly related, I do think an ~all topic for people to quickly see everything including topics they've unsubscribed to quickly from the main feed page would be a great addition.

How should we transition existing users over to the opt-in approach? Should we effectively treat everyone as a new user, and get them to select the groups they're interested in from scratch? Or should we do something like use their activity (voting, posting) to pre-subscribe them to some groups?

Existing users should keep their current subscriptions and then manually subscribe to any of the new groups that interest them.

When it comes to groups and subgroups, I do think we need to make some changes here. I think a lot of people are attached to what Tildes has been and they're passionate about preserving that. And I think that's mostly good. The community, vibe, and goals of Tildes are what make this place great and not just a reddit clone. However, I do think the site needs to grow and accommodate newer users and can do so without losing its soul.

I'd start out with allowing more subcategories. For example, ~sports.baseball, ~games.pc, ~comp.programming, ~health.mental, etc. Keep them somewhat generic. Don't go super specific on things that won't get a ton of posts (e.g. no ~games.hearthstone or local city groups).

I would also say that if we're adding more groups and/or subgroups, we need to start thinking about organization of how to navigate them from the front page in a user's subscription list. Maybe subgroups don't get listed the same way that the top level groups do but instead top level groups have an arrow next to them that you can click on to expose the subgroups. It will clean up the list a bit and make it more usable.

I also think we should allow subscribing to specific tags within a group or subgroup. And I think these should be specific to that group, not saying I want to see every post with that tag across all groups. Then you could show those tags nested under the group or subgroup they belong to in the subscription list, as well with a # instead of a ~.

I've always intended to make the groups more independent, but the site's activity has generally been too low for that to be feasible. All of the groups needed to be able to reach all of the Tildes users, but there have been significant downsides to doing it this way.

I think you should follow what you had always planned Tildes to be. Obviously take feedback from us and all that. But your vision will help the site grow and prevent stagnation, too.

I will just say to close out my thoughts here that while I definitely don't want Tildes to turn into Reddit or a clone of that site, I do see the value in specific and separate topics. The example you gave in your post resonates with me and how I feel using Tildes sometimes:

For example, I follow video game news closely, and it's currently a very busy time with tons of events and announcements. But I wouldn't want to post all of those announcements to ~games, because it would completely flood the site and annoy everyone.

This is how I feel. There was a ton of news about games due to Summer Games Fest but I didn't post much of it because it would flood everyone's front page. And that's not something you want people to feel when using the site. And you may get similar issues for people who are super into soccer, for example. When the World Cup is going on, they might be hesitant to post news coming out of that. And yes, megathreads can help alleviate that a bit but that shouldn't be the catch all solution when we can improve how the site functions to make things better for everyone.

I've sat on this one for a while, but I think I'll finally weight in.

Regarding question 2, "Should logged-in users still have a homepage made up of all their subscribed groups mixed together?", this seems like a clear preference to the forum style. Navigating groups adds a lot of friction versus having the content pushed to you.

Tildes has bumping, so there are some concerns. Low-effort question threads or those that spawn arguments are more likely to keep bubbling to the top, since they attract easy comments.

So for a reddit-style feed, I feel some algorithmic magic would be helpful to suppress overly-active threads, to encourage new topics to show up from time to time, and to factor in some sort of freshness factor (eg. mixing posts you've already seen with those you haven't).

"But algorithms are evil!", I hear you say. And you're right... sort of. Algorithms are a problem when they're optimized for engagement and user retention. Tildes is not designed in this way though, and there's no reason to believe it ever will be. I believe there can be value in designing an interesting feed that respects and values the user.

I'd also like to suggest offering more granular control over said algorithm. For example, in addition to a simple "subscribed/unsubscribed" toggle, groups could offer a frequency setting. Don't wish to see ~games that much? Set it to low. Want to see every single ~food post? Set it to High.

As a side note, I believe this helps mitigate the concern Deimos shared about not wanting to spam any one topic too much, lest it overwhelm the site. Controls allow users to adjust their own feeds if they're unhappy with any current trends.

Other algorithm settings could be incorporated such as allowing us to set a desired split of fresh vs seen threads. If you prefer to follow along on earlier discussions you participated in, or always see something new, you could tweak this to your preference.

I know many of us (myself included) have a knee-jerk reaction to any sort of algorithmic-driven feeds, but I really do think they can provide value when they optimize for the user, and not the user metrics.

For logged out users, it decreases the barrier of entry if there are a default set of communities being shown like it is now. If I link tildes to someone who has never used it before, they can instantly understand what it is and immediately view posts, without having to take the extra step of choosing a community. That could be good or bad, depending on how easy you’d want it to be for new users to join. Personally, I’d say keep it how it is for now as the site is small and still invite-only.

For logged in users, I like the current method of having a mix. It allows me to jump from topic to topic that I’m interested in. Having everything be separated does create individual board culture (see 4chan), which can be nice. However, that can also cause issues if the board culture diverges too much from the site as a whole. Personally I say keep it how it is for now. It’s nice having both options available.

For existing users, I would be surprised if anyone felt very strongly either way. If you treat existing members as new users, nothing changes immediately except the new option to customize your homepage communities, which you can already kind of do with filters. If you subscribe us based on activity, someone who wants to keep seeing everything will have to resubscribe to everything which might be annoying. I say it would be easier and less friction to just treat existing users as new. The site is still in alpha so I don’t see anyone being very surprised by that.

Although my comments basically sum to ‘don’t change anything’, experimentation is good and could lead to a better experience than I can currently imagine. So whatever you decide, I personally will keep an open mind.

1. Definitely everything.

2. I like the idea of the homepage showing you stuff from every group you're subscribed to more than the opposite. Having to manually click every group to see new content just seems kinda overly laborious.

3. The user activity approach would be far more complicated than just opting everyone out to then choose which ones they want. I would say the latter. Or shit, just opt-in to all by default off the bat. It's not like we've created so many groups yet as to make it unreasonable.

I wonder if it's possible to keep the number of top-level groups small and mostly expand through sub-groups? That way, you could subscribe new users only to the top groups, so they are still given a broad but shallow overview of what's being posted on the site, and let them select more specific interests as they wish.

Of course, this works best if users who are subscribed to the top groups don't see everything submitted to the subgroups - otherwise it's like being subscribed to every group anyway! I remember seeing somewhere a mention of the topics in top groups being populated by "bubbling up" from that group's subgroups - if a topic that's posted in a subgroup gets active enough it gets promoted and appears in the top group. I think that's not the current system because I can't find it mentioned in the docs, so maybe it was just an idea that came up - anyone happen to also remember seeing it?

Anyway, I think it's a fair idea to make groups more independent. To the questions:

1. Ideally, some selection of the best posts from all the groups. Like I said, it would be good to show a broad coverage of what people are talking about, but not too many posts from one very large group. "Best" is subjective though - it needn't necessarily be what is the most engaged-with like it is on say, Reddit.
2. I'm open to trying the forum style where I have to check individual groups. The Reddit front-page style is convenient, but it means I often only end up checking the few posts that are on the front page, and miss a lot that goes on in the groups. I say we go all in on it, at least for a bit.
3. Both? Make them pick groups to subscribe to, but pre-select some that they've posted or commented in. (Voted in might be too broad.) I think you have to change existing users over to the new system to be sure it'll affect them, and not just new users. So you can't just leave them subscribed to all the defaults.

One thing I’ve been saying in discussions about Reddit alternatives and Tildes is that I like Tildes a lot (even though I’ve only been here for a week) but it’s too focused on being general to be a good Reddit replacement.

I certainly get the need for more specific communities, but I’m not convinced they need to be on this site. I think the beauty of tildes.net is that it’s a fairly general message board without hyper-specific groups, and while I get the concerns around groups being opt-out (and would encourage you to try out what you’ve described around that), I do think that keeping the groups roughly as-is would probably be best. Other people have mentioned expanding tags to help organize things better, and I think that would be the best approach.

As for other communities… you’ve made Tildes open source, and there are absolutely people like me who are comfortable running “instances” of it for their own communities. I’ve offered to set one up for a specific subreddit that I think would be able to leverage the structure of Tildes well, and if the mods are interested I’ll gladly run that for that community. I don’t think that’s the best solution, but I do think it’s a good one in a lot of cases, and it might help to make it a little more approachable of an option; right now there doesn’t seem to be a ton of documentation on running Tildes in production, it’s mostly focused on development.

But ultimately, I think that for tildes.net you should be leaning into what makes Tildes different from Reddit. Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t make it work better for the community it’s gathering—but you’ve got it designed in certain ways, and I think changing those designs to appeal more to users like me would probably only result in more spaghetti (both from a code perspective and a moderation perspective). I don’t think you’re likely to ruin the site, but you’ve got an opportunity to take what already makes it special and really make it shine here, and I’m looking forward to seeing that (regardless of what you choose to do here!).

Would it be a possibility to have the subgroups as the separated parts but also keep the current structure?

So you have the existing top level list, and that could even act as your default setup for new users. So ~sports would be opt-out for new users and would not change in its current mod approach (except maybe the amount of mods, as mentioned). Sub groups, however would be opt-in, and have separate mods, and be user-created. So, ~sports.manunited would be run by Manchester United fans (etc.).

This would also provide the ability to have subject fanatics running their subgroups, hopefully offering that 'expert' quality that may be lost in the more general groups.

I haven't totally thought this through, but I think there may be something to it, as I feel it keeps some kind of a happy medium between the two approaches, while maintaining the (awesome) existing community.

I’ve avoided commenting on these subjects because I’m new, and I want to - 1. Learn 2. Respect the place/philosophy 3. Not rock the boat

BUT.

Totally down for what this post entails. Yes this isn’t Reddit, and that’s awesome. But it doesn’t mean that every idea Reddit had was awful and that some can’t be emulated. This is one that, in my opinion it’s a fantastic idea to emulate.

It would be nice to silo engagement into respective areas, while allowing for browsing of all topics when desired. My bet would be that it would foster more engagement, ultimately.

As this place grows bigger, you definitely want to have separate spaces IMO. Different people are into different things.

I like the idea of the default being a list of what my subscribed groups are for the full forum-esque experience, but having an option of seeing content from all the groups mixed together (à la "home") and also another option to see everything (à la "all").

If this goes through, I'd also like to be able to filter out tags: I basically never want to see anything about topic X, let's say, but there's stuff in its overarching group Y (to which topic X is often posted) that I do want to see. Having to ignore it every time it comes up will get frustrating fast, I figure.

I'm a new Tildes user as well and find myself constantly looking for my subscribed to groups only to then remember that they don't actually exist since I'm subscribed to all of them. So this change sounds great to me...the sooner the better I say.

To answer you other three questions:

1. I say show it all to logged out users
2. I vote for a subscription feed and a button/option to switch to an ALL feed.
3. I vote just default to no subscriptions and allow for starting from scratch by the user

Thank you for allowing your users to also be stakeholders in these decisions.

My two cents as a new user is that I want the Tildes homepage to be the jumping off point for discussing and browsing content related to my interests, and I believe having to individually browse each group would run counter to that goal and feel a lot less smooth than if everything is available from one page. To that end:

1. Logged out users should see the same page showing the aggregate of the various groups as it does now. At this stage, the potential new user wants to see what content the website has to offer, so giving an overview of everything is IMO the best choice. If they want to check specific content, that's what the sidebar listing the groups is for.
2. As a follow up to answer 1, having existing accounts not being able to see the mixed view whereas logged out users can would be strange, so I think the homepage should show all the user's subscriptions' topics as it currently does, at least by default.
3. I believe the transition should be a manual process, by adding an option in the user settings to empty the entire subscriptions list and redirecting the user to a page showing a list of the groups they had activity in and an option to subscribe to each one, plus a link to the "Browse group" page should the user want to add more. When the option is added, a text box at the top of the home page (or maybe a notification?) with a link to the option should inform the users that it's available, with the choice of either using the new option or dismissing the box. And to go back to answer 2, a "view only the links to the subscribed groups on the homepage" toggleable option could also be added.

Finally, I also believe that being able to subscribe to tags rather than just groups would be worthwhile to further curate one's home page.

EDIT to add the following: Regarding whether Tildes should stay as one "unified" community or develop into separate ones over groups, I believe this will happen organically as users start choosing the groups and tags they want to focus on if the combined activity of all groups becomes impossible to keep up with by individual users. I do not think trying to encourage it by silo-ing the groups is required.

As a new user I'd say

1. Show them everything
2. Homepage style
3. Until a critical mass of users and groups are reached the opt out version keeps things more lively

As some others said maybe the tags could be made more powerful.
Maybe tags that keeps the post only visible when you're inside the group. This could keep noisy/casual stuff like tv episode discussions inside the group and give more thorough discussion the place on the homepage

I'll preface that I'm a recent migrant from Reddit, and so my biases are definitely towards what is familiar to me.

1. What should logged-out users see on the homepage?

My instinct, largely informed by Reddit of course, is something akin to /r/all, where you get everything (except ~test). I also think this view should be available to logged in users too.

I used Reddit for three separate, but related, purposes: discussion on things I cared about (i.e. subs I subbed to), discovery of new things (/r/all, but with some heavy filtering to remove things I just didn't want to see), and doomscrolling (also fulfilled by /r/all). Tildes as it stands does #1 pretty well, doesn't do #2 if you actually unsubscribe from the defaults (hello, I'm one of the people who unsubbed from ~anime as soon as they figured out how), and #3 is a function of activity on the site (the more activity, the more doom to scroll).

2. Should logged-in users still have a homepage made up of all their subscribed groups mixed together, or should we lean further into the separation by requiring groups to be viewed individually?

I'd rather see all groups I subscribe to in one place. This was something I really appreciated from when I first joined Reddit, as it reflected my reality much more closely: I am not a set of siloed topics in their own areas, I am a messy human being whose interests all mix and meld together to form whatever I am.

3. How should we transition existing users over to the opt-in approach?

Is a migration for existing users necessary? This change isn't adding any new groups as it stands, yet, so existing users' subscriptions can be left as-is. I feel there are two other questions that jump out:

1. What groups do you give new users?
2. What users get subscribed to new groups?

Reddit's answer to those new questions are "a set of defaults", and "nobody as people must discover it themselves (either in other discussions, offsite, or through /r/all)".

What do I think would help Tildes? I don't think I'm qualified to answer, given my newness and inexperience with the culture of the site. But if I had a go, it'd be something like:

1. While the numbers of groups is small, just give them everything. This has the added bonus of keeping the initial work small in scope, and buys time until this one actually needs to be solved. Once the number of top-level groups grows, then some form of discovery would be useful. What that looks like, idk.
2. Something heirarchical, at least for subgroups? Say there's ~foo and ~foo.bar and we're about to add ~foo.baz. A user subscribed to ~foo would get automatically subbed to the new ~foo.baz, but a user subbed only to ~foo.bar isn't interested in all of ~foo so wouldn't.

As for the addition of new top-level groups, that's an entirely different matter, but that might warrant a site-wide announcement which would bring visibility to that area.

Reading through other threads, I do agree that caution needs to be taken as to what gets added as a group. I, ultimately, would not be a good judge of that, but I'll be following along in those threads to get more of a feel for how this place works.

One of the main consequences (which is becoming more obvious over the last few days) is kind of ironic: by showing all groups to all users to increase activity across all of them, it actually discourages activity in any individual one. For example, I follow video game news closely, and it's currently a very busy time with tons of events and announcements. But I wouldn't want to post all of those announcements to ~games, because it would completely flood the site and annoy everyone.

I think you're very right in pointing out the problem of having big group drowning smaller ones in their activity.

This is a similar problem RSS reader are having when subscribing to both journals (daily updates) and bloggers (monthly or even yearly updates). The way most of them manage this is to have an unread counter in the subscription list. That way I can reliably know when there's an update on a less prolific feed.

Maybe Tildes could implement something similar ?

It's not a perfect solution (how should the counter be updated ? doesn't that exacerbate FOMO ?) but I feel there's at least some value in the idea.

Reddit 'fugee here.
Only joined recently so apply less weight to my input:

1. Logged out should see all, lest it be seen as either a soft-wall to access a broader view, or an exercise in tedium to get said broader view (I'm visualising a stick of RAM catching fire as I open my nth cCrome tab)
2. Somewhat contrarian, but a view of All with an opt-out feature feels like the best way to make sure some small communities don't go undiscovered. I personally would never have navigated to ~hobbies but this unfiltered stream has led me to some pleasant surprises. I despise that my YouTube home page shows me what it thinks I want to see, which makes it an ongoing experience of much of the same. (Yay my 999th Blender tutorial video, Lofi music playlist, and recipe video). If I can just opt out of stuff that would be ideal. I think it seems tedious to opt out but I think a heirarchical structure would make it less onerous. Example I won't have to sub out of ~yankees and ~other team and ~10thbaseballteam, if I can just opt out of ~baseball as a whole. This also kind of makes sense to me since if I'm into ~baseball I can then just opt out of a team/aspect I hate and keep the rest, as opposed to just being disinterested altogether. Sorry I think I've over cooked this but hope my general feel comes across!
3. Implement however you'd like - if it's opt in, it will be a manual task either way so I guess some of the burden could be removed if some are suggested up front! If we do go down the opt in path, I think the most important thing would be to have an intuitive and easy discovery method for all topics such that people aren't seven drop down menus deep wondering what's at the bottom!

Thanks for lending me your ear!

I like the opt-in approach. It makes sense. It's more intuitive than requiring new users to opt out of a bunch of groups they're not interested in. Also, in the future, when there are more groups and sub-groups, that opt-out process will become quite onerous. Opting in makes sense in many ways.

As for your specific questions:

What should logged-out users see on the homepage? Just a list of links to individual groups, and they have to pick a specific one to see any posts?

They see a feed of all recent posts from all groups.

Should logged-in users still have a homepage made up of all their subscribed groups mixed together (Reddit-style), or should we lean further into the separation by requiring groups to be viewed individually (forum-style)? (I think I'd want the mixed style to be available long-term, but maybe starting without it would help establish the individuality more strongly?)

A mixed feed of posts from the various groups & sub-groups they're subscribed to.

How should we transition existing users over to the opt-in approach? Should we effectively treat everyone as a new user, and get them to select the groups they're interested in from scratch? Or should we do something like use their activity (voting, posting) to pre-subscribe them to some groups?

It's probably simpler and cleaner to make every existing user hit the same landing page that you would build for new users, to select the groups they want to subscribe to, as a one-off transition exercise.

I didn't realize that by default I was subscribed to everything. It makes sense given the smaller user base, but there are things like sports that really aren't my bag, and other things that I have no interest in. I suppose if you see topics you don't want to from a particular group, you can unsubscribe from that group, and if you aren't seeing unwanted topics it is because nothing is posted to those groups anyway so it doesn't really matter.

I will say the unsubscribe UI is a bit counter-intuitive, it took me a minute to figure out because it works backwards. In order to unsubscribe from a group that you are not interested in, you have to click on the group to see literally only content you don't want to see in order to remove it. It would be great if from the groups page https://tildes.net/groups or from the sidebar if you could click a javascripty button that unsubscribed right there, without going into the group itself. I know that the site tries to be fully function with minimal javascript, which I applaud, so maybe some kind of checkbox / submit form monstrosity, I dunno, I'm not a web developer :-P The idea would be: a way to unsubscribe from a group or groups without going into said group.

What about... let's say. Each group can have subtopics once the subtopic's community that are vouching for it prove they have enough trustworthiness and audience. These subtopics will only be added manually and will be in still general tones like let's say ~games will have |game-announcements and |community-game-help. The group's default showing on homepage will show non-subgroup stuff, going into the group, you can filter posts by everything, non subgroupped(default), or specific subgroup of choice. This could open up segmentation of more niche topics that don't really have a choice to grow much because of an audience too niche to warrant a group yet with a decently large community. If they prove to have quality that can be appreciated by many, they can be upgraded into the main tilde and now can be seen on homepage. Obviously, this idea should be looked upon with caution, we don't want to overcomplicate things much but since it's helping to segment and grow smaller communities and you're still in charge what gets implemented, we could make it vague enough to make it decently open to outsiders so that they get the general gist of the idea and allow even the smaller communities here.

I would have preferred opt-in when I joined but given the relatively small number of groups it was hardly much of a task to unsub to the ones I wasn't interested in.

I would personally suggest the idea to show new users a "pop-up" with the groups available to manually subscribe to instead of auto-subscribing everyone to every group. Especially when the number of groups increases even further, the auto-subscription might become very tiresome to some.

I would also suggest a seperation of the current groups and future user created groups, at least until a specific activity threshold was met. They would be still available in the same way, but specifically marked as user created (maybe a different link color when looking for groups) to differentiate between official general groups and niche things until they have become more popular, or, option 2, have been manually verified (or a similar term). That would also, at least visually, seperate basically permanently almost empty groups from actual active ones and make the search look less full of abandoned categories while searching for a place to post that actually gets looked at by people.

Edit: Oh lol, I just now realized that this post is already a bit older. I assumed it was new because I saw it on my homepage for the first time.

Keep everyone subscribed to everything, and allow for more tags.

Allow higher level subreddit like boxes with their own moderators and names, but let them be a sort of optional space without a /r/name to them - instead, let them identify themselves with tags and filter their posts into the current system.

Make those higher level boxes opt in except for those who want to see them all.

Let people moderate and build their own spaces, but don't let people dominate a single namespace /r/games - instead - make it a way for people to make, keep, and curate a space that others can opt into.

Let those boxes have their own invites

Visiting a roses tildes "sub" like /r/games could lead you to a list of communities, rather than just one.

Crazy idea, but how about long term thinking of making sub groups crests or by users? Let’s say I want to make a topic about felting, I could be allowed to create the sub group creative.felting while making a new post.

With regards to moderating, trying out something like giving some set of moderator tools to the n top contributors (based on a rolling 12 month period) in a sub group could be interesting. I dislike how on Reddit communities become completely owned by the moderators, with the community only having the sincere hope that moderators enact their wishes. I like the philosophy here of it being more grass roots and trust on thy neighbor

First of all, love the philosophy and organizational setup of Tildes. It's been great to lurk here for the last couple of days!

A few thoughts on your questions:

1. I think seeing a list of groups is the best idea. It'd be clean, and easy to understand where to go from there.

2. Make it Reddit-style. That homepage was a very useful place to hang out in, and I've always found it more straightforward than navigating a level, or more, down to find what I want, which is the forum style.

3. I think the transition is: announce that it's now opt-in, have a place where we can see a list of groups (at least while the number of them is manageable), and let people go there and sign up for what they want. From what I've seen, unlike other Reddit alternatives that have gotten popular in the last week, Tildes is more popular with the more "power user"-type crowd. I'm sure they (we) will figure it out.

Cheers!

I kind of like the idea of users curating what they want to see based on tags, but maybe that's sort of the same thing? I like that there can be many tags under one group, rather than many groups. Creating my own filter system would feel better to me than subbing to many groups. But I have no real strong opinions, as I am still learning how it works anyway and probably don't fully understand. You should do whatever you feel is most achievable, and will support the site the most. With all the new people coming in, myself included, I'm sure you have a ton of work going on. I hope that we will all be able to be patient, and not apply pressure for changes to happen fast because of what we are used to.

Smaller, niche communities were always the best part of reddit, and I think adding them to tildes would combine the best of both sites. I already love the discussion focus and different feel tildes offers compared to reddit, but I miss curating the experience of reddit's smaller communities. Here's my take on your questions:

1. I like the idea of non-logged in users seeing a spread of postings from across tildes, rather than links to communities without posts. I think seeing actual posts will give those users a better sense of tildes at a glance and will better encourage participation and discovery. Anyone who is seeking a specific community can still easily search or view the master list.

2. I MUCH prefer logged-in users having a page that aggregates posts from all their subscribed groups. I want to easily keep up with all of my communities in a time-efficient manner, and a Reddit-style front page facilitates that. It allows me to quickly peruse my communities to stay caught up and to easily see any posts I feel I can contribute to. When I want to focus on a specific community, I will seek it out via my subscribed list.

3. I'm mostly neutral on this, but I lean towards treating existing users as new and having everyone manually subscribe to what they're interested in. That seems easiest to implement and least likely to cause confusion.

I'm glad this place exists, and I'm thankful for the obviously significant amount of work you and the early-adopters are putting into it. I was honestly feeling pretty shitty about the effective loss of reddit, and none of the other alternatives I tried (kbin/lemmy/raddle/squabbles) felt right. This place feels awesome so far, and everything in the docs really resonates with me. Can't way to see where things go from here.

Like most others here, I support the idea of a front page with groups we're subscribed to and an equivalent to r/all. Right now I'm subscribed to most groups not because I have an interest in the topic (e.g. sports), but because I want to check news and such so I can keep up with current events to some degree.

I'm on-board with more niche and specific groups. Right now, I think part of the issue with the current system is that a lot of groups feel feel too broad, which makes posting difficult. For example, I'm a writer, but the idea of sharing my writing in ~creative feels weird since it's such an eclectic blend. At the same time, posts about writing in general could go into ~hobbies. Actually, checking those two groups just now, I’m realizing there’s a lot of potential overlap between them. Right now there’s a topic about needlefelting on creative, and fiber crafting on hobbies for example. While I don't think we’d have enough people to justify a group (or subgroup) for those two specific examples, I think we could more thoroughly define the difference between hobbies and creative.

I don’t think we need to get too niche, but it could help to have some new groups for sure, both more specific and more broad. With gaming, there would likely be a lot of interest in console-specific groups such as the Switch, Steam Deck and PC gaming. I think a broad ~vehicles group would be good, which could have subgroups or tags for cars, motorcycles, etc. Within broader groups, maybe add some way for users to suggest subgroups that can be more niche and user-moderated?

One other thing: I think it could help a lot to have tags more easily viewed and sorted. Right now, the way it's implemented isn't very intuitive. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you need to check the documentation to get a full list of common tags? Meanwhile just on this post, someone stated they wanted a way to filter out tags not realizing that it's already a feature. I discovered that feature while trying to figure out how to search for specific tags. So I do think the tag system can use some clarification.

I originally made a reddit account 13 years ago specifically to weed out the default subs that I had no interest in. I think having some default (maybe even everything, since the userbase is still low) for users not logged in is totally acceptable. However, I do think that upon account creation there should be a prompt to choose from several groups or just a "show me everything!" kind of button, so that registered users are not always just thrown into whatever default experience there was not logged in, IMO.

I do like the idea that Tildes has had for some time with some groups being .subgroups of the main, I personally like that "tree" kind of grouping. I think that can help with discovery within one's preexisting interests. For instance I am interested in american football, mostly the NFL, but there are other american football leagues so maybe a creation of sports.american_football.nfl there could be a linked one through the tree of sports.american_football.xfl or ...cfl or ...cfb or ...usfl. Even specific teams (...nfl.49ers would be my team).

I think having the ability to subscribe to one part of the tree and see everything lower in the branches (with the ability to opt out of subgroups) it a good way to give newer communities a "boost" when a subgroup is made. I think it will help keep some of the userbase from fragmenting, but still give more options for personal curation. I know that might be difficult to scale at a large enough userbase, but that is my two cents.

I personally enjoy that we access all of the groups initially. I’ve been lurking off and on for years now, and it’s cool to see all the activity—and accessing groups that I wouldn’t normally jump into, has helped broaden my interests and knowledge a bit.

I think higher curation of subscribed subs will be necessary if you plan to create more subs or extend that opportunity to the community, however I do really like to default option of opt out as there are subs I’m now happy to check out that I wouldn’t have actively subscribed to.

Maybe as the site expands keeping a curated list of ‘default’ subs you’re automatically subscribed to and/or giving new accounts a list of popular options to pick from when they sign up like how a lot of services do with the select interested topics thing.

I like the main feed being all subs you’re following but it would be nice to also have each one feel slightly more like a community and less like I’m filtering by tag, just not sure what exactly would be the best approach to accomplish that.

I think logged out users should see everything.

I'd like an option for both everything and only my subs when I'm logged in.

I'm in favor of the opt in approach, so long as there is a way to see when new groups are added.

Speaking of subs.. something that might be a bridge to separating groups would be to allow us to subscribe to one or more tags within a group. For example, in games, I might want to create a sub that only shows minecraft content, another that only shows stellaris content. On the sidebar, it would be great to see these organized under the main group with whatever nickname I give it.

So I could see
~games
~games.minecraft
~games.stellaris

It should allow me to indicate that i picky wasn't to see content in ~games that have subscribed tags and still see the specific tags that I care about.

First, I got an invite so if you see my email that mentions the pirate bay logo, that's me and I'm already here!

Second, I think at some point you will have to have some sort of mechanism to separate the groups more. So it is not a question of if you should separate them as much as a decision as to when to do it. Right now Tildes has a similar feel to reddit a long long time ago, I was a lurker for some time before joining and it felt like this, I was reading interesting conversations from a distance, but it felt like one group with many different topics... letting the groups be more independent definitely enriched the platform and I think this will happen here. I'm personally very curious how such communities would form with this Wikipedia-like approach to moderation. Maybe Tildes could benefit from implementing some of the processes Wikipedia has to moderate articles?

I am also all for logged-out users being able to see something like a front-page or ~all

1. Probably just a mix of popular posts

2. Definitely reddit-style

3. Instead of nested groups, create a set of core tags (largely based on the existing groups). Posts must contain a single core tag and one or more subtags. Allow users to create their own "tag sets" that they can follow. A tag set could contain included or excluded tags. For example, maybe someone wants to subscribe to basketball, but for they are only interested in college level and not professional. They could create a tag set like "sports basketball ncaa -nba". This would allow everyone to customize their interface to see the posts they are interested in, but still interact with other users who have the same posts in their own tag groups.

4. On a moderation-related note, core tags could have "librarians" (I apologize to the person who suggested this in another thread that I can't find) whose job it is to edit tags and titles. They might also have the ability to lock posts or threads or "shush" users (silence them for a few minutes). Like subreddit moderators, librarians would only be able to perform these tasks on the core tag to which they were assigned.
   A different group (maybe "chaperones" or something?) would have the ability to lock comment chains or threads and temporarily ban users. They would not have access to edit titles/tags like librarians. A smaller group of "administrators" would be able to delete comments/posts or permanently ban users.

What should logged-out users see on the homepage? Just a list of links to individual groups, and they have to pick a specific one to see any posts?

Adopt the "default" group system. Like a sampler plate. Users can then add or remove groups to their liking.

Should logged-in users still have a shared page with groups, or have groups only accessible individually?

This boils down to a trick question, the answer is both.

How should we transition existing users over to the opt-in approach?

Why should we? Current users can decide what they want to do with their life. New users can come into whatever layout we're trying out, then proceed to also do whatever they want. Unsubscribe to groups, subscribe to groups, there's no reason to change an already existing user's settings unless we're actually adding the setting for the first time. Group count is so low now (you said 30?) that it would be pointless to unsub everyone then tell them to sub back... it's less work to just unsub from what I don't want.

Groups to me are default subscribed tags editable on your groups/subscription page.

]all[(tags=all) (hidden but is your top page list of results)
]anime[(tags=anime)
]arts[(tags=arts)
...

You can't solve the problem of what subscriptions (and their tags) should be in the future or for every user or use-case You can however build tools to allow the individual or community to work towards more solutions for more people.

I'd suggest the groups/subscription page become more or a tag management page.

• Custom subscriptions like "]de[(tags=de,all)"
• Tag specific moderation "The tag 'de' has been marked as language specific, threads with this tag hidden when this tag is not specifically used. See the language preference issue tracker
• Current 'tag' issues. The tag "reddit" has a limit under ~tech to the top 3 voted for the next 72 hours. See "downwithreddit" issue.
• Here are the most popular tags in the last 7/30 days
• Here are the most popular subscriptions, subscribe or modify to your preference
• Here are popular subscription playlists (think themed set groups you can hotswap)

I don't think any soothsayer can predict if finance.crypto, tech.crypto or crypto should be a group. And since it only matters for the 'default' experience I'm perfectly fine with the site admin just making a decision based a coinflip. I'd advocate search and subscriptions should accommodate all of these possibilities. Aka welcome to set theory/combinatorics and tag management.

You know my deal already, #tags and ~groups seems redundant to one another, Twitter and Tumblr have their weird corners without it being defined top down as "this is what we're talking about when we are over in this area." Maybe that's why following and subscribing to @users are a bit more focused on over there, and being able to follow people doesn't seem right for this site. But groups and tags, never saw a reason why one is a sub community and one is a quantification of interest.

As far as logged out or logged in, I want everything and I want to be able to be opted in to new groups that form. Maybe that could be some sort of checkmark on the account settings page for the least amount of friction.

I don't think the user base is large enough to support such -small- group features. I suggest going to the old Reddit approach where we have default ~'s and users can opt in the other groups as well.

Speaking of other groups, we shouldn't open thousands of them. Again, the user base isn't huge and that'd make finding groups harder for end user. Instead, we could have weekly(?) polls or something similar to that nature to open groups.

Top posts in specific groups probably should appear on the front page for everyone as well. This is necessary for increasing discoverability; as we don't have mechanisms to suggest subs to people based on their behavior.

Assuming the bulk of the new groups are actually new subgroups:

1. Logged out users see main groups, they are unsubscribed (see nothing) from subgroups.
2. Reddit style not forum style
3. Existing users are automatically subscribed to all new main groups but are unsubscribed from new subgroups (have to subscribe manually to new subgroups)

Assuming you make minimal code changes to tildes initially: I think this means that any posts to subgroups are only shown to those who explicitly subscribed to those subgroups.

That way you can spam gaming.whateveryouareinto and I wont see it by default. Anything relevant to us CIS folks can be shared to the main LGBT group. Anything specific to just LGBT people can go into a subgroup, where hopefully most CIS folks know not to subscribe or respond to. If there were a news.USA I am sure that would be appreciated by some non-USA users. I think this would really give minority voices a space just for them e.g. you could have a women subgroup...

Until the bubble up algorithm is figured out, I think those with the move post privs can help ensure only globally relevant posts are in top level groups...

On a side note, how is the funding looking like for tildes? I already donated on github as I don't mind paying if I plan on using tildes on the regular. I'm guessing that the funding at the moment seems fine as I haven't seen any posts about it but I've also only been on here for a couple days.

New user that was a reddit user so I have limited experience here.

But what if you kept the current groups how they are and additional groups can be the non default ones you need to opt into.

In terms of moderation I think more mods for the current groups will be needed as the site grows and more eyes are needed.

I think it's fine to give groups more independence, BUT one of my biggest annoyances on Reddit was how every subreddit had their own obnoxious rules to follow. I typically discovered new subreddits via r/all and might see an interesting post there from a new subreddit and I would either make a comment on that posting or try to make a posting of my own on the actual subreddit itself, only to have it removed because I broke some stupid arcane rule that they had about formatting or something.

If there's going to be a set of posting rules, they should be universal across the entire site, or put the rules ON the post submission page and make them clear and concise. I'm lazy and I don't want to open up a subreddit's sidebar and go through their FAQ or bylaws or whatever the hell pages-long requirements document they have just to post something. I understand each community may have different rules that become important over time, but don't make casual commenters/posters have to dig to find that stuff.

I think this is a good idea as long as there's enough activity to sustain all the groups. I don't know how many of the new people from Reddit are planning to stick around long-term---I'm pretty sure I am personally, being one of them, but you never know.