Any significant changes to Tildes are extremely unlikely
I've been assuming that this is fairly apparent since nothing significant has changed here in years now, but I suppose it's best to be explicit.
There is no intention to do anything like:
- Actively attempt to attract more users
- Implement new functionality or change existing functionality
- Change the site's structure
- Give any other people access to moderation/admin abilities or control of the site
Or anything else of a similar level. The site has basically been in "minimum maintenance mode" for a long time, and I do not plan to start investing more time in it or otherwise trying to reinvigorate or reinvent it. I recognize that a lot of information and documentation on the site does not reflect this, but almost all of it was written aspirationally nearly 10 years ago, and those aspirations failed. To be clear, I definitely don't consider Tildes a failure—I'm proud and happy that we were able to create a small community that people (mostly) like being a part of. I enjoyed building it, and it's great that the community has managed to sustain itself for so long, but it's not the same as the goal that most of that writing had in mind. I should remove or update a lot of it, but there are very few new users and almost everyone here already knows how things work.
I'm certainly happy to continue keeping Tildes running while people want to keep hanging out here, but you should only do that if you are satisfied with the state of the site. If you are unhappy with Tildes' current functionality, structure, design, userbase, culture, or any other major aspect, you should probably look for a different community (or start one, anyone can!). You should not pin your hopes on any major changes happening here.
Hey everyone, I just got back from vacation!
Part 1
Honestly though, it looks like a lot has happened in the past week(s)? I don't really have the full context for all of it as I haven't been following everything directly, but as a long-time Tildes cheerleader, I'll toss in my two cents.
One of the things I love about this place is that there's a pervasive, nearly universally held ideal that things can be better. Like, the moment we run into any sort of friction, people are looking at and hashing out solutions both social and technical. It's sort of in our DNA at this point, which makes a lot of sense, as the site itself was founded explicitly on the ideals of being better than the all the other rage factory data funnels people spend their time on.
Looking forward is a good thing, but I think it's important not to lose sight of what we do have, and I think that Tildes has been around long enough that some of its merits have become largely invisible -- we take them for granted.
There isn't another site I know of that has an audience as willing to engage in good faith as Tildes. There isn't another site I know of where the norm is to calm down and disengage rather than fire up and hit hard. There isn't another site I know of where my clicks and mouse movements and demographics aren't being slurped up and sold off to data brokers and AI companies.
Some of this is the technical background on which the site has developed, but a lot of it is the social state we exist in, largely because we have a lot of people willing to actually live up to those ideals.
Like, finding a reddit alternative is not difficult these days. It feels like someone's spinning up a new one every day (even moreso now that they can be vibecoded). However, nearly all of these fail to find a critical mass of users and die off. Even if they have some great technical stuff in place, they lack the most important part of any social network: the people.
We've got the people, y'all. We're here. Many of us have been here for years!
Is it a ton of people? No. But is it enough? In my opinion, yes.
The site has already reached enough activity where I can no longer read every article and comment. It is most certainly not a ghost town. If you don't believe me, check out nearly anything posted to /r/redditalternatives in the past few years and you'll see that we've actually got genuinely good traction and retention.
Part 2
Unfortunately, it does look like we're losing some people. Others are frustrated. Long-standing resentments have boiled up and maybe over.
This has happened to us before. We exist on a wider internet that treats people, ideas, and comments as disposable and inflammatory. I cannot stress enough how much this is now the general background of wider internet discourse, to the point that it's genuinely amazing to me how little we actually see of it here.
So, when it does happen here, it hits harder.
It hits harder because we care more about what we say here, because our ideas and identities don't feel disposable here, and because there's still a social cost to escalating. We feel it in ourselves when this happens. It goes against our guiding principle that things can be better.
I understand the want to turn to technical solutions. I genuinely do. Tildes was founded on some amazing technical decisions that make it the rock solid stable experience it is today.
But a lot of this site's special sauce is what we do here, not how the site runs.
Choosing to act in good faith is something we all do. Choosing to disengage is something we all do. Choosing to push back in ways that we feel is fair is something we all do. We're not perfect at it, of course, but more often than not this place functions because of conscious individual decisions of its userbase that come from a shared set of values about how people should interact with one another.
The cool part about this is just how powerful it is. The same forces that make the bad stuff hit harder here also make the good stuff feel bigger as well. We're all just psedonymous handles, but users here feel like they know one another. People have actual, honest-to-goodness presence on the site, which is truly amazing for something entirely text-based. Someone leaves, and their absence is felt, maybe even mourned.
Seeing that the site's technical side is effectively in stasis does bring me a bit down, in part because I love it here and would love to see it keep improving, but I simply don't think it's a death knell or anything. For one, it's already how we've been operating for years now, so genuinely nothing has changed. Way more than that, however, is the idea that we're here and have been here because of each other.
Part 3
It's with that in mind that I'm going to implore two different groups of people to consider something.
We, us, the people who choose to spend our time here are what make this site work. Without us, this would be a technically incredible but functionally dead space. With that in mind, I ask you to do the following: please treat other users like they're the most valuable thing here. Because they are.
That means when you find yourself getting heated, or you want to shout someone down, or you just sick and tired of
something, please do not take it out on others. Whether that's by speaking your difficult truth kindly or flat out stepping away is entirely up to you, but eroding the experience of others here has a tangible human cost. Please keep that in mind.Also, let's say that you posted something that you genuinely didn't know would be controversial or get pushback, and now it's heating up. Try to listen, understand, hear with grace, and, if needed, write your difficult response kindly or, in some cases, not at all. It's okay to step away too, or simply say "hey, I might be missing some perspective on this" and leave it at that. Not everything has to be drawn out to a protracted and ugly conclusion when an easier, healthier conclusion is available earlier in so many other forms.
You are under no obligation to stay, of course, and I am not trying to guilt trip anyone. What I do want to point out, however, is something that I think often goes unseen. Remember how I said people have actual presence on this site? I encourage you to consider that it's true for you too. You have an identity and standing here.
Leaving means stepping away from that, and again, I have to stress that I mean this not in a guilt-tripping way but in an "it's easy to lose sight of the good stuff when angry or frustrated" kind of way. Time and effort here are generally rewarded, honored, and acknowledged in a way unlike most of the rest of the internet. It makes us not nearly as disposable as we are on other sites. So, I'd encourage anyone considering leaving to think about whether they feel that their time and efforts here are truly being wasted.
If so, that's on us to fix -- not with labels or technical solutions, but with social ones.
Also, I know that there are certain topics and discussions that tend to erupt and light fires. I've been around for plenty of them, and it looks like I missed a few while I was away.
I think what we have to remember is that there is always going to be some non-zero rollover of topics and discussion patterns from the wider internet. People here are going to occasionally fall back to engagement-centric, inflammatory commenting styles. People are occasionally going to touch on controversial topics.
I say this not to excuse bad behaviors but to acknowledge that we have to measure our success not by a goal of zero friction but instead by a goal of meaningfully handling that friction when it arises.
If that means disengaging, go for it. If it means speaking your difficult truth kindly, go for it. If it means speaking your truth then immediately disengaging, that's okay too -- probably even ideal! Erosion doesn't happen as a one-off thing -- it's the repeated exposure that wears people down. If our waters are wearing away your shoreline, then I cannot recommend enough getting out of those waters for a bit. Find another place to dip into the stream -- there are plenty here, nearly all of which are still and calm.
Part 4
A lot of what I've said above comes from me being a longstanding Tildes cheerleader and even apologist.
That's because I love it here.
Do we have problems? Of course. Those will also always be non-zero. People are messy and inconsistent and frustrating. Anything that centers people will invariably have its difficulties. Navigating these is what makes all the good stuff possible and worthwhile though. I think it's why there's a palpable sadness at this announcement. I feel it too. The guiding principle of ours that things can be better sits on the shoulders of change is possible, so when we're presented with a closed, locked door, it stings. It feels like we can't navigate difficulties as well as we could. It feels like maybe things can't be better.
But, just like I encouraged people above to properly account for things, I want to make sure that I do that too.
Which is to say, that, if Tildes were to officially shut down tomorrow, I would still be happy with the time I spent here. At this point I've been here far longer than I was on reddit, and because of Tildes I feel like I'm a calmer, more thoughtful, more relaxed person. This community has had a non-negligible positive impact on me, to the point that even if it goes away I would still think of it fondly.
I'd be sad too, of course, but putting all my stock in an immediate feeling rather than the YEARS of time I've been here isn't the right way to look at things. Proper accounting means I have to take stock of everything and give it the weight it deserves.
So, with that in mind, I'm going to end this with a message directly to @Deimos:
I've told you this several times before, but I want to reiterate it again because you
probablydefinitely don't hear it enough.Thank you.
From one human to another, for making the best online community I've ever been a part of.
I know it didn't turn out the way you wanted, and I'm sure you're beyond tired of moderating us constantly. I'm not saying this to try to pressure you into keeping things going or whatnot -- if you need to formally sunset this place, then I completely understand.
Just know that I'm incredibly grateful for the wonderful years I've had here. I hope for more, of course, but I understand that nothing is forever -- especially not a small, volunteer-run social network that exists on an increasingly hostile internet.
Thank you for the EVERYTHING that you've done: the guiding principles, the code, the ongoing moderation. It's an honor that I get to spend my time here, and I choose to do so because of everything you've built. You've helped establish that the guiding principle of "things can be better" is an actual, actionable thing instead of just a pie-in-the-sky ideal.
You made a better place, and I can definitively say that I'm better for it. Thank you.
I agree 100% with everything in this excellent comment, and the only thing I have to add is:
I'll be honest, one of the reasons I love it here is that it feels "complete" rather than "stagnant", both on the desktop side and the Three Cheers for Tildes mobile app (someone please remind me who built it so I can edit in some kudos).
[EDIT: @talklittle, your app is absolutely fire, hell yeah, thanks to those that reminded me]
What I mean is, to your point, the value of Tildes is primarily social. I'm only speaking for myself but compared to all the alternatives out there (and like many, I've looked) this site feels like it has everything it needs to have as a platform. There's not a single feature on this site that I wish it had but doesn't. The features it could have feel like they would eventually degrade everything you're praising. Some may disagree, but the things it doesn't have strike me as a feature, not a bug.
The only bummer for me personally is that it feels "final" in the sense that @Deimos making the post at all rhetorically implies that there's an expectation that the site will die "sooner rather than later", whatever that ends up meaning in practice. But I get why it was said.
The excellent human @talklittle
Three Cheers is developed by talklittle
Not to "I am Spartacus" this, but I feel compelled to echo that "Thank you".
Just the knowledge humans can and will create something that improves on our lives rather than take from it is meaningful.
You (and everyone) can Spartacus as much as you like!
Nothing would make me happier than seeing Deimos get the appreciation he deserves for the near decade of time, effort, and wisdom he’s put into this place.
I think we all seriously underestimate how difficult it is to consistently make tough judgment calls on our worst moments as a community. That would be draining for any of us, and he’s done it without complaint for years now.
Thank you kfwyre, and thank you Deimos.
Tildes may not be something I am as active on as I used to be but that’s valid for most social media anyway.
I still read the site very regularly. If it were to disappear, I would be sad.
Happy for the time I spent here, but sad nonetheless.
(Recommended ambiance for this comment: A crackling campfire at night under clear skies in a remote part of the Nevada desert)
I dunno, does that make anyone else a little... sad?
Sure, the site works great, I'm not debating that. If you pressed me on the issue, I don't even think I could think of a feature that I'd want added or changed. Tildes is fine as is, and I certainly aren't missing anything.
But hearing that out loud, Tildes is in minimum maintenance mode, even though I know it true in my heart of hearts, is... bittersweet. I dunno. Mark this as noise, but it feels kinda weird to say. Yeah, this is the little camp of tents at the side of the information superhighway, and yeah, eventually it'll be over, and we'll all pack up and move on to somewhere else, that's how these things work. That's how we got here.
I just hope it's not anytime soon.
I'm going back into my tent. See you all tomorrow.
It made me a little sad to post it! Like you're talking about, I think I've kinda avoided posting anything like this because it makes it feel more "final". It's the reality of how the site's been run for years already though, and I don't see it changing, so I really should have done this long ago.
To add a clarifying question, I joined in 2023 or so (whenever the reddit API killed third party apps like TalkLittle's).
I've been debating picking up some small features here and there as I am a dev, and trying to contribute.
Are we saying here that we don't have any intentions to let net new features be developed by community members? (I'm not implying this is wrong, I just want clarification so I can stop and not waste my time with what I've been working on the side).
It's not impossible that I'd merge others' code, but it really depends what the feature is, how it was implemented, whether it has potential impacts on the community, how much work would be involved in integrating/reviewing/maintaining it, etc.
Not only for Tildes, but I would say that it's generally best to talk with the maintainer(s) of any open-source project first before you start spending time implementing something. They may already have plans for the feature that aren't explained publicly, there may already be someone else that's been working on it, and so on. This is especially true recently now that it's become so common for people to point LLMs at open-source projects and drop random, large PRs on them. A lot of projects have started rejecting all unsolicited PRs because it's so much work to sort through the AI slop.
(@Minori)
I have the same question. I was going to contribute to some of the backlog items, but I won't invest time if they'll never be merged...
I don't mean to speak for Deimos, but my interpretation of "No intention to ... Implement new functionality or change existing functionality" would preclude new features of any kind (whether self- or community-developed).
This is how I had interpreted it as well. Since reviewing the code would be a "full time job" ultimately for him, as well.
I’m a little confused: does it mean the site is being slowly sunset or does it simply mean it’s feature complete and that’s it?
And I’m missing some context, what is the failure you’re talking about?
Like creesch said, it's more like the site has gradually been sunsetting itself for a while. I wanted to clarify that I'm just intending to continue letting that happen at whatever speed it wants to, without actively fighting back against it.
The site is basically in maintenance mode, it might get some small fixes but no big features. So not quite sunsetting, slightly above it basically.
As far as context goes. If you look at the bottom of the page there is a footer with various links. I'd start with the blog one to read the original announcement for tildes. Then go through the docs and you'll see that Deimos had much bigger plans. You can also see it when you browse ~tildes.official older posts.
Got it, thanks
Actually it makes me pretty happy. Specifically the part of not wanting to attract new users. Tildes changed a lot during the Reddit API wave of new users. Having more than 100 votes on a thread would have been insane back then. 30 comments in one thread was a milestone achieved maybe once a year. Now we pass both of those regularly.
Back then, I didn’t think that there was a way to expand without destroying or diluting what made tiles great. I am very happy to say that I was wrong. There were some especially rocky patches in the first few months, but things have settled out now. Tildes isn’t the same as before, but it has kept what made it good: honest, open discussions.
But now, I do think we are on the edge of the popularity we can handle. I may be proven wrong again, but I don’t think so. Tildes is not a Reddit replacement. I am happy to have my one small pleasant place on the internet.
Yeah, & idk if i were @deimos, after seeing so many ideas take off & experience incredible success, & then almost all of them slowly descend into rampant inescapable shittiness... i mean it's working so i'd probably leave it alone too
I'm one of ex-Redditors. I'm grateful I got here - thanks @OBLIVIATER.
I didn't know the community before that, I like it as it is (now). I got my 5 invites to send to my friends and later got another 5. I still have all those as I didn't invite anyone. I have friends but they either don't have any interest to be here or wouldn't be able to cope with rules and traditions here. And as I have it mentally set I would make myself reaponsible for their behaviour. And thus they are not invited to be here by me. I also feel responsibility to behave well due to the person who invited me here.
I believe many people has it like this.
I agree it’s pleasant but also I feel like I’m in a bubble here where I get only tiny pushback on things that might be controversial. So either we’re pretty aligned politically or there just is almost no engagement when people disagree.
I have seen some spirited arguments here but it’s been rare for me to be in the middle of one.
This is where you're dead wrong. You're in one right now and you just don't see it.
OK, just kidding.
People who engage get banned. There's a few familiar names that had been around awhile that are no longer around anymore and when I go to their profiles, it says they are banned. It's also true for less familiar names.
Because there is only 1 moderator on the site, and as his post laid out here he doesn't have much time devoted to the site anymore, the way I'd put it is that there's very low tolerance for friction, because more friction requires more moderator attention, and moderator attention is an extremely limited resource here.
I spend half my life wishing companies changed things less. Tildes is pretty solidly functional as-is imo
It’s been this way since before the 2023 influx. Deimos only updated some stuff, such as adding the society tab, as a result of the new users. But this is the norm.
Oh, I know. I've been here for a while. It's just... different when we hear our fearless leader say it. Half joking here, but it... made me feel something. I dunno. Humans are weird like that.
I get what you mean.
For any other Silmarillion fans, it made me feel like how, after the Valar conducted the War of Wrath and imprisoned Morgoth in the timeless void, Manwë made it very clear to Elves and Men and everyone else left alive that there would be no more divine intervention.
This is it now, no more restructuring of the circles of the world, make of it what you can.
It's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just nice to think that, in a time of great need or strife, gods will ride in with thunderous might to save things. And sure, they occasionally lightly put their thumb on the scales if they notice things going really badly wrong - like sending the Istari when Sauron started his alt-right podcast that led to full on fascism.
But mostly, they're in Aman, focusing on things that they enjoy and make them happy. I don't know a good word in English to describe that feeling.
The Valar were bad gods for wasting their time in their pleasure gardens in Aman while Men suffered atrocities in Middle Earth. Fëanor was a 100% right when he said that the Noldor were off to fix a problem the Valar had ignored for too long.
(please mark this comment as off-topic)
That's also my interpretation of the text. So I refuse to mark it off-topic, you can't make me, thou jail-crow of Mandos!
(In a way we're all jail-crows of Mandos in we don't know where we're going or if there's anything next. But in a much bigger sense, for me, that lack of knowledge isn't a prison, it's freedom. Anyway I didn't want you to interpret my Silm quote as an insult, blessings of Ulmo - who gave a shit and tried his best - upon you!)
I think that's a tad uncharitable to the Valar, though. Eru Ilúvatar didn't make the Valar to do things in the world. He made the Children for that. The Valar were for building the world, setting fast its pillars, ensuring that Eru's plan goes off as well as possible.
Part of Morgoth's kink is that he doesn't understand that. He's chosen to be an active force in the world, and in fact, all of the maiar who choose to take an active role in Middle Earth–as opposed to merely accepting the charge given them by Manwë, such as the faithful Istari–are "evil." It's part of what defines evil for Tolkien in his creation.
From a certain point of view
A wrong one
Personally I think Tolkien's in-world definitions of evil and an omnipotent god/God (as well as the nature of Orcs) were part of his internal struggle to square his Christianity with what he saw in the war--and the broader Problem of Evil--and that he did not ultimately succeed in any of the three, either for himself or his world
Yeah, I don't buy his conclusions or his morality either, but I find eavesdropping on his reasoning fascinating anyway.
The last half of your comment is how I feel in a shared office space listening to my coworkers...
Same
<noise>Morgoth's kink would be a great band name</noise>
But what did the Valar so about the Children? Almost completely drain Middle Earth of elves so they could live with them. Why? According to the text, because the elves were fair and pretty and the Valar liked them . Elves that were meant to stay in Middle Earth because their job was to prepare the world for the Second Children.
The Valar were meant to make the world. They do this once until Melkor turns. Per the text, the Valar get tired of building things only for Melkor to destroy them, so they build an impregnable fortress in Aman and spend the better part of an age in their island paradise while Melkor has complete free reign in the rest.of the planet. The absolute only reason Morgoth didn't go on to dominate the entire world is because the Noldor kept him contained in his fortress for half a millennium during the Siege. And even after the Siege was broken, Morgoth was busy waging war on them in this tiny corner of the world. And by the time Morgoth wins, the Valar are finally moved into fixing a problem they've ignored for who knows how many millennia.
The out of universe reason for all of this is that Tolkien was a Catholic trying to marry his brief system into a fictional world full of contradictions. But taking the text as written, I have a very poor opinion of the Valar.
This is why Tildes is great and doesn't need to be changed at all, ever. This thread right here. Bookmark it in case you forget.
It's probably worth remembering that the "text as written" is a compendium of writings produced over decades and collected and edited by his son after his death. Tolkien himself was aware that he was never able to satisfactorily square that circle, which is partly why the Silmarilion was never published while he had editorial control over it. We only have the work because Christopher Tolkien realized what a tragic loss it would be if it were never made available to readers. Some grace should probably be given on that account.
For what it's worth, I absolutely agree with your assessment. Tolkien's greatest weakness–if it can be so called–was his insistence that his creation be consistent with his vision of Christianity (OK, maybe his "greatest" weakness was his love for and imitation of archaic verse forms, but the Catholicism comes in a close second).
But I think that's only really a weakness in a textual context; metatextually I think it makes his ouvre even more rich and fascinating. It throws the incompatibility of the pre-Christian mythic modes with Christian theology into stark relief, and sheds light on the tremendous shift in thought that must have accompanied christianization in medieval Europe (not coincidentally Tolkien's subject of expertise).
That's a fair point, you're right. Tolkien never really meant to publish the text we got. And I want to be clear, this is not a critical view of the text. I liked the text, and I liked Children of Hurin, and the little we get out of out of Beren and Luthien and Fall of Gondolin.
Part of my read of the Valar is that Tolkien (as a Catholic) and I simply have different moral frameworks. Tolkien, like many Christians, struggled with the problem of evil in a world with an omnipotent omniscient God, and is following the old tradition of trying to solve it. I think the result is that he creates an arrogant, hedonistic pantheon, but that's absolutely not what he meant to do. It's merely my personal read. I like it, I don't think it's bad writing.
And this is one of those weaknesses that actually got worse with age, not better. He spent such a long time trying to fix problems in his world that did not exist, like the constant attempted retcons of Galadriel that would've made her character more and more boring by removing the core flaws that made her story fascinating.
Obviously we're allowed to spend our time like we want, but it reminds me of Newton spending the better part of a decade trying to find numeralogical significance in the Bible.
It's very European too. He didn't want to explicitly wrote a Christian story because it was boring, and because literate European really liked pagan pantheons. But as he decided that his world was Earth, he needed to square it with the Christian creation story. And ultimately, he really can't..he wrote a flat Earth where the Sun is a god. He was able to change some thihg, like bending the world, but bot others.
And I 100% agree with you that it's one of the things that make his world so incredibly rich.
That's the strangeness at the heart of Christianity in general and its European fork in particular that makes me so endlessly fascinated by it. It's such an obvious logical trap! So obviously an invalid syllogism, prima facie, and yet theologians and other devouts have spent 2,000 years trying to hammer it into some sort of valid logical shape–and mostly failing miserably, by my lights.
On some level Tolkien must have thought to himself, "I'll make a world that makes sense of evil. How hard can it be?" And he ends up with deadbeat gods and a really thorny Orc problem. I guess I gotta hand it to him: he kept trying even beyond his death, in a way. That's better than most.
And most religions avoid it, either by having the gods be limited, or dualistic or distant. You only get the problem if you insist there's only one god, that that god is all powerful and all knowing, that that gods precedes everything (including logic and morals), and that that one god is good. The vast majority of religions avoid this trap by avoiding any of these things. Christianity still really struggles with it, like you said.
I kinda respect Tolkien for it. Because he really could've just said, orcs are just evil, they're orcs, we're done. But it obviously gnawed at him. He cares about his fictional world in a way that makes me really jealous, as someone who occasionally tries to write.
Christianity conflates the concept of a personal deity, which is the sort of “human relatable” entity (specifically the sky father figure that exists across many traditions), with the transcendent divine principle that platonists/neoplatonists call “the one” or that Hinduism calls “Brahman.”
Many Eastern and pre-Christian pagan traditions more or less say you can’t do that, and realization of ultimate reality requires specific mental and spiritual conditioning to even attempt, where they treat the personal deities as a sort of “on ramp” to do that. Christianity decided they had one simple trick, which is a very attractive proposition, but also prone to sending most people down weird and counterproductive rabbit holes while not meaningfully inoculating against the allure of superstitious thinking and grifty, charismatic cult leaders.
Tolkien seemed to sort of be spiraling around making the same realization from first principles.
One of the things I know about ancient Mesopotamian beliefs was that you could have your personal god, your family god, and the national (city) god. You wouldn't just pray to the national god, that didn't even make any sense. The king had rituals in how the city interacted with the national god. You would offer thing to your personal god, and holed that it would intercede on your behalf.
Like you said, Christianity didn't actually get rid of this, not for most Christians. Christisns pray to Mary, the saints and angels all the time asking for intercession. Now, this obviously doesn't make sense because God knows everything so what's the point (is Mary going to convince God???), so they need to have narratives around it (it's just a respect thing, etc), but it's the exact same behaviour. The human doesn't think the creator god will bother so the human prays to the caring mother goddess or their personal god (perhaps their saintly namesake) because that somehow feels easier. Even the way people appeal to Jesus as opposed to the Father draws from this.
This is the consequence of imposing a universal religion in a species that is more or less naturally animistic. We won't ever stop seeing ghosts of our ancestors and spirits in the forest.
Islam actually does a more successful job at tamping down at this behaviour, but generally through force. The second the grip lessens (shias), they start praying at saintly tombs again.
So I grew up Catholic and in fact they do teach that Mary will convince her son using the wedding at Cana where she convinces him to perform a miracle when she is aware of a problem before he is.
Just for what it's worth, it is intercession and it is the belief that Jesus who is God could not deny his mother what she asks of him. Rinse and repeat for other saints.
It's just an interesting belief. Presumably, an omnipotent omniscient God doesn't need convincing, and presumably such a deity doesn't love the human that have birth to its body more than an innocent orphan or a mass murderer. Like, would someone be picturing an actual conversation where Mary goes up to Jesus and makes her argument? And then Jesus talks to dad, or does it himself?
Mary herself is also so obviously your standard earth mother goddess too, like the Romans would absolutely not give way on having a divine mother figure they could pray to. If civilisation collapses and people unearth our ruins, I don't think future archeologists would determine that Christianity was a monotheistic religion. Depending on where they dig, they might even list a full pantheon!
I just love that that humans can come up with whatever ideas we want, but we always come back to the things that make sense to us innately, regardless of what dogma says. Like, how many Christians do you know that believe in ghosts or that their ancestors are angels? The former being expressly forbidden by the Bible, and the latter not even being a thing. But you can't get rid of geists or ancestor worship, no matter what you do!
You have to remember that Jesus is "Dad". But if Jesus wouldn't do something for his mom, why turn the water to wine?
I personally think Mary was a 14ish year old girl, not an earth mother goddess. She lacks, I think, much "earth mother" aspect to her "Mother of God" aspects. She's portrayed more as obedient and pious throughout her suffering than anything more Earth Mother-like. Plus Jewish folks of the time wouldn't have intentionally mapped most of this, and the Romans saw monotheists as atheists. I won't deny there's some bleed back and forth but trying to map deity to Saint to deity feels like missing the point a bit. Especially with the saints who weren't just legend. Ymmv.
(Ghosts aren't prohibited by Catholic dogma and "joining the choirs of angels and saints" is a liturgical phrase that combined with iconography gets theologically confusing)
Jesus is "Dad" in the formal dogma of the church. In practice, regular people think of and talk about Jesus in very different ways from the Father. They pray to them differently and think of them differently. I grew up Catholic too, this is personal experience. The dogma of the Church is absolutely irrelevant. The actual belief system is how people on the ground act like.
YMMV, but if your Catholic community Mary was thought of as a 14 year old child, then we ran in very different Catholic circles. For us, we prayed to a big motherly statue of Mary looking down on us kindly and wisely. She was thought of as a mother figure. I don't want to presume, but I am willing to bet money that for the vast majority of Catholics, Mary is a mother figure. And if you have a mother figure you regularly (very regularly!) pray to, you build huge statues of her, you attribute miracles to her... I'm sorry, Christians can come up with whatever fancy Latin or Greek derived terms they like, but that's anthropologically just run-of-the-mill Mother Goddess, with a dash of the womanly griever and mourner, another common archetype in religion.
To be clear, this isn't coming from the Jews. This likely wouldn't have been a thing in early Christianity. This happened when the Romans mapped the new legal belief system onto their society. Christianity very quickly became, and still is, the religion of the Roman people.
In terms of mapping saints to deities, Christianity isn't the only religion with fancy "not a god" names for its deities. Zoroastrianism does it too. Islam struggles with defining djinni sometimes. In Shinto, the difference between a god and a spirit is academic. My point is that if we saw something like saints in ancient Akkadia, we would refer to them as gods, because they quack like gods and swim like gods. A thesis specialising into them might point it out, but we very commonly refer to the Zoroastrian yazatas as gods, even though they're closer to concepts of truth. But, uh, they're just regular gods when compared to contemporaries.
I was speaking to how "I" see Mary. She's absolutely venerated as a mother figure, but I don't believe she fits into an Earth Mother category based on her characteristics.
I really just came in to say that there weren't fancy words to pretend intercession was "just respect", it was intercession.
I like comparative theology fine but I'm not that interested at the moment. Was just giving the theological point for why intercession is considered a thing in a way that I think contrasts with your broad statements
Also I've been rate limited and I find that annoying so I don't want to go back and forth.
Ah sorry, this is a topic I enjoy, didn't mean to make it unpleasant. Have a good rest of your day ☺️
There are communities (around specific websites) that are still around that I've been part of since before 2010 that are in the same low maintenance state. And I'm pretty sure it's where I find the most value still online. It's fun to hang around and see what everyone is posting or talking about. As long as the site stays online, things will stay pretty much the same. You see the same people over many years even though their own lives change a lot. I think it's good to have grounded communities like that.
The constant struggle of software vendors to gain ground in the attention economy has somewhat conditioned us into thinking that software that isn't constantly evolving is as good as dead. A piece of software which initially releases with tons of shortcomings that are then addressed in subsequent updates is more exciting and garners more attention than a piece of software that just works well out of the box.
There is however software that functionally stands to gain little from more attention, especially without the commercial incentive and explicit goal to sell access, more copies or ad spots. Consider Tildes as both a piece of working software and a community. It's the community that drives me to engage with the software, not the other way around. The software just has to let me do that in a convenient way, which I think it has successfully achieved. This simple relationship really only looks odd through the lens of commercial social media, where dilute content exists as much if not more to drive users to engage with software.
Resist the urge to worry and embrace finished software!
Move slowly and don't break anything
Well said.
You know in tech and software there's an ancient saying "Software is never finished." However I think in a good way that doesn't apply to Tildes.
Being in “Maintenance mode” is not inherently bad per se, it just reached a point where it reached a “feature complete” for its function.
Granted I wasn’t expecting to explicitly see it being called in maintenance mode, but it is what it is, not like there’s a new feature I want on the top of my head.
Tildes reminds me of an internet era where people spun up their own forum software and had communities with their own moderation, tone and range of topics. There were general discussion ones with tens of thousands of users (but realistically a few hundred at most who are active), like tildes. Somehow, communities are better when they have a human limit, when they do not constantly threaten to spill into the “infinite” of social media spaces. It’s depressing to have every major internet community now live on one of maybe 5 mega-platforms. It also seems unhealthy.
I vaguely remember a similar thread where I once pointed out that I believe modern “social” media behaves more like a “broadcast” than anything genuinely social. The cut-off for the distinction is probably a few thousand users. Maybe tildes could never be a platform of millions without sacrificing its ideals. Maybe the better way of thinking of it as a solution is having other people spin up their own “tildes” (I believe the code is open source?). The site as it currently stands is proof that you can have something stable and alive that lives outside the reddits and discords of this world.
I was introduced to this idea via the Monkeysphere, which is just a meme term for Dunbar's Number. We really aren't meant to handle the immense numbers we encounter via most social media, especially when you have to factor in how people will react differently to the same content.
Yea, it’s essentially my half-assed application of Dunbar‘s Number to social media moderation. You only get to see the posts of people you’re friends with and if you want more than 1000 friends or something you have to apply for a broadcast license that will be reviewed and can be revoked. Tongue-in-cheek but I legit think it would make the world a better place.
I love Tildes. But I think my ideal would be less BDFL managed and more social experiment to see if we can distribute every critical task. I’d love to start such an experiment some day. I might even use the Tildes code as a starting point.
StackOverflow delegated a hell of a lot and I know that ended with a pretty nasty culture, but maybe it could work better outside of the structure of that site.
I think you're kinda screwed either way with a site that size.
What do you think the max sustainable size is then? Though now that I think of it, Stackoverflow is probably also an extreme because of the nature offering questions answered for free, I suppose.
I've long had an idea for a social media site which would slowly partition itself as new users joined and also unpartitioned itself as users became inactive. Every user is part of some explicit or implicit cohort that is attempting to maintain a specific size and rate of posts and comments. If implicit maybe just the ranking changes so that you tend to see your cohort content first before anything else. If explicit then cohorts could vote to reshard into smaller ones and some graph partitioning algorithm would shuffle users around. In implicit mode you could try different cohort sizes and see which ones actually work best. In an explicit sizing mode, communities get the final say on when big enough becomes too big.
I think this would work wonderfully well for like a chat app with rooms / channels like Discord. For forums hmm I think its a little tricky to engineer and also explain to the user how it works. I do think the idea is ingenious though. Like let's say 500 is the implicit limit for a community and you've got 1000 in a World of Warcraft sub, now that sub automatically divides into 2 cohorts both still WoW. Each community has an equal share of active/inactive members ranked, users are assigned to a cohort based on their interactivity with other users so that people you like are in your cohort. Users can also switch cohorts (limited use to prevent mass switching or hopping back and forth), then something like posting and commenting outside your cohort is limited. Hmm I think this si what I mean by engineering complexity. Still, super cool idea mate.
I think what’s more important is the growth rate, eternal September and all that. I don’t think I can say anything about the absolute size. I do like the size of Tildes though.
I hate to say this in writing, but original reddit mostly had that figured out. The culture of varying sub-reddits, the ease of creating them, the inclusion and high visibility of custom wikis and rules, and the "knights of /new" made for community moderation where posts conformed to the sub culture in order to be seen. Counterintuitively, things could rise when we didn't care as much about the culture as the content. I think we all miss the days when we had a strong community that was led by people who truly knew what they were talking about. I strongly miss subs like /r/wicked_edge and /r/personalfinance
Those subs are still there, but they're no longer made up of people who are passionate and knowledgeable about the subject matter. They're easily politicized, and filled with low effort content. The same gif responses pop up during browsing over and over. There are no longer any communities where you can enter as a novice, and easily be brought up by the community and resources there. You can't ask questions and get replies from people who have more experience than you, you can't be guided by their experience and knowledge. That is what I really want in a replacement, and what nothing comes close to. I doubt it ever will be available again in my lifetime, and that's wild a shame to me. Instead they want us to ask a chatbot, because they can get revenue from it. They want low everyone to post every thought they have because all that matters is an engagement number.
Its an typical chicken and egg problem that most people here are aware of. I think people are now more and more busy especially those passionate people with specialized knowledge. Unless they themselves try to create a community its very hard to get them to participate in one just willy-nilly. It's why I think anything of that sort would take years. Maybe 10 or 20 years ago building a global community's infra is hard but now its relatively do-able with a bit of personal investment and good engineering.
I think you would need to separate the technology from the community. Develop a core site and services, have functions that can be turned on or off as needed, and then people can just set up a server, install the software, and run it.
I always thought it’d work better as a way to spin your own forum, kind of like PHPBB is/was. Or IRC.
As a programmer, I hope I can get away with saying that there is a peculiar streak of nastiness that runs through that particular subculture that dates much farther back than Stack Overflow. Back in the late 90s and early 2000s when I was trying to learn Perl, I noticed on Usenet that the most innocent questions from beginners would be met by a shocking level of hostility.
I've thought about this a lot too, possibly since before I discovered Tildes. But we've all seen what volunteer moderation looks like, over time. The politics that develop, and so on. Safe to say that it would a huge accomplisment to create a community like Tildes with distributed moderation/control.
Part of the reason Tildes works is that the moderation is quick, decisive and mostly stays in the background. Once the politics of moderation and governance leak into the community it can drag everything down.
Still, it would be fun to try in some future with more time in the day.
Thus little.camp of tents will probably be here next to the superhighway forever. It is up to us if we will stay here or jump in a car and join the highway. I rode my part of highway and I don't like riding it anymore and if I do it is just a quick trip and then back to my tent here.
The company here is in the camp is great, I like peoe here and I'm not planning on leaving. I imagine only a bus full of even better people would have to go on the superhighway next to our camp for me to even try and follow them wherever they are going. But it seem unimaginable to me this could happen (and my imagination is vast!).
I like that this camp exists and I can cope with its kinda minimalism. It has all one needs to live life simply, yet comfortably.
And now in real words - I absolutely understand Deimos and the motivation behind (not) wanting to change things. And I stand on his side, I wouldn't change much if anything at all. And it is great to hear it from the site owner in such a plain and understandable words.
Perfectly ok by me. I don't want the nice local pub to suddenly change its menu and become a franchise or something like that.
This analogy particularly resonates with me.
It happens to physical spaces, it happens to digital spaces, all increasingly so over the years it feels1, at a far greater rate than new small pleasant comfy spaces are popping up to fill the gaps left. So to know this particular corner of the web that I like to lurk on isn't at risk of going down that particular path right now is rather comforting.
1 This may well just be a symptom of getting older but that's a whole other flavour of distressing notion to bear any mind to.
Thanks for this. Is there options for continuity? What happens if you're gone? I'm sure you've thought about funding options? Can you share those thoughts?
There are some simple plans for continuity just in case, but it's old. This is a good reminder that I should review and update it.
What do you mean by funding? Some people are still donating—it's generally less than the ongoing hosting/etc. costs but there's plenty left in the accounts from all the donations over previous years. I've never paid myself or anything, all donations have only ever been used for site expenses, and there should still be more than we ever need unless the site stays active for a very long time.
Feel free to not answer, but do you know what you plan to do if/when that money runs out and it needs to come out of pocket?
One banner at the top of the page announcing that fact would probably get all the donations necessary.
I don't think it's worth worrying about unless it actually seems to be approaching, but likely some combination of: figuring out ways to reduce the ongoing costs, requesting donations from the remaining community, and/or just paying for it myself.
It's a text-only forum with (relatively) few users, it can probably run on a cheap VPS for like 10€/month.
Edit: welp, I was off by an order of magnitude https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/1vjt/any_significant_changes_to_tildes_are_extremely_unlikely#comment-iepn
I find this surprisingly high.
Text-only? Do you not see that beautiful 144x144 logo at the top of the page??
I think there are people here who would be willing to run the site on their own server if the need arise.
I also run my own server and I would be willing to host the site (just provide hardware, ypu would still be the one who runs it), but I don't have 99,99999% availability and I can't vouch for that. Datacenter is better choice still, but more costly.
I imagine Raspberry Pi could run the site - computational requirements wise. The most important thing would likely be to have up-to-date system and software, I presume.
Anyway - could you share specific expenses for a year? I donate measly dollar a months, but I guess if a few of us do, you/the site should be covered.
It generally works out to around $100/month between everything like servers, backups, DNS, domain names, email, and a couple of other minor expenses.
Me, who has been donating $3 a month through GitHub: I'm doing my part!
Thank ypu fpr the insights! I didn't thinm it is that much. I stand corrected.
Thanks for the reply. I meant revenue/keeping the lights on. You've answered fully. Thankfully it appears to be a non-issue.
Thank you for the clarification and thank you for creating and running the site. It's the best anonymous online community I know of!
Thanks for posting!
This does all feel bittersweet. On the positive, it's the way the site has been run for a long time and honestly, the fact we haven't changed except for required changes is exactly why tildes has stayed around and we all (OK most of us) like it.
@Deimos would you consider doing a proper retrospective post on tildes as an experiment/project?
I would be really interested to hear about how you feel about the site's success in more detail, those failures and successes you mentioned in other comments.
I understand a post like that might take a while to write, but I would sure really enjoy reading it!
Thanks anyway for putting this place together in the first place, and opting to keep the lights on. It's clear that you understand online communities in ways that most mortals do not.
Hope life is treating you well, best wishes!
If anyone on Tildes has experience as an interviewer and, if @Deimos was interested, it would be cool to see an interview--whether that be as a Tildes/blog post, YouTube video, podcast episode, voicenote, etc.
Good on you Deimos. Tildes is the only “social media” I use. And if it ever changed from what it is that would be a mistake in my opinion.
...i'm not a tildes-hound but i must confess that i visit lemmy only when i'm craving trashy engagement; i appreciate the more selective tone cultivated here...
I feel you. I lurk on YouTube but have not actually logged in for years at this point. I just read and move on.
I don't necessarily need a full documentation overhaul, but it still sounds a bit somber hearing this out loud. What were the true aspirations, and why does it feel like the site fell short of those?
Was it a matter of budget (Times, money, and Man-hours)? I know the design of the site was made to limit explosive growth and thus prevent an Eternal September effect, but was there still hope for more growth than what happened? Is it a simple matter of personal life perspective changing over the last 9 years?
"Sad" isn't quite the word I'd use to describe my feelings here per se. I knew for a while in my bones as announcements became more sparse that some features I was hoping for weren't coming. But more "unfulfilled". I just would like to get a better perspective of what plans were imagined and why they felt they fell short. A small retrospective for future potential social media creators who want to defy the factors of modern social media that Tildes did.
I'd say you can just look at a lot of the older posts/docs/etc. and see how they were aimed at a different scale. The obvious example is the very first one, the announcement blog post. The things discussed in there aren't like, "we can address this by building a small site for a few hundred regular users".
There are a lot of places you can see it in the site's mechanics too, things that are far too complex for this scale. We have stuff like a complex hierarchical tagging system, hierarchical groups, and so on. I still think they were good ideas with interesting potential, but at Tildes's scale, we probably don't even really need separate groups at all.
I don't think there's any specific cause. I made a lot of decisions, and a lot of them were mistakes. But as with every site, there are a ton of factors that affect things, and you can never really know what would have made things turn out differently. As I said in the post, I certainly don't think of it as a failure or have regrets that it didn't end up being larger.
Melancholy or somber is how it feels to me.
I definitely felt the same way reading that as you most likely did. I don't think I'd consider the site a failure by any means, but it seems a tad discouraging that Deimos feels like it's no longer worth working the project either. At the same time, I am an extremely unimaginative person and I don't know what I would change myself. I think the only thing that would really help discussion personally is image uploading for posts and comments, but I imagine that would be a huge cost increase in terms of hosting as well.
Thank you for this post. I had wondered if you'd open the door to allowing others to push proposed features, but ah well. The site is perfectly functional right now, any new features would basically be "bonuses" rather than absolutely crucial (well, maybe besides a "block user" feature).
Thank you for all your hard work maintaining the site! I do second the question about the plans for continuity though. Really hoping there's not a bus factor of one.
While I will echo the somber sentiment of this thread, can I entreat others to potentially look at it as a positive?
Tildes has gone through ups and downs over the years, somewhat reactive to changes by Reddit, and yet it remains. Perhaps the original userbase has shifted with exodus waves, but the flame of the Tildes torch has been continuously lit. Yes, there has been internal drama, but the core ethos of meaningful text-based discussion hasn’t been lost.
In an age where AI threatens every corner of the web, Tildes operates as a small but mighty bastion against the tides. Locking down user growth insulates it from the growing influx of AI slop and manufactured outrage. Tildes is not immune to the general sways of the public sphere, but we have less of a chance of being infiltrated by astroturfing due to the low user numbers. That may end up being our strength.
Our own format excludes low-effort users as well: long voluminous comments are prized, whereas short quips and puns are discouraged (or labeled as noise). Maybe this stagnation in embracing change is actually a strength? This “off putting” aspect has organically found its own human verification rather than subscribe to the misguided efforts seen across governments in the modern world.
One thing I’ve always appreciated with Tildes is the commitment to the ideals of the Socratic dielectic: that through discussion and good faith arguments we might strive closer to achieving something beyond current knowledge and edge closer to the Truth. In practice (with notable examples of users feeling disregarded/silenced) this can be debated at length, but that’s the magic: the healthy debate/discussion is the point. Otherwise we might as well be throwing our thoughts into the æther. Even if another human connects with a thought/comment from another it is a net-benefit to communal understanding. It’s my personal philosophy that this shared understanding is the whole point of life. The problems we face only seem surmountable with a shared understanding and empathy that comes from open communication itself.
To adapt /u/delphi’s analogy, we are a humanist cult collected in makeshift/open source camps of our own doing. We tend to our small fires of enlightenment, dotted alongside the superhighway in hopes of attracting those offbeat users, but with no intention of inviting the throngs of incurious and caustic elements that make the rest of highway toxic to engage with. We can redefine ~society/life as we see fit, but only with the consent of those who agree to participate in our own little experiment on this sometimes-cozy corner off the beaten web.
Sorry y'all for the subsequent rambling, I guess I've been compelled to have thoughts.
I'm reminded of something McLuhan said in Understanding Media, when an old media is made obsolete by a new one, it is then elevated into an art form. In our current moment in time, when most of social media are slowly being taken over by AI-generated contents, I'm actually quite optimistic that an inadvertent consequence would be an increased desire for authentic human connection online among the larger public once again. Bespoke community platforms such as this one will soon be in good company before we know it :)
The hard part of community building is not developing sofisticated features or organizational structures but the grunt work of keeping up activities and enganging with fellow members. There're a few lessons that people learned from the early days of the internet that needs to be revised since the landscape has been different for a while now. For one, it's no longer enough to just 'build it and they will come'. That may be applicable back when the internet as whole is expanding and everything is new and unsettled. Nowadays most people are on the net, with major established platforms that most people already belong to. Lots of ink have been spent on how to defend against too many people coming in and not enough on how to attract people to join. I think this is an area where online community builders could learn from those who've done the work in meat space.
On the internet, there's generally a conflation between being snarky and being insightful. We see this on Reddit, where the snarkiest retort are celebrated, regardless of how frivolous it is, because snark is enough as a substitute for substance. I see a shadow of that still prevalent here as well, where the more effortful a post seems to be the more tolerant it is for being snarky, while positive and supportive sentiments are often only seen in playful banters. The former is not good for healthy interactions but even more detrimental in small community like this because generally it's much easier for people to leave than to stay. Established platforms has advantage in terms of abundance and diversity, which makes people more willing to tolerate the usual negativity. Small places like ours don't have that luxury so we need to be more attentive.
I actually believe the site in its current form is close to sufficient and this community still have lots of potential to thrive. The danger is people, especially those who still have the energy to contribute, feels like the effort is wasted and the exhaustion in dealing with the potential reactions not worth it. I have a feeling the current set of feature on the site is still under-utilized but to the earlier point, there's no technical workaround to just trying to be decent toward your fellow members.
So, um, that's all from me. If anyone has plans after this I'll be all ears.
My hope is that nothing changes and this lovely place far outlasts all the other "social media" sites.
My only suggestion is that there should be some plan in place in case of an incident (database gets deleted, sharp increase in bot spam, DDOS, etc.). Let's make sure there are no existential risk to this community.
Those types of things should generally be covered. I still have monitoring, DDOS protection, backups, and so on (in fact, the backups were the cause of the last downtime).
Thanks for everything Deimos. Tildes has a lot of good ideas in it and I'm grateful it has been here as long as it has.
Do you have any new projects going on?
Projects? Let's see, I'm working on a solar-powered, rain-barrel-fed automatic watering system for all our flowers in the garden, I've been slowly clearing out and reorganizing cluttered storage spaces in our house, I'm starting to move circuit production to Vulcanus, trying to get better at recognizing when I can route into auto-timed safejump okizeme setups, ...
Oh, you meant stuff on the internet? No, nothing like that.
Circuit production to vulcanus you say? You planning to ship in plastic or liquefact coal for it? I already do bulk circuits at vulcanus with liquefaction, but I feel like I want to spin up bulk bioplastic and ship it from gleba.
Yeah, I'll just do it all on Vulcanus for now, but plastic from Gleba is an interesting idea for later. I haven't gotten there yet on this playthrough, it's a new one I started where I'm forcing myself to use things like trains, the circuit network, and the quality system more heavily. I didn't really go into much depth with a lot of that kind of stuff my first time around.
Still a Strive player? Or have you moved on to other games lately? There are so many new releases!
Yeah, so many new games. I've been trying to play Marvel Tokon recently, but the online play is working so poorly that it's mostly just been frustrating. Hopefully they'll sort that out soon.
I've played Strive occasionally still, but I've mainly played SF6 ever since that came out.
Yeah, Tokon is a bit of a mess... Maybe I'll try again in a month, hah. I didn't manage to stick with SF6 myself; took a break, and came back to the genre recently. Been playing Dizzy in Strive and both Azulas in Avatar Legends.
Ngl seeing this in bright orange as soon as I opened up the website made me laugh
Sounds great! I, personally, am not opening Tildes immediately after closing it because I am hoping against hope that it will somehow be different. This site encompasses the entirety of my social media diet. I would have happily stayed at the old site, had they simply let it be what it was. Then again, this place is way better, so I guess it all works out eventually.
Thanks for all the initial efforts and thank you for keeping the lights on. I don't think I can add much more that hasn't already been said by others.
As long as @cfabbro keeps posting about Humble Choice and @talklittle keeps making the app, I'm here forever.
I'm a man of simple tastes.
I’m a newcomer. I’ve been here about a year+, and post in spurts then go dormant for a bit. (This is the backstory).
I actually love this site overall for what it is. I like the community, and the fact that it is small. Truly enjoyable.
I enjoy topics that everyone dos not comment on. For example, I notice that some weeks no one comments in the “what you have been watching TV thread”. WHICH IS FINE. We aren’t always watching new things. But I am happy it is there for us to discuss.
The BIGGEST THING IS THIS. I find you all authentic. I would be surprised if anyone was a bit responding. There is no agendas, and everyone who does respond is giving an authentic response. Not a meme, or a one word flippant answer.
IMO, that is the strength of Tildes. I hope it sticks around for a long time.
@deimos You did a wonderful job with this site. This may not have been the intent, but the beauty of the site IMO, is the simplicity and Niche of it all.
I personally don’t even want to tell people about the site, as I like it the way it is. But that is counter intuitive. If you want more users, I would consider courting people who look up “social media alternatives”. It is how I found you to begin with.
Fine by me, I'm very happy with the minimalist structure. I don't need or want more than Tildes offers: users submitting and commenting, like the forums of old.
@deimos I’ve noticed slower and lower moderation from you.
Please reconsider allowing a few trusted individuals greater moderation privileges.
Simply allowing them to lock a thread before you can decide what to do might help.
As I said, I won't be doing that. It might help some cases, but it would also introduce other problems.
If you think something needs moderation attention, please send me a message or use the Malice label. Those are the best ways to get my attention on something quickly (and you've never done either of them).
Just to quote the post you're replying to
Look man, he didn’t even need to write any of that. It is known.
Just like it’s known that he won’t respond to my request. Charles Rules of Internet Arguments.
But he will read it. Might even think about it.
Btw. “Please reconsider” means I am acknowledging he already said no. And I am explaining why. And I am suggesting something new. Some users have elevated moderation privileges to edit titles and tags. My suggestion is simply to elevate them a little more. Not banning or deleting. Just freezing overly heated threads. Pretty sure that has never been discussed.
Sorry if I offended. Neither of us would be the first person in this thread to misread or miss something.
Sorry if I over reacted to feeling misunderstood.
It's been a few years since I joined now, and whilst I would probably classify myself mainly as a lurker (though having quickly looked at my post history, there's more than I realised), I really do enjoy the overall community and pace of things that are present here.
I guess what I'm trying to say, is that despite the site/project being in maintenance mode, I do hope that it will be around for a long time to come yet.
Whilst I haven't mentioned any specific names, anyone that reads this thank you for making the site enjoyable.
As someone who's making a new platform, I really empathize with the sentiment.
It's very taxing on 1 person to create anything with a certain bar for quality. Tildes is a non-profit that just makes it even harder as it would take a ton of donations for this even to work. With every new feature there's an increasing amount of nuance and details you gotta look at because the overlap with existing features keeps increasing. We have a lot of technical folks here, so all of this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
I'm not sure what sparked this post but I for one am very grateful that Tildes exist.
Feature-wise, I think for a text-only forum, it's extremely well designed. I can't think of much to add. The design is minimum, by design.
There have been several threads lately discussing feature adds such as block users, new labels, and pronoun tags next to usernames.
Ah I see. Yea I guess I'm not on here as much. Hmm, just my opinion but most of these doesn't seem to be necessary and might actually add ways to reduce discussion.
Blocking someone feels nice cuz its most likely someone who disagree with and you don't want to deal with again. But if everyone starts doing that and only view comments by people they agree, how does one get out of one's own echo chamber?
For me, blocking/hiding helps me tailor my own level of engagement and often makes it healthier. It also keeps topics or behaviors or just certain things out of sight which just provides a better experience. It's the same reason I block certain tags- just taken to a user level. This might be a hot take but I'll make it: sometimes echo chambers aren't even a bad thing. It just depends on how deep it goes and in what direction and if harm is caused by that. (There are plenty of "opposing opinions or views" to my own that I've already heard ad nauseam and never need to hear again or remotely entertain for as long as I live and encountering them isn't going to make me budge the slightest so it's useless, and is nice to be able to essentially force myself not to engage)
The assumption of an "if everyone will do that" problem is a big leap though, those that want to have involved drawn out conversations on certain topics won't use a block option so widely, and so on.
As much as echo chambers can sometimes become a bad thing, I don't feel the need to perceive rescuing or preventing people from entering their echo chambers as a noble goal (not saying you do, but some do)
I think such a feature will yes reduce discussion potentially, but in beneficial, not detrimental, ways. I don't perceive of 'in-depth discussion by everyone on every topic' something necessary to preserve. If people stop engaging and doing that feels beneficial, that's okay IMO. If I want to step out of my own echo chamber and encounter things I disagree with at a fundamental level, it is because I'm making a willful effort to do so and the more options sites give me to do that on my own terms the better.
For me, it's not that I would block/hide everyone that I have the smallest amount of disagreement with (though trust me, I get it, I probably come off as someone that may indeed do that). There's a lot of nuance to how/why/which topics/what behaviors/what conversations/etc I would take action on. And if people wanted to use it that way they could, and more power to them if that helps them curate the experience they want, but there's more to blocking/ignoring than just "they disagree with me in some way". I've already explained this elsewhere, but it's useful in a number of ways and lot of it isn't even some direct personal anger or anything.
That said, I'm just discussing the option in general, which means this is kinda off-topic now I guess? Or at least tangential, because said things are not going to be built-in to Tildes. I can and will use scripts/extensions/etc to achieve the experience I want, however.
Hey look happy to discuss this even though we're probably not gonna agree. That's ok.
I think your general point is that blocking is often used as more of a curation mechanism instead of anger/reactionary mechanism. My take is that curation should really be used on themes / communities and less on people.
I'm of the view that generally you create a community like IRL when people are in a room and you can't "block" someone in a physical room. I look at this from a very meta community view. Your view seems to be more that from a consumer of a forum, I want to have options on how to consume content and if that doesn't hurt anybody else, why not and a lot of people probably share this view. This I don't disagree.. I think we just look at this differently.
Re echo chambers. Again I just have a different view. I think echo chambers are significantly unwelcoming to new users so I like forums that are designed against it. I also understand that its of course very nice to chill and vibe with people you like and agree with. :)
Weirdly enough, I lean the opposite way. Although there are definitely topics I find boring and try to avoid, I think excess curation can be harmful exactly due to that echo chamber effect (though this mostly an issue for personalized-feed type websites, like YouTube, not Tildes so much).
I suspect blocking people is much less likely to cause that kind of issue — though this could be colored by the fact that I, personally, only block accounts that spam a lot, that engage in harassment campaigns, or that are very clearly bots/AI slop. Blocking people has never materially changed the type of content or the kinds of opinions I encounter online. (But curating my feeds absolutely has.)
Make sense. I should have explained myself a bit more there. Self curation or too many options definitely will self-select one into echo chambers.
Re blocking seriously annoying people, its more like as a moderator I rather have users report AI slop or spam rather than just blocking someone because that to me is a platform issue and should not be solved by individuals blocking such person. For people those opinion or vibe one simply cannot stand, again as a platform I think its better if people learned to ignore it instead of "Ah let me block this person, I remember him last time making dumb points". In a large community this rarely causes any problems because there's so many people and blocking hundreds won't really change much. For small and new communities, this can cause a lot of weird nuances. Let's say there's 10 people active in a community, some has blocked 1 or 2 other people, so then if the person they blocked is a top comment then you gotta decide if you want to show that or not, If you dont show it, then it causes confusion. Or let's say someone you blocked has a comment that attracted a lot of replies etc etc.
Gotcha- we indeed just view it from completely different angles and that's okay.
I really, in no way, want my online experience of communities and discussions to be that close of a simulacrum of how they operate in the physical world. Especially since there is so much that physical proximity entails (body language, barriers to escalation, lack of anonymity, some extra levels of human connection) that digital communities can't replicate (and they don't need to try to)
I think the digital world is a different beast altogether and should be approached as the different beast it is.
(and to me, for echo chambers, the point that they sort of weed out some new users I actually find to be a good thing. It happens in a very well self-policed Discord community I am in and works very well there and even with our 'echo chamber' there's still a variety of differing views and opinions on various things, it's just that the community has boundaries and some 'base views' that we won't budge on and if you're a new user and you really don't vibe with the atmosphere we have, or can't really stay in those boundaries, it's beneficial to everyone that you don't stick around, basically)
Yep and I totally get it. I mean its a complicated topic because as you said if its a nice niche community with its own rules and vibe, echo chamber is not an issue. But on the other end, there are hordes of communities on Reddit where "if you don't believe in X or do Y" => "you're a horrible human being". Even that might be OK if its niche but what if its a popular community like /r/science (just random example, I don't frequent this one to really know).
Another dimension is that because I'm making a forum as a passion project, most of the time I'm thinking about forums from the "moderator" or "admin" standpoint not from a user standpoint.
Cheers.
I don’t think exponential growth is what anyone expected or wanted. But it is a bit disheartening to hear there’s no further growth desired. What were the aspirations that “failed?” If anything, Tildes has shown successes as an active forum and aggregate.
Given how many of the planned features described in the docs are for managing community at scale, I think growth was one of those aspiration. Just maybe not growth for its own sake but growing while still somehow maintaining quality. That's probably not something the creator has control over though, you can ban people for doing things but cannot force people to do things.
Perhaps the aspiration wasn't technical as much as societal: that there would be a critical mass of people who enjoy long text and higher effort communities. That when offered an alternative, society would leave tiktok et al algorithmic junk spaces and gather together on Tildes. The site didn't fail, and it wasn't that Deimos wasn't able to pull it off technologically, but the huge number of people who enjoy reading and participating instead of endless 5 second scrolls just didn't materialise.
Sometimes I imagine Tildes being a site kind of like Craigslist but a version of Craigslist where the geographic separations are invisible but also not 100% strict.
I think something along those lines would be the only way to really scale to millions of people (ignoring the bot/authenticity/moderation aspects which would need to be solved separately) and not have a deluge of content where people just doomscroll and where discussions are broadly distributed but still have a small enough number of comments where people still feel like they can have a voice on that platform.
But actually I think something like that would be really horrible for all the obvious reasons that it becomes a bit like a Facebook Feed and I much prefer the way Tildes actually is.
I would LOVE a city-specific social media page. I feel like whatever niche there is for this is dominated by random little Facebook groups and city subreddits, both of which have their own issues.
Also NextDoor…which is 50% a cesspool of the worst sort of HOA folks, and maybe like 25% useful
From the early days it was intended to be able to operate at the scale of Reddit or Digg in their primes, but a load bearing pillar of how that would work was going to be a reputation system to do most of the heavy lifting in terms of moderation. I don’t think anyone’s actually been able to crack that nut yet. I know @Deimos had some exploratory ideas around that but I think they either didn’t pan out for whatever reason or he didn’t have the time or support to flesh it out.
Fine by me. I'm not the most active person here, but I still check it regularly and comment every so often. Thank you for creating this place.
Very upsetting news. Some features I lament we shall never see on Tildes now:
My reaction when Tildes won't be getting Microsoft Copilot integration
src
I just joined this site today after lurking for so long, and I have never felt it needed more. Though I can understand how older members would feel. But nonetheless, happy to be here :D
HACK THE WORLD!!
Hey, welcome.
May I ask the Avenue of how you joined the site? I know Cfabbro checks a Reddit thread, and older users can send invites. Just wondering
thanks, nope it was through fediverse[1].
[1] - Very good Introduction Video
Can't speak for 0o0, but it's how I joined fairly recently. I do hope people will stick around a little longer. I'm enjoying it here too.
Thanks Bluefly, glad to meet you
Glad to meet you as well!
There’s also an email address you can contact to get an invite. That’s how I joined back in 2023.
I haven't posted in awhile, since 2024, but came back on a whim and saw this post which immediately broke my heart a little. I still donate via GitHub despite my absence, and I think I'll continue that at least awhile longer because I respect the heck out of what you tried to accomplish here, and what was accomplished by you and the community. This website is frankly still beautiful to look at and use and I hope it lives out the "long defeat" a la Tolkien.
Are there any decent alternatives? Reddit got overrun by bots, decentralized solutions like lemmy and mastodon don't work properly and regular people will never use them.
I like tildes and was hoping it would grow, but that's obviously not gonna happen if it's already essentially on life support.
The interesting thing about that is how that decentralization service seems to be migrating to centralization. While you can register for an account anywhere and comment on communities hosted anywhere else, it seems like most people just register for an account at lemmy.world (the largest instance) and participate in communities hosted at lemmy.world (which seems to host the most communities too). If all the communities you want to participate in are hosted there, having an account there too simplifies things (and avoids technical "federating" issues).
At some point, could they become large enough to where interacting with any other instances (decentralization) is seen as an esoteric feature that can be ignored? If so, they could become a more notable thing as time goes on and become something that more people could use. It wouldn't be "Use Lemmy! Figure it out..." and more "Just use lemmy.world and don't sweat the details too much."
It is worth keeping an eye on because of that.
I go to lemmy universe for memes, but nothing else. In my experience, it's just like reddit but smaller - with the same toxicity and other issues included
I tried it a few months back. Looked like a twitter clone, not a content aggregator.
I didn't like it much as it was overrun by political propaganda.
Thanks for the heads up! I might give it another try.
I don't post here much, but my reddit-alternative turned out to be Discord. I don't post there much either tbh, but some more than here. Without threads and what have you from reddit it isn't the same, but the signal to noise is higher than reddit. People generally post about the topic and that's it. New folk arrive and leave, and you notice it, the servers I'm on have a smaller community vibe.
I'm working on what I believe will be a spiritual successor to old Reddit (before subreddits). I'll be sure to share it on here when it's up and running. Do you have any ideas on what you'd want to see?
My main goals are:
More importantly, comments won't have vote buttons and they're sorted by new. I think everyone is entitled to an opinion, and voting encourages echo chambers. I don't really want to create a "safe space", but more so a place to encounter an infinite number of opinions. I have a ton of other ideas that I will eventually map out in some form of documentation.
I'm exhausted from alternatives not existing, so I've made it my mission to create it. I'd like to hear what others would want from a website like this.
FWIW Tildes did experiment with eliminating the vote button for a little while and posting slowed down. The consensus was that the place felt quiet and dead because there was no indicator that anyone was seeing or reading anything anyone is saying.
My recollection is that we removed the visible vote counts, but not the vote button. I liked the change. Removing votes entirely would have a pretty adverse effect on comment sorting, though.
Understandable. I still don't like votes because of the "right vs wrong" mentality they create. However, some feedback could be good. I've thought about displaying a view count to indicate activity levels. I'll think about some other metrics and how to display them.
I like how HN does it, with private vote counts.
I think removing the vote button for comments is the right way to go. I like what Tildes has done different than reddit like allowing comments to 'bump' older posts and such, like old forum style, but having votes I think is a mistake. Of course sorting just by new has its own set of problems too, I've seen other people mention various ideas over the years that sounded compelling but of course I can't remember them now.
The rest of your description is open-ended enough that anyone can put their own assumptions about what that might look like in there and to my eye, the 'infinite number of opinions' description doesn't seem appealing. Not that I don't like varied opinions, just that I don't find an 'infinite number of opinions' to be a worthwhile goal on its own. There's got to be something more compelling than that, otherwise it's just a waste of time trying to filter through an 'infinite number of opinions' to find something that's relatively unique or higher thought/effort.
Personally, the one thing that I've found as I've gotten older is that I find a lot of opinions seem familiar through my history, in that I can recognize that I thought a certain way when I was X age, and a different way at Y age, and another way at Z age, and I sort of have grown to dislike some aspects of the intermingled commentary of people in anonymous/pseudonymous platforms because sometimes I'll see something someone has written/argued and think 'you'll see the other side of this in some amount of years' and there's no words or response more effective than time experienced that will affect that person's perspective. I'm not saying there's anything actionable in this viewpoint but it is what came to mind when I thought of 'infinite opinions' and imagining finding anything worthwhile to me currently in something like that.
That is fair, but not quite what I meant by that line. It's really difficult to a) explain my idea in a single comment, and b) know exactly how the design will make people interact with it.
I agree entirely that a sea of conflicting opinions on every post does not sound attractive. However, if you adjust the type of posts (and comments) you imagine, it doesn't seem so bad. In my mind, I think of posts relating around: cool things you've found, interesting rabbit holes on the internet, interesting blog posts, content you find funny, STEM related topics, etc. I would like to avoid the outrage news cycle that's very popular today.
It's important to note that: self posts will not exist (kind of, see here). If someone wants to offer their opinion as a submission, they will be forced to find some other means of doing so. Whether it be a blog post, YouTube video, or whatever. I find that a lot of lower quality posts are from self posts that don't require much effort.
When I say infinite number of opinions, I basically mean you're free to say something without it being algorithmically buried. An interesting experiment is when you go to a Reddit post, simply sort the comments by oldest. It looks almost the exact same as when sorted by Best. Many websites have tried to combat the problem of showing you quality content first, without much success. If, instead, the majority of comments are quality, it becomes less of an issue. It's why I want to focus on a simple design, as the text on the screen is what actually matters.
I've come to the conclusion, like you said, that intermingling many different people does not work out too well. The primary demographic is essentially: mature, open minded adults with a technical background, who are capable of knowing when to be serious. I have a hunch if I'm able to start that seed and let growth be slow, it's possible to exist. I'm not sure I exactly captured my idea, but like I said, I plan on documenting all of this in a way encourages this behavior, without telling you what to do. I hope that helps clears things up.
Edit: Mildly related, but another idea I had would be to mark a comment as "context". For example, someone submits a post to a news article, but there's a ton of background knowledge required to understand it. It could be pinned at the top for you to read above the rest of the comments. It's not quite a "fact check", but more help you understand the full picture of what it's referring to. It'd basically be the reply to someone asking "source?" That idea is less fleshed out in my mind, but is something that could be interesting.
Edit2: clarified "with a technical background" as the demographic
Interesting thought. My whole experience with reddit and now Tildes has firmly made me swing the other way. Posting links is easy, starting a good conversation is not. To me websites focused on discussion and making self posts first class citizens generally seem to have a better community as well. In fact, part of the decline reddit went through is because they made self posts second class citizens. To be fair, they also try very hard to have people not link to things externally and just make it about media consumption.
But before new reddit was a thing I always thought that subreddits with a primary focus on self posts did offer better quality.
With link posts you tend to get a big larger chunk of people that just respond to the title. Where with self posts that is, unless you are socially just inept, not done.
In my mind it is also why Tildes is such a good place as self posts sit right aside link posts. And if you post links you are heavily encouraged to do so with a piece of text next to it.
Anyway, that is my thought on it and context as to why I am now very curious about how you arrived on the other side.
This is a great point. It's a part of the puzzle I'm still trying to solve - but do have some ideas around. Part of me feels like responding to the title is okay, as long as that "pinned context" comment is there. I've also considered blocking commenting until you've either clicked the post link, or agree that you've already read the article. From my experience though, a lot of mainstream articles don't provide much information beyond the title. I think it really just depends on what it is.
It's my understanding old reddit had no self posts initially, and was disliked by most when it was introduced? I can't really say, as I wasn't around then.
I'll take back calling them low quality, because that's not entirely true. Simply, it's not the kind of content I'm looking for in a link aggregator.
With Tildes specifically, I notice a lot of meta talk that never goes anywhere, people asking for advice that's very specific to their situation, or posts asking for movie/music recommendations. There's nothing wrong with users that do post them, I just prefer being linked to something interesting, fun, or whatever weird stuff there is on the internet.
Essentially, I want to build something other than a direct Tildes clone. I don't really have interest in building a community of people that all know each other.
I also have a feeling that no self posts means you're forced to put effort into learning how to host a website or writing up a blog article to think your idea out completely.
It's difficult to explain and layout cleanly, so I'll spend some more time thinking about it!
Those could be interesting yeah.
That is somewhat related to why I consider self posts often better than a lot of link posts. For context, I have spend (too many) years moderating on reddit and seen the ready stream of low quality often just spam link content. Rarely I have seen an article that is fluff result in good discussion under it.
Where with self posts that ratio is different. Anyway, I do get your perspective a bit better now. I think it also comes down to preference about the sort of content and subjects you want to talk about and from there I am interested to see what you'll eventually land on.
Very early reddit also didn't have comments ;) I more or less was referring to reddit before they started working on new reddit where they really started to focus on visual content and less on anything text related.
To me those are a sub category of what self posts can be about. But in that category I do have to agree that certain types of self posts aren't all that conductive to engaging interesting discussion.
Anyway, thanks for sharing! Honestly interested what you'll end up with.
I was thinking about your comment some more, and I think what we're seeing right now with Tildes is partly an issue with self posts.
Personally, the people leaving Tildes are overreacting. But with all the meta talk, it kinda snowballs how people think.
It generates discussion, but it's too much discussion? It's like the threads are so big, it's just a huge mix of people misunderstanding each other.
It's another thought I had: I actually don't like how deeply nested comments can get. It's like every level of indentation gets more off topic, when the post itself is the more interesting topic. It's okay when two people are replying to each other, but when other people join in, it gets really messy.
Do you have any thoughts?
And thank you for engaging with me! I wanted to mention, too, that self posts aren't entirely off the table. I just want to avoid making a clone of things that already exist. It could be cool if they existed in a different form, or maybe in a dedicated area.
As you can probably guess, I still have a lot of unanswered questions. A lot of them basically boil down to not being able to predict how users will behave lol.
Another tangentially related aspect is I intend on writing blog posts that I'll share on the website. It's for a few reasons, but I kind of hope it will encourage others to do so too. It's not fair to assume users will do all the work for me!
In the end, I want something other than traditional social media. Of course, alternatives do exist, but not as many as I'd like. I figure if I build what I want, put effort into designing every aspect, users will mirror that in a way.
Find a way to limit negativity. Most social media is unusable (or at least really miserable) because of it. I don't want to be angry at everything 24/7. Emotional manipulation in general. It's infuriating how many pet subreddits are full of dead animals milked for pity karma.
Figure out how to fund it. If you chase investor money, it will get enshittified to please them. If you rely on donations only, you end up like tildes - with no salary and no staff, you basically rely on an enthusiast to never lose their enthusiasm. Which they obviously will. Figure out how your website will get worked on 4 years from now when you are no longer all that interested.
Entirely agree, I have the same frustrations.
Donations is the model I'm aiming for, but in a way that's a little more apparent than Tildes. I remember reddit back in the day had a little "monthly funding goal" bar on the right side.
I'm building it in a way that minimizes costs as much as possible. I would love for one day to have paid moderators, as it is not easy work. I also have a strong opposition to venture capitalists. I like to think of Wikipedia, but without the obnoxious banners/emotional manipulation tactics they use.
Honestly I’m kind of thinking that paid social services are the best way to go. I keep thinking about how the WELL is still running in spite of costing $15/month. I can’t see what is happening in those conferences but something is keeping it going!
The Something Awful Forums are still running, even though registering an account is $10.
Made me look! Yeah, people are still chatting. There is an AI conference now. (Their word for a forum.)
It’s not somewhere I go very often. I didn’t cancel my account out of inertia. Demographics are old and older.
Like Tildes, they are in “cozy mode” and the software doesn’t change.
I've never heard of the Well before, but the concept is interesting! Do you use it?
Good luck with your project! Let us know when it's up:)
I actually kinda wish the old forums had vote options, it would be really nice to not have to page through 100s of replies to find the solution I need on old car forums and etc
Like yeah I’m sure it’s abused in discussions about like politics and general opinion based discussion but every so often someone posts a troubleshooting post here and I love that the top answer is always the whole solution you could ever want.
I've had the same thought. In my mind, there is a different area for "q&a" self posts. Things that actually do have an objective answer, or would be helpful to know the majority opinion. For example: the best way to do something, the answer to a question - basically just stack overflow. I'm not sure there's a need for recreating stack overflow, but taking advantage of the demographic I outline here could be interesting.
This q&a idea isn't fully fleshed out either, as I'm not sure how it'd fit into the feed if posts you see normally. I just think a comment voting mechanism doesn't fit well when trying to have quality, nuanced discussions.
“Find the posts in this thread that best answer this question” seems like a perfect LLM use case TBH. You can literally just have it auto-sticky the most helpful posts based on sentiment analysis of responses once the thread gets long enough.
There was actually a test phase of Tildes where votes were entirely hidden. It was walked back, though I don't recall why in particular. Perhaps someone else who's been around a while recalls it better?
I was one of the minority that thought it was great!
From what I can remember, a lot of people use vote count as a proxy for engagement with their posts and comments. A vote means at least someone read what they wrote and thought it was worth something. Without some sort of feedback, short of a full comment reply, they felt like they were shouting into the void.
There's surely a way to provide some loose feedback like that without actual votes. If you're willing to accept some tracking (first party only), you could do some clever things like tracking time-on-screen of a post or comment, normalize it by average reading speed, and then provide some aggregate feedback viewable only to the author like "X users have read your post, Y have skimmed it, Z have skipped it, and N have returned more than once". There's all sort of things you could do here.
Of course the flip side to any feedback with a measurement - votes included - is gamification. Some of that can be mitigated by keeping it all private to the author, so there's no contest, but it can still be a useful tool for a scammer, spammer, or anyone else primarily looking to drive up engagement to their own posts rather than just participate in a community and feel seen.
I can totally see why the lack of feedback felt empty. I mentioned this in another reply but I think displaying the view count next to your comment could go a long way. Or perhaps knowing if the person you replied to read your comment.
My mindset going into this is "the simpler, the better", but those ideas you threw out are worth considering!
The reason a vote is an expedient way of doing this is because it respects the privacy of the user and lets them give the knowledge of their actions at their choosing. While some of the things you are talking about are cool ideas, I would run, not walk, away from a news aggregator or discussion site that explicitly tracked things like how long you viewed an article, or limited discussion to people who had clicked a link, and used that as a metric to show other random users. I'm not even one of the more privacy minded people here in Tildes.
Votes are a mini "opt in" that you can choose to partake in, or not. And I think it's important to be allowed to choose.
Edit: I am not trying to yuck your yum, or be hyper critical. My tone should be perceived as "as kind as possible" and I also acknowledge that it's ok for you to build something that is not for me, but I wanted to give you an idea of why something like that might not work for everyone.
To be clear, privacy plays a major role in my decisions. For example, a username will be the only requirement to sign up. If I did have an option to gate comments to users who clicked the post link - it would be done client side. I'm not entirely sold on the idea, either. It's just something I've thought of to stop users from impulsively replying to a headline.
What you're describing is basically what modern social media does. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube all track how long you engage with something to show you more of that thing. My idea goes in the other direction - ignoring all that stuff. The next logical step in tracking user activity is showing them ads, which I have no interest in.
Haha, that's a long way of saying I appreciate your input, and I agree with you. It's hard to describe everything clearly when you can't see it yet, but my hope is it'll feel a lot closer to home than most other websites. Tildes is a big inspiration, it'll just have some key differences.
Yeah having to build in surveillance apparatus to avoid a vote would probably be a deal breaker for me too. I think tracking click-throughs would probably be enough, though in many cases someone will post something I’ve already seen and I’ll upvote it because it’s good content without clicking through. You’d miss that, but I’m not sure how much you’d be missing. It also might be a feature, like if you’re frequently posting things that EVERYONE is already finding elsewhere then is it really adding any value being posted here too? Maybe no? So maybe no need to encourage it, no matter how softly.
If you look around, there are actually a hugeeee or massive amount of alternatives. Most of them are 2-week projects or are an literal copy of Reddit with um shittier UX. So much for enshittification. I know being on TIldes whatever you're making will be a lot better.
I guess my main question would be, how would your alternative be different from Tildes in a meaningful way in addition to the no comment voting and date sort?
I've noticed the same. Every time someone links an alternative, it's either: dead, no thought was put into it, or like you said, just a complete rip off.
I think I answered your question across my other comments, but I'll try to answer it directly:
Also, the algorithm I've chosen is similar to Reddit, but rewards commenting on top of upvoting (among other metrics). Tildes has more of a forum "bump" style system.
Otherwise, I feel like it'll be structured closer to hacker news, but with a user base similar to Tildes.
I see what you mean now. Yes those are substantial differences. I'm feeling a bit of Digg's original spirit there.
I also really like your take on self-posts. I think that's a very fresh perspective. I also like the no communities part. I think especially for slow-growing communities it is a natural segregator and people automatically pick communities they like. That's not necessarily a bad thing but makes growing more painful.
I enjoy chatting about this stuff cuz I'm making a 2026 gaming forum as a side project. It's a very specific niche in that I wouldn't call it an alternative to Tildes or Reddit. Yet a lot of topics you covered in your other comments are very relevant.
I look forward to seeing it come alive! Frankly I'm surprised someone haven't built Lobster.re or HN for non tech people so this could be that!
I'd be happy to chat about it in general, I have a ton of ideas and have done a lot of research into what went wrong with various alternatives. Feel free to message me, or we can switch to some other platform.
It's also surprising to me that no one has built what I'm going for. Tildes is basically the only option, but everyone should have choices to pick from!
I'll DM you, we can do Discord if you have that or honestly anything else I'm good with too.
I've been thinking about making my own niche site like that for a while and have been collecting ideas and opinions on what it could look like. Could make for a fun discussion topic as its own post, seeing what people value or take issue with for that kind of platform.
Probably a good idea to have a topic to gather everyone who wants to build another site, pooling ideas and efforts, collaborate on a best possible successor and make sure it can take off, instead splintering into multiple solo attempts.
I'll be down for this. Never hurts to have a lot of different spinoffs of Tildes each slightly different and designed intentionally for a different purpose and perhaps content and consumption pattern all the while sharing the initial vision of Tildes of being a more discussion focused space over emotional bait.
Edit: I missed the collaborative part. I think that's definitely do-able for other new projects. My forum project is way past the MVP stage though but I love talking about this stuff so would be down to just engage and help refine ideas.
I’ve been flirting with the idea of doing something similar, but I was thinking about having identity managed by ATProtocol. So basically the entire site and its contents, tag hierarchy, etc. is a monolithic thing that lives on its own database. But people can auth in with a Bluesky account (though the user account would still be able to post under a pseudonym). Then that way you get to piggyback off Bluesky community moderation to set a floor that pre-screens the egregiously bad actors (e.g. spammers, scammers, noxious bots) and the fact that it’s tied to a real account they presumably use somewhere else means you can make moderator actions, like bans or mutes, stick.
My approach to bad actors is to simply limit how many users can sign up at a time. Then there would be periods of opening the sign up to the public. It's not perfect, but at least I can control how fast the site grows and not be swamped with new accounts.
Bubbles has a similar approach to what you describe, but with mastodon accounts.
In my experience the only thing I want to see is a really strong hook that will make people join, that should be priority number 1 since without people the rest doesn't matter. From what I've seen the last two alternative that had some success are cyberspace.online and cozy.talk.
What's something you consider a strong hook? A small but lively community is that hook in my mind.
Sure if you already have the lively community it could work, but don't expect it to form by itself.
cyberspace.online and cozy.talk both have striking aesthetics & UX, something that makes them feel cool and fresh, but at the same time I think that's a bit too niche. Lemmy had a technology hook which can work but it also appeal only to a certain type of people. Things I wouldn't consider as hook are stuff like privacy, anonymity, basic features, no ads, details of the algorithm, etc. these are all good to have but it's just not exciting.
how are we doing for expenses and all that?
Is mentioned here, seems to be alright for now.
Yeah I'm pretty ok with that. Personally I think a little more traffic would be nice. I only check in once or twice a week and it's pretty common for the half the active posts to be the same. But I can't name a new feature I'd want to see implemented
Thank you for your efforts.
The site is cool as it is, no need for shinny new things that nobody asked that ultimately go nowhere or worse, make a site user-hostile. (cough redesign cough).
Thank you again for creating this corner of the internet and I hope you have enough to pay the bills for a long time still.
Since I haven't seen an explicit answer, @deimos are you open to merging PRs for any of the backlog items?
It's worth noting that there were posts from talklittle awhile back about work on Tildes codebase. @talklittle and @Bauke were added as maintainers.
Specifically in the post I linked, it said this
But there have been no updates since then, so I'm not sure the details of what is happening with that, if anything anymore. I'm not sure between those 3 people who is able to provide insight on what is the status of all of this and what it means to people who want to contribute. In talklittle's post there was a link to documentation for those who wanted to contribute, but again, none of that necessarily means anything if everyone involved has moved past that.
talklittle and I tried to make updates happen together with Deimos but unfortunately I think at this point it won't be happening.
I'm still interested in developing Tildes but it's discouraging to see changes happening in gitlab without them being deployed on the live site. And regrettably this topic confirms that I should try to let go of that continued interest and put it to use on other projects, I already have way too many going... :P
I really like this corner of the internet, Tildes (the community) is pretty great and Deimos has done a good job of cultivating that. But on the flip side Tildes (the software project) has languished and I wish it hadn't.
I just wanted to cut in here:
@lostwax observed that no new invite codes are issues since joining and emailing for codes no longer works.
I've verified with someone I invited back in December 2025: they do not have any invite codes.
It used to be that newer folks get invite codes after a short time. If emailing no longer works, and newer users don't get any more....
Then basically we've been invited to someone's house party, it's been really great, but the host has decided it's late and he's going to bed, help yourself to the remaining snacks, there wont be any more pizzas ordered, don't let anyone else in and last person please turn off the lights and lock the door on your way out.
I thought perhaps you and @talklittle should know.
Indeed, I'm aware. It's unfortunately only something Deimos can weigh in on as he's the only one that can give users invite codes and has access to the invites email inbox.
A temporary solution may be to post a new general topic here where people can comment to request an invite code and others can offer their invite codes that are not being used.
I'm uncomfortable with inviting more users if that's not what Deimos wants. The invites mechanism was something intentionally put in, worked for years, and then intentionally and quietly turned off. I've enjoyed being here very, very much, but it feels entitled of me to add to a burden someone no longer wants.
Not gonna lie, this post hits harder to me than Deimos' post does, only because I had already known that Deimos wasn't working on the site anymore and I think many people did as well, so none of that was news to me. Even the declaration of lack of changes didn't necessarily shake me because I remembered in talklittle's post that he said that Deimos was still the one deciding on what made it live to the site.
So to rectify that conflict of what Deimos said I had hoped maybe you guys were still continuing in the original vein of the 'community fork' sense that it would potentially allow for the creation of new tildes sites to pop up, but I certainly can't fault anyone for feeling dispirited about the situation either.
Not for me personally as I'm not a coder, but I assume others might ask, do you know if either you or talklitle would still be open to accepting contributions if there is someone significantly motivated enough that would intend on starting their own tildes site? Is that even within your scope to be able to do that as maintainers on the official repo, or would such a person just be better off making their own fork?
I'd recommend forking in that case, I don't think continuing development in gitlab.com/tildes/tildes makes sense if it'll diverge from what's on tildes.net
And ultimately Deimos is the owner of the Tildes gitlab org so he'd have a say in anything that happens too. With a fork anyone can make their own decisions.
As with @Grumble4681, I also had hope in the community fork/maintainership. It seemed like the best path forward for us. I understand though that priorities have just not aligned in this case, and it likely won't be possible to make work. I appreciate the efforts from yourself and @talklittle all the same.
I wonder if there's a third option, something which basically keeps using tildes server/db and reskins it plus adds new popular features. People could choose which interface to use and it requires nothing on deimos' part. Assuming tildes is open in that respect and deimos approves of it, of course.
So tildes will always require an invite for new users to join? I wish tildes would remove that invite and open the gate. I don't care about the other features. Oh well
Oh god, please no.
I saw what happens with popular blogs and subreddits, its always become echochamber and powerplay.
Invite-only is the primary reason it's easy to keep the bots, advertisers, and trolls away. It's easy to prune a branch of bad actors.
As soon as floodgates open, it becomes an arms race.
Yea, minimal maintenance and arms race cant lead to a good outcome.
Genuine question: why?
Personally, I think it's a terrible idea based on what I've seen happening to other forums and subreddits. But I'm curious about why you would want that
Just my take but most likely it'll just attract more bots and spammers vs. the typical Tildes user we like here. Its surprisingly hard to get people to sign up to a new forum, even if all you need is an email.
If anyone believes otherwise, please enlighten me as I really need some ideas. /s
Fair, I suppose that does settle it. This website gave me lots of things for a while - even including friends I met irl - and particularly due to the efforts of @teaearlgraycold with his mc server. It was fun while it lasted, but I guess the time has come at last.
If someone really wants to stay in contact with me, send me a PM so we discuss whether we have any overlapping platforms or whatnot (not that I'm expecting to receive more than 3-4 at best). I'll otherwise abandon this account and my alts in roughly a week, but I'll continue logging onto @teaearlgraycold's MC server until it shuts down for this season.
Met vriendelijke groeten,
The Lactobacillus Lady
Wait, why are you leaving?
OK have fun
Poochie was an alien?
Btw, you, Fae and Choco are the three most recognizable (to me) and my consistently favorite members. So also thank you for being here while you were.
/offtopic, but FWIW whoever labeled this as noise is a jerk. Another swing and a miss for labels I guess.
It hasn't been labeled Noise, it is labeled Offtopic (which I'd agree with).
/facepalm
OK that makes more sense, thanks for the clarification. And thanks for keeping the lights on.
Several of her posts were marked noise lately including multiple on-topic contributing ones. So yeah, it is a real jerk thing to do.
fyi that you can counter "noise" labels by upvoting, IIRC at a ratio of 4:1. So, upvoted.
I don't think we've ever interacted as I don't post often, but I've always found your contributions to be meaningful and worthwhile. I hope you find happiness on your other platforms!
Your presence on this site will be missed, I always enjoyed reading the posts you made, especially your recent less-serious posts on this site (and the new un-serious recurring posts). Best of luck in the future, hopefully we'll still cross paths on the Minecraft server before this season ends :)
Though we haven't interacted much (I've limited my posting time hard), I'll definitely miss your spirited voice and perspective.
It seems to me that some of the missing safety functionality (legitimate asks, IMHO, under present circumstances) can be emulated through use of Tildes Re-Extended to highlight usernames and filter topics. But that's just one more layer of effort in a world of exhausting online interactions where people who behave in damaging ways are given excessive license, over and over again. I'm sorry this has been hurtful and has created a hostile environment for you, me, and others. I hope you can find a more benevolent community.
I understand the position that attempting fixes beyond what we have on Tildes now is likely to cause more issues than are resolved. Ultimately, I don't think there will ever be, or should ever be, technological solutions for all human problems. A geological age ago in Internet years, I'd suggested the "Malice" tag, under the assumption that there'd be enough people moderating to detect and evict users with consistent patterns of hostile behavior. That hasn't materialized, and Tildes' norms have drifted towards more tolerance of JAQ-ing off, sealioning, dogpiles, and all the usual online community entropy.
I've seen too many good, kind, thoughtful people leave because they've had abrasive interactions, and aren't finding enough positives to stay. It's a self-reinforcing cycle - using community standards for surfacing hostility fails as the user base becomes more generally hostile. It's a living example of the "Evolution of Trust" game.
The thing is, these are problems with humans, not just the technological affordances of Tildes. Again, I hope that you can find a place that fits, and that you can keep it for as long as you're at home there.
In my experience, I’ve found that there’s very little genuinely bad faith/hostile behavior. I believe the vast majority of folks here have participated in good faith. What I think is happening is the combination of different thought patterns (some users have very rigid/analytical thought patterns that do resemble JAQing off), different worldviews/circumstances (capitalist US versus ex-communist Central Europe, atheist versus evangelical Christian), and the general decline of internet interactions raising everyone’s hackles. This is on top of the fact that text isn’t always great at conveying tone.
As the cliché goes, YMMV.
When someone says, "this is my experience", it's not an invitation to say, "no, you're wrong", or "have you tried x, y, z" without reading the post. That's just rude and socially unaware, at best. It definitely feels hostile when it's repeated, or turns into a dogpile of similar denial responses. Recent example...
Maybe it's the general unfriendliness of other sites and their discourse cultures bleeding in here, maybe it's the threatening nature of (gestures at everything) current events making everyone more fearful and guarded. It's also worth considering that Tildes has selection biases due to the invite-only system and the Reddit invite source. Each wave of new users has brought some acculturation problems, with fewer active "old hands" to guide behavior in accordance with the expressed philosophy of the site. Explaining why low-effort, discourteous, or derogatory posts are unwelcome, over and over, isn't anyone's idea of a good time. Of course people just want to hit a label and make the problem go away or become someone else's (Deimos, usually) problem.
IMO the most hostile thing in that thread is the edit in the OP. I don't see anyone operating in bad faith.
The person in question was wrong, but people are allowed to be wrong. They could have handled things a lot better, but so could almost everyone participating in that mess. And then they ended up leaving over it.
At the end of the day, we're all sharing this space. I think people on all 'sides' of this debate need to be more courteous, assume good faith, and if they can't, just take a break. We need less volumes of poorly sourced counterfactuals or anecdotes every time someone disagrees with someone else and more agree to disagree and move on. That goes for everyone in that thread.
I think that if you look at that thread in isolation, then your point is "correct". The most obviously hostile thing is the (I think quite understandable) edit made by the OP. This is one of the issues with systemic sexism. In this case, it is useful to think of the straw breaking the camel's back analogy; someone coming into a space that is explicitly supposed to be for women ~life.women and then telling a woman that she is wrong when she is complaining about how things aren't built with women in mind is a straw, and the edit that you think is hostile is the camel's back breaking. People are telling women every goddamn day that their experiences aren't real, and it sucks. Eventually, those people will get told, and in this case, they got offended and felt persecuted by it. Even later in that thread, the same user is dismissive of a well sourced book that cites multiple case studies about how crash test dummies emulated crashes for men decades before women (edit for clarity, the book is not about crash test dummies, that's just one chapter). No reason given, just disbelief based on vibes. It's difficult to deal with that level of bullshit regularly, so it should be understandable when people get frustrated about it.
I understand all of that, and I do sympathize. And I recognize that people can have bad days. The user also admitted he did not notice the life.women group, which is unfortunate.
But outside of that issue, (I agree that space was not the right one for that discussion) people can reasonably disagree. If someone says "As a woman, I think X" someone else, men included, can chime in with their belief in Y. That's basically what you sign up for on a discussion platform. There are very obvious limits to this that are enforced on Tildes, but I don't think that discussion in particular should have been off limits. If that's upsetting to someone, IMO they should remove themselves from the discussion. Reply to someone about how/why they are wrong once and then disengage.
I think people can definitely disagree, and it's important sometimes to have discussions about those disagreements. There's a time and a place, though, and sometimes there are things that don't require rebuttals. For example, I would say that "the default experience that product creators tend to consider is males" is not something that requires rebuttal, because it's just true, and if you try to rebut it, then people are going to get testy about it, because most of the time the people that do that are sexist.
I agree with the premise but I don't think it's so obviously true that someone cannot question it in good faith.
While I agree that it is possible to question this in good faith, I don't think that is what happened in that case, especially when the user in question just straight up rejected one of the best examples - crash test dummies. When someone basically says, "my vibes of truthiness is better than that well sourced book you brought up" then they can be safely discounted as not questioning in good faith.
I don't think I agree with your characterization. They said they were skeptical, but would have to read the book to be sure.
What is the correct response when someone uses a book as a source? Reading a book is a large task. Someone can very easily provide all sorts of examples of books in which arguments are posited that you and I would both disagree with. These books are well sourced. Is the onus on us to read them and pick apart the arguments?
/shrug
I think at this point we just agree to disagree.
I've been lurking in all the discussions about this over the past couple days, and there was this general discomfort I couldn't put my finger on that I think I'm getting now.
There hasn't been that many times where people have pointed out specific posts, but when they did (like you have), I've been completely unable to see what exactly makes the comments on them problematic. I'm not denying the experiences that people are talking about, they're obviously both real and common enough now that it's sparked all this.
The part that makes me uncomfortable is that I don't know how not to perpetuate something I can't perceive, I don't want to ask for specifics because everyone says they're already exhausted by it, and even if I did, I'd just be JAQing off. What recourse is there but to not participate?
It is difficult to notice things when you're the "in" group.
In this case, this is a topic that was posted in ~life.women. It is a group that is for things related to life, and specifically for the lives of women. In this case, it was an article about how things are not designed with women in mind most of the time. The top comment is one made by a woman, and that woman states specifically that while the article is about jars, it's really about everything. The top response is a man, coming in and explaining why the woman's lived experience was wrong. That comment was given the exemplary tag; a travesty in my opinion. Then, when faced with rebuttal, many users jumped in, explaining to various women about how, um actually, many things are made for consumers and not just for men, as if that's some kind of point. Then they claimed that physics was a limiting factor for a lot of things, like tools, despite the fact that I have any number of expensive tools specifically chosen so that my wife or daughters can use them, so obviously physics is not the problem. All the way down, it's just men telling women that their experiences aren't real, listen to us men explain it to you, here's how things actually are. One of the most egregious things is when someone brings up the wonderful book Invisible Women (a great, insanely well sourced read about this very topic) and then one of the men says that he doesn't believe it.
If you want to not go down a rabbit hole of jackassery, then there are some very easy steps you can follow to not be a jackass:
When you read someone talking about their lived experience, read it as if you believe every word to be the gospel truth, even if your lived experience indicates something different. This is the most important thing that you can do. Listen or read, and try to understand that what they are saying is true.
Instead of engaging in rebuttal, engage in support. Don't try to correct someone else's lived experience. This happens so much online and in person; someone will share, and then someone else will come in and explain how that lived experience isn't correct. Support doesn't necessarily mean acquiescence to a point you fundamentally disagree with, though.
Learn to give up. Sometimes, it is not important to "win" an argument, because sometimes it's not an argument, or even a discussion. Sometimes there is a gulf so wide that you cannot make inroads to find a common ground. That's okay. This is especially difficult when you are right and the other person is wrong. To give an extreme example, sometimes I will come across discussions on other sites, and the point at hand is "all white people suck" or "all heterosexual people suck" or something like that. It is not incumbent on you to enlighten the person making such a comment.
Engage in the principal of charity. Using the above example, "all white people suck" is a pretty hard to defend thing, but if you look at it as "all the white people I have met or read about suck" then it's pretty understandable. Similarly, if someone says something like "all men are terrible" you can do the insertions: "all [the] men [that I have known in my life] are terrible". And again, I'll refer to point 3, it is not incumbent upon anyone to explicitly add the words for other people. Sometimes you can just not engage.
It's difficult to follow all four of those points, and I frequently have problems following my own guidelines here, but just knowing and attempting to follow them will make your online experiences easier.
Amazingly well said (as usual for you, aphoenix!)
To take your Point #2 further:
So many people, when expressing a frustration or difficulty, will have someone point out a separate frustration or difficulty as a way of minimizing the first one.
This, to me, is completely ironic, because that means those two people have just found common ground! If anything, they should understand each other better and be able to empathize with one another.
In the context of the topic: if being a tall man sucks in some ways (and as someone who just spent many consecutive hours in tiny cramped airplane seats, let me assure you that it does), that should help us better understand what women are saying when they're complaining about, say, opening jars. This feeling is awful for me; that feeling is awful for you; we now understand each other better because we both know how that awful feeling feels.
Where it goes wrong is that people go "your awful feeling doesn't matter because I also feel awful sometimes too." Instead of finding common ground, it becomes a line in the sand that gatekeeps problems and separates us from one another.
I just feel like going
⊹₊⟡⋆⊹₊⟡⋆⋆EMPATHY.ೃ࿔.𖥔 ݁ ˖*:･༄
✧◝(⁰▿⁰)◜✧
But you explained it with actual words.
So, I do this behavior a lot in an attempt to relate to the person expressing a difficulty, and it does often come off as you describe it despite that not being my intent.
But thanks to my unique mixture of lived trauma and mental disabilities, I've never figured out how to properly improve on this, and I'm intentionally socially isolated enough that its unlikely to improve. I've had it described as having "sympathy, not empathy" but I don't experience emotions on a level that most neurotypical people seem to, and so the closest I can come to engaging in a conversation short of passive listening is to try to relate what I'm being told to my own lived experiences.
And it really sucks! But whenever I attempt to come out of my shell a little more, it inevitably backfires.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that its easy to misread intent, especially in a world where there are a lot of people operating on bad faith. It often feels like I'm speaking in a different language, unable to properly understand or communicate to the other party.
Would you want a suggestion or two in how to use those similar experiences in conversation?
If it is applicable from the perspective of someone who is autistic (among other things) and doesn't involve masking or trying to project a fake kind of emotional support, then sure. But I imagine that rules out most otherwise helpful suggestions?
I'm allistic but ADHD and have a number of autistic friends plus work with neurodivergent college students as part of my work. I can't say for certain whether it would be masking for you or whether it would still feel authentic but provide a bit of a script or structure that can help your intention of making connection and demonstrating that you relate.
It's something I've had to learn some myself and then I went and got a degree in it. I don't want to overstep, so let me know if it would be helpful or not.
While its a difficult topic for me, I mention it in the event it might be helpful to others and/or myself. So whatever you want to share here, in private message, or otherwise is fine - the worst I would do is politely decline further conversation, or break from the conversation if I'm unable to cope with it. If I ever delete messages on Tildes or elsewhere, this is usually why, and I mean nothing personally by it.
Fully fair, and personally I don't recommend the How to Win Friends and Influence people book. That stuff feels very fake to me, and my goal isn't to be fake. (Also as far as I can tell he was an old timey "sell you a seminar" grifty guy. So don't feel bad for not liking it )
If you decide to delete or if this just doesn't click for you, that's fine. There's no one way to interact with people and that is what can make it difficult when it doesn't come naturally. I'm going to kind of list things out as steps. Not because I don't think you know some of this but because it's how my brain builds information.
When someone is sharing a more vulnerable experience - something that made them scared, something that hurt them, something that made them feel "less than." They're often looking for support and understanding rather than advice. So my mental script, one I don't have to actively think about as often anymore is
Listen actively, I don't mean eye contact but listening to the whole situation and leaving the rapid association with my own experiences more as background processing. I'm not just waiting to say my side, I'm understanding (or trying to) them internally.
Acknowledging the situation they're sharing sucks/is hard/is making them feel bad (depends on the situation). "Oh man that's rough, I can't even really imagine." Or "I'm sorry that happened to you, no one should have to deal with that." Or "fuck cancer, I'm sorry about your family member." This part should barely touch on you at all, it's really about validating their feelings. Because even if maybe theyre overreacting, it still sucks to feel the way they feel in the moment.
2a. If you've experienced something similar but you don't know if that will make them feel your care and understanding, you can add something like "I had something like that happen to me and I felt ___." But only a general/broad statement, not the details. If they're in a space to ask you what happened, you can absolutely share. But you're basically cracking your door and seeing if they want to come in, or stand on the porch and talk. But keep it brief at first until you know what kind of support your friend needs. If they want to share experiences they'll often bounce back with a new one of their own.
The check in: "How can I support you?" "Do you just need to vent?" Or even if you get to the comfort level "what do you need from me in this conversation?". That last one feels really blunt so I only really recommend it if you've had a conversation with a friend in the past establishing that language. Mostly you're trying to communicate "I want to support you but I need you to tell me what "support" is for you right now."
If at any point you get a "no not like that" or "you're not understanding me" then pause, don't get defensive (maybe apologize for the misunderstanding). Validate that even if you're getting it wrong the situation is hard for them and you care and ask how you can help. "I'm sorry, I'm willing to listen without asking a lot of questions if that helps, or if you want to explain it to me I'm here to try to understand. But either way i want to support you."
All of this assumes that you a) care and b) want to connect and provide support to the person you're talking to but want to make sure you don't overstep their boundaries/comfort etc. This also generally applies to being polite in general social situations but there you can mostly assume they just want to talk, and the risk of sharing your own story is usually lowered.
None of this should necessarily be repeated verbatim, just wanted to give examples of natural language.
I used "you" here in a general sense as I dont know you as a person. Maybe none of this helps, it's just how my brain works. But I hope it's helpful at least a little. I may come back and tweak as this is written without notes
Excuse me for rambling, as I'm going to reply in the order that the thoughts came to me:
On a base level, this makes sense. It doesn't gel with how I would expect or want it roles reversed - if I'm having a bad experience I am either looking for advice or using my talking as a coping mechanism, as opposed to looking for emotional support or empathy. So I struggle to see things from that angle because its a type of caring that I've barely been exposed to in my life (long story, not a pleasant one) and thus don't expect from or know how to react to it when it does happen.
Point 3 is key though, and is the thing I most find myself trying to remember in the moment. Asking for clarity when the other person thinks their perspective is already clear helps head off the confusion I often run into. Of course, its hard to ask when I think they're being clear from my pov (when actually I've got it wrong), but it does work.
Often times with Point 1, I struggle with common "small talk" situations because they are reminiscent of a trauma I've experienced, and my brain defaults to self-defense mode trying to summarize or tune out details. Then later I'll find there was an important detail I needed to catch and couldn't/didn't because I was trying to avoid the alternative, which in my case can lead to gag reflex->hyperventilation (panic attack).
I do appreciate the effort you put into both probing and replying in-depth here. My prior experiences in exploring issues like these online is that people tend to jump to incorrect assumptions/conclusions from their very different experience, and it ends up making one or both parties look like they're acting in bad faith.
No worries about rambling at all
That's fair and while my advice is very much aimed at "talking to neurotypicals" that is where point 3 helps a lot in asking what the person is looking for - that "vent/ramble with just vague empathy/support" can look similar across neurotypes even if there are tweaks. And when someone doesn't mind that pebbling of information and experiences back and forth it makes it easier.
I am sorry (expression of empathy not responsibility) that this has been your experience. And that's part of why I suggested some scripting, but also would recommend watching media with thoughts toward how people have these conversations (maybe not comedies... Sometimes). Masking is a coping skill but an uncomfortable one and I don't suggest it unless/when it's necessary.
And that makes sense. It's a good skill to learn how to offer what folks are looking for.
That is fair too. It's ok to let someone know that you care about them (if applicable) or that you want to help them but that hearing the details is bringing up your own past and you can't handle that right now. I can't promise people won't be a jerk about it, but you setting boundaries is healthy and socially appropriate and if they're a jerk, that's them being a jerk.
Glad to be somewhat helpful! I work with a lot of our ND/autistic/ADHD students and while I'm not autistic (I don't think, pretty sure) I have my own sensory issues, and a sense of needing to script/practice/overstress on my social interactions in a way that I've mostly learned how to put on automatic but sometimes have to run in manual transmission and shift gears myself.
If you want to understand how to better interact with people broadly, I'd recommend reading How to Win Friends and Influence People. It's simple and effective. People with mild autism can be extremely socially successful if they learn the language and communication tools.
I've read this book actually, probably still have a digital copy sitting around on an older phone somewhere, because that's one of the first things that gets suggested to me when I bring the topic up. I'd have to reread it to remember why exactly it didn't work for me though.
Putting it into practice requires changing your thinking to think first of the other person and what would make them happy. Once you've figured out what the other person wants, you can start sprinkling in the things you need out of the social interaction, or, even better, you can convince the person to act in a way that benefits both of you.
You're more likely to get good service at a restaurant if you're polite and complimentary. To soothe a crying child after they fell, you'd talk to the kid about how strong and brave they are, not share anecdotes about how you remember falling and crying too.
While I understand that you're giving the shortest possible version of a concept (I don't fully agree with), this is in my strong opinion incorrect. Both as an example of the ideas in the book but also in how to treat children.
Remember: the first step is to not want anything yourself. Stopping the crying is often something adults want. The child (depending on age, gender, etc obviously) often just wants to cry, maybe tell you what happened, etc.
I find that the best way to deal with children displaying strong emotions in public is to get another adult to catch all the adults that want to interfere so that the child can be safe with you rather than you having to deal with all the adults that are upset about the situation.
I can understand where you're coming from. Giving children a space to safely express their emotions is important. Depending on the time and place, it can be the right way to handle a crying child.
That example actually wasn't a hypothetical. I recently went biking with some children, and one of them fell and skinned their knee. The kid is usually brave but falls to bits if even mildly injured. After verifying nothing was seriously injured, we needed to bike back to the parents.
Children reflect the emotions of those around them. All the child psychology I've read says that calmly reassuring children is the best way to handle scary situations and soothe them. If the adult acts scared or starts crying a bunch, the child will learn that's the correct response. Sometimes it is but not usually.
I wasn't there so for me this is a hopythetichal situation that I relate to similar situations from my own life and nothing else.
To me it still reads like you wanted to get back to the parents. And thus you approached the situation with an agenda from the start. (Which is one of the flaws of the book: it describes how you should pretend to not have an agenda rather than actually not having an agenda - which is a good way to make friends.)
My apologies: I didn't explicitly say that it is good to stay calm and curious when children express strong emotions, but that is - to me - obviously true, and I forgot to write that in my previous comment.
What I was aiming to convey was that if you stay calm and curious with a hurt child and stop others (adults as well as children) showing up with fear, upsets or crying of their own it is mostly fine and often quicker to let the child cry it out and then have a reassuring conversation about it.
The other adult[0] I wrote about is the one whos "job" it is to intercept all the other people who get scared and want to join in into the situation with fear. That, as you write, only makes the situation worse for the current hurt child.
I think I pounced on your use of "brave" that I associate with adults wanting to shut up children's feelings rather than to just let them be scared for a little while.
It is mostly not dangerous to be afraid, but it can be dangerous to not show that you are hurt (both physically but also psychologically).
It is of course also ok if we disagree, parenting and taking care of children is a really hard subject to agree on for me, especially in text (where I tend to become more theoretical while in meatspace I mostly see that we all do as best we can and most things are fine).
[0] But I have also recruited other children to do this: "Hey, remember when you got injured that one time and it was kind if nice to not hear everyone elses stories until afterwards?", "Maybe you can gather up the rest of the gang and stand over there and talk, while I take care of X for a bit?"
Well we were on an off-road trail, so it was necessary to eventually get the child back to civilization and their parents lol. As you're well aware, sometimes adults have to set priorities and make decisions. Teaching children how and why to make decisions or approach various situations is part of helping them grow up!
You're obviously better with kids than many adults I've met! How to deal with a crying child is an ancient problem that people still struggle with. Probably in part because there isn't one right answer for every situation.
I think we mostly agree here and just hadn't shared full context on everything. Thanks for helping me clarify things; you raise good points.
I'm glad we shared this conversation, it reminded me of things I enjoy.
Like being with (and thinking about) young people and their caregivers.
But also to hike, bike and being outside :)
Thank you!
This is what I've read in multiple studies, and have seen it first hand multiple times even within the same individual. Kids that could take a rough tumble and get right back to running with their friends as long as any adult response is calm or silly, but later completely break down after the slightest bump if grandma comes running from across the room "oooooh noooo, poor baby! that must have really hurt! are you ok!? let me hold and rock you." The other extreme is "pain is weakness leaving the body" crowd are also messing up their kids coping skills, but it seems most parents in the modern times thankfully don't follow that anymore (at least publicly).
Of course the usual caveats about individual personalities and needs still apply.
Tangent!.. I recently (as in the last decade or so) started acknowledging small accidents that happens to me or others.
Just a quick "ouch", "woah" or "you OK?".
My idea is to normalise getting hurt or dropping stuff or whatever, but without making a fuss about it.
So many adults seem to feel too much shame for just stumbling or falling or whacking their toes.
I'm not sure it's helpful for others, but it makes my life more enjoyable anyway.
Non-tangent!.. I started thinking about your comment and wanted to ask you to clarify what you mean by:
As I can't really relate to this concept and I'm having a hard time understanding how this plays out.
Re:Tangent - Totally agree. Now that you've called attention to it, I realize we do this in our own family and household. Seems to work nicely. Keeps things light unless they're serious, encourages proactively checking on each other and offering help, and shows the kids that even adults have these problems.
Re:Non-Tangent - "Pain is weakness leaving the body" is a common military and fitness mantra, possibly originating in the US Marine Corps. I was using it here to encompass all of the toughness-is-superior philosophies - no pain no gain, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, suck it up and toughen up, don't cry or whine, feelings and fear are for the weak and you should be ashamed, your pain is not real and is not an excuse, just pick yourself up and push on.
Ah! I thought you meant that, but wasn't sure, thanks for explaining.
That's where I reacted to Minori:s use of "brave" in my original comment here, but I understand now this was not what they where refering to.
That makes me very happy!
Wow, how could you describe it so well? I remember the first time as a teen I was shocked when I realized being a minority didn't mean that you automatically empathized with other minorities. I was like, how can you not understand? You already know what it's like to experience discrimination.
Thank you my friend.
I try to find delight in building bridges instead of putting up walls, which is exactly what you've talked about here. The breadth of the human condition is such that I just find it infinitely more interesting to find common ground and empathize.
I will sometimes try to do this and it often goes badly. If I share a somewhat similar experience as a way of showing that I can relate, it’s usually misunderstood. Probably bad communication on my part, but I’ll just say that it’s a skilled practice and not necessarily something that people can just do.
I want to suggest another way to reframe this. Most people don't say "all white people suck" they'll say "white people suck". What they usually mean is closer to "some white people, specifically whatever ones I'm referencing now, suck" As a white people, I don't feel the need to say "no I don't" for several reasons. 1) I make an effort not to suck so it's probably not about me; 2) I try to intervene when other white people suck; and 3) white people do suck sometimes.
So it's less "all ____ I know suck" and more "not all ____ but it's always _______ who suck like this"
It's not all about me. And the dynamics of this absolutely vary with who is saying it about what group. Because the reality of our world is one of power dynamics. But charity still applies as you described.
I think I need more unpacking of this (sorry).
I'm all for extending maximal charity to the speaker's frustration, but being on the receiving end of such generalizations also deserves charity...
That pattern "not all ___ , but always a ___ " is a barelly nuanced generalisation and pretty indistinguishable from racism depending how you fill the blank.
Maybe we should actually , gently, after some cool down time, give a reminder that racism is bad reguardless of the power dynamics?
I realize this is obvious, but you can only control your own charity, you cannot extend or demand charity from others. You can also elect to not be offended when someone is being uncharitable, and the extension of charity from you to someone else is, in my opinion, always a good thing.
I have interpreted your point as "it's important to point out that racism against white people is also something that we should remind people is bad". If that is not the correct interpretation of what you said in your last paragraph, please feel free to ignore everything I say here.
The topic of racism is a difficult one, because racism is an overloaded term, and the overload leads people to a lot of frustrating miscommunications. Some people use racism to mean any time someone is personally prejudiced against another person based on their race; this definition allows racism against any race. Some people use racism to mean mean systemic racism; this definition frequently does not consider specific cases of the prejudice, so you have people saying things like "it's impossible to be racist against white people." And frequently people talk across each other when bringing up things like this because one person is talking about racism in one way and one person is talking about it in a different way. I've only outlined two possible definitions, and there are more; there's lots of opportunities for miscommunications and anger.
And I guess I introduced the "white people suck" bit above, so I'll tackle it a bit more head on. There are a large number of people who have a lived experience such that in their lives, the white people they know have caused them nothing but problems, and there are a large number of white people in the news who are causing immense destruction to the world. So taking any time to tell people who have this negative association with white people, "actually, prejudice against white people is bad, okay" becomes something that they interpret as very aggressive and only exacerbates the problem. This is only made more difficult to discuss because of the mixing of personal prejudice and systemic prejudice; if you are a member of a group that has not historically suffered from systemic prejudice, then you don't know what it is like to be a member of a group that has, and so holding forth on the topic is at best distasteful, and at worst perpetrating more systemic prejudice.
In the post above, I put four points down, and I numbered them in rough order of importance, and it's notable that I put "it's okay to give up" above "extend charity". In almost every case I would suggest that it is more important to leave the conversation than it is to stand up for white people and remind people that racism against whites is bad.
To be clear: prejudice is bad. It can bother me when people don't like me because of my race, but as a white man, I have had it much easier than a lot of people, and I haven't experienced systemic racism, so when someone doesn't like me, just for being white, I shut up about it and just let it be. There is no point at which it is really beneficial for me to hold forth about the wrongs of prejudice against white people, and I have understood that it's not about me, it's actually because of systemic racism, and that should piss you off more than any interpersonal prejudice that you have ever experienced.
Fair enough.
That is a correct interpretation.
Thank you so much for taking the time in explaining this. Trully. I can now sort of understand why some people like saying stuff like that without being machiavelian comicbook villains...
You don't get to speak for all white men though, and that attitude pervaded enough such that my race is now sometimes included with this idea that people can't be racist towards us. It's the epitome of the white man's arrogance to believe that their tolerance for racism out of some feeling of guilt should allow them to then redefine what racism means, impacting everyone else and depriving them of a say in it. Keep your "systemic racism" definition to yourself. If you're okay with someone being racist to you, fine, but don't put that on me.
I really struggled with your comment, because I think it missed a lot of the things I was saying, to the point that it felt like it was not made in good faith, so I left a pithy nothing comment. However that itself is uncharitable, so I have deleted that comment and left this one instead.
I parsed your comment as fairly angry, but I think it also had a bit of misinformation in it, which I'll address right off the bat:
You seem to be operating under the misapprehension that white people came up with the idea of systemic or institutional racism and you are incorrect. The idea is generally credited to Kwame Ture (born Stokely Carmichael) and Charles V. Hamilton, both of whom were black / African American researchers. It is also not a predominantly "white" thing to believe either; a brief google suggested to me that maybe half of white people in North America believe in systemic or institutional racism. Systemic racism is not an arrogance of white people that they came up with to deprive anyone of anything; it is hard-fought research by people who have felt the effect of it.
I also think that it's important to note that defining systemic racism to mean something does not negate the existence of racism on a personal level, nor does it mean that racism at a personal level is not problematic.
My assumption is that you are white, and are talking about how I said above that people can sometimes say that it's not possible to be racist against white people, because they are talking about systemic racism when they say that. You should note that what I did not say was that I think that it's not possible to be racist against white people.
If you read again, you might note that I actually specifically talked about people being prejudiced against me for my skin colour, and it bothering me. In my comment above I was actually talking about the fact that when people say "racism" they can be talking about different things, and the overloading of the term can lead to anger. I think that's actually directly supported by your response. I was talking about the difficulties of navigating a complex topic, and you zeroed right in on one of the things that I said could happen in a discussion as if it had happened in the discussion.
I don't think this would be helpful, no.
I'll think about it some more then.
(Edit: aphoenix explained, we're good)
I won't rehash the discussion, but I feel it's important to clarify this isn't exclusively a gendered thing. I'm a woman. I shared my experiences and advice in the thread. Some of it could be uncharitably interpreted as dismissive.
Communication is hard, and wires can get crossed. Social expectations and norms vary. Your points are good recommendations for productive conversations.
Ah, the joys of shooting from the hip while making comments... I definitely wrote "it's just men telling women..." which clearly means that it's the only thing that is happening. But what I meant was that it was happening a lot, but wasn't the only thing that was happening. Moreover, your comments in that thread are one of the things that I was thinking about when I wrote my point 2 above (support instead of rebuttal). It's exactly the sort of thing one can do to engage in a conversation like that, because it acknowledges the underlying issue, but gently points toward solutions. I went back and checked and I don't think I parse any of what you wrote as dismissive.
Disclaimer, I am very much a white cis male so take my comment for what it is worth.
What you are perceiving is what makes it difficult. In the linked thread nobody in it is rude, while you are probably scanning for hostility but are mostly finding polite comments where effort is put in. But, what you are also seeing is that women are sharing their experience of not being able to do something and then are getting replies explaining why it is the way it is. Which doesn't seem like much but does dismiss the experience and it happens in multiple places about various things. Also important, context. This happens in ~life.women, not even a more general group which adds insult to injury to many I imagine (and also ends up debated...).
Each reply on its own doesn't seem bad but it is a cumulative effect where people are being told, at length why the thing they are experiencing isn't really happening or just the way it is due to reasons.
Anyway, that is my general read on that thread specifically based on comments I have seen about it and me going over it. I am avoiding going into too much detail as it ultimately is not my experience. It's more to illustrate how when this is mentioned I have learned to look past what is there in words and start focusing on the interaction and a bit between the lines.
As far as asking goes. There is pretty wide spectrum between asking a question out of genuine interest and JAQing off. The biggest difference is what you are doing with the answer. Asking to understand is different from asking something to justify your own standpoint. People in general are generally pretty good at picking up the difference.
Also, this is general advice, if someone tells something about their experiences in life don't see it as something that needs correcting. Most people get annoyed by that, some groups just have to deal with it more often making it more exhausting.
And sometimes it actually does mean not asking the question in the moment but at a later time while making it clear you genuinely want to know the answer. Which I guess you have done here.
Again, just my read on it but very much as an outsider to it all.
Chiming in here, personally I don’t mind the rudeness. I guess its because I don’t really feel like this here is MY community, I have no admin rights, no real ties here, I just post sometimes, like you.
I would absolutely mind someone coming in and dirtying up MY community with that nonsense, and from what I can tell, for the recognizeable users like tspickles and fae, this community is theirs and if its gonna be dirtied up like that they don’t want to continue putting the amount of community building effort that they have been putting into this.
So, I’m not yet exhausted by it, and I’ll be here for a while because Ive created a boundary between myself and this place since I know now that it can be toxic and Demios has basically told us that he’s not going to do anything about the toxicity, we just have to put distance between ourselves and this community or we’ll rage quit. Its the same boundary that I have for all the rest of the internet, theres just gonna be people out there that are rude and wrong and I gotta just accept that. Its a nail, but it isnt the final nail in the coffin, but as more of the good users leave this place because of them, they become the only ones left, and eventually you’ll have posts complaining about how someone cant find a girlfriend and THAT will be the final nail in the coffin.
Edit: Its been brought to my attention that users do in fact get banned eventually, so maybe there is hope.
This makes me so sad. I don't post here often but I've always appreciated your contributions. I wish you all the best.
I'm late to this, so I hope you're still around to see it, but I'll miss you TSP.
I hope nothing but the best for you as you move on, and know that you're always welcome back here if you ever do decide to return.
You are going to be missed, but as I also said on the server you need to do what is good for you :) We'll keep in touch.
I just announced our (platonic) relationship to my wife, and now you're leaving? She'll never take me seriously again.
Take care :)
You and I haven't interacted all that much on here, save on a couple of topics in ~lgbt, but you've been such an active presence on so many threads that I came to recognise your voice before your username! l will be sincerely sorry to lose a fellow trans person from the site, but I understand why you're going. Take care, and stay safe <3
TSP <3 Gotten to know you a bit through the MC server and I've appreciated your humor, outspoken nature, and general vibe. I do hope you'll reconsider, or at least keep tabs on the MC server and reappear next season, because I'll genuinely miss you.
Will you reveal your alts? (I’m not trying to pressure you into it, just curious)
We haven't interacted too much, but I'll miss seeing you around. You reaching out to me recently reaffirmed part of why I love the community on Tildes so much, so it's sad to see you being pushed away from here. I hope you can find more places with a bit less friction and a similar sense of community.
Is there a possibility of you allowing others dev/admin rights?
Fourth line, no intention.
Brain fart
So if you like the bones of the site and how it works your best bet is probably to fork it and build your own.
You will need to seed an initial community and build it up from there, which would probably be the toughest part once you set up a reliable hosting solution.
I’ve considered doing this myself to spin off a page specifically for professional networking in the civic tech world. But I just don’t have the time to dedicate.
Man, things I might do if I didnt have to work for a living!
So many projects!