Tildes can now be considered "public information"
I think I was confusing about this before, so to be clear up front: Tildes will stay invite-only for the foreseeable future. There's a ton to figure out and build before we can even consider making the site open to the public. Staying invite-only will let us take our time on a lot of the systems and functionality, and build up a good "base culture" before worrying about a massive influx.
However, starting now, we can stop treating it as a secret. Please don't go out of your way to promote/spam it anywhere (and I'm personally still going to take it a bit slow today), but if there are people that you want to talk to about it, feel free. Please try to send anyone to the announcement blog post first, since that's the best explanation of the site's goals.
Edit: I've also tweeted the post from the official account, if that's useful for sharing or anything.
I've also given all the current users 5 invite codes, so you can invite specific people if you'd like to. You can access these on this page, which is linked from the sidebar on your user page. Keep in mind that the site is currently quite minimal and inactive and probably will be for a while yet, so it's best to invite people that you think won't be discouraged by that (and ideally will help by posting things themselves). If you want more invite codes, just let me know and I can give you more.
As always, thanks for being here so far, and please do tell me if you run into issues or have any feedback.
I love the invite system. I feel so much responsibility sharing a code with people - reminds me of invite trees on my private trackers, which work really well in keeping people active/honest.
Yeah, that's always a risk.
I think the real worry here is Tildes getting slammed now while it's still an alpha platform. We have to get the tagging working better, the metadata lookups for submitted links built on top of that, and functional search at a minimum before it's ready for a larger scale launch.
If people come here now, it's just a half-assed reddit clone. If they come here for the first time and see something that's reddit-like, but clearly displays better design, better features, and a working search, that's a far bigger draw and much more likely to snowball into a viral launch.
Let's make the site sexy before announcing it to the world. Until then, we just keep inviting the people we know can help us do that.
When talking about Tildes, all we need to do is hint that there's a real reddit alternative in the works, or a backup plan for when reddit implodes - we don't need to tell people what that is, just that it's coming, and that they'll know it when they see it. Let them savor the anticipation for a bit.
This actually makes me more confused as to how much I should share Tildes' existence.
It seems clear I can share it with individual friends now, but not sure beyond that. Should I post about it on private social groups (like Slacks or Discords) with people I know? Should I RT that tweet, where it potentially could go viral?
I'm excited to share the news of Tildes with others, but don't want to put undue pressure on the site early.
Haha, sorry. I'm not doing a very job of explaining it, probably because I'm honestly still a little unsure myself.
But at this point, I think it's fair to just share with whoever you want to. I'm not specifically trying to get a lot of attention yet (though I might soon), but I'm also not going to try to control it any more.
The tweet's already getting spread a little bit—I think @brian kinda-retweeted it from the reddit_AMA account which has quite a few followers.
The blog (which is about the only thing people can access now) can handle a lot of traffic, so I'm definitely not worried about that or anything.
I think just feel free to share it with whatever groups or people that you feel like you want to. Like I said, don't go out of your way to promote it somewhere that it would feel "forced", but if there's people you want to tell, that's definitely fine.