Some really great feedback and ideas came out of the discussion we had about the group structure recently, and while I do want to work on implementing some things from that eventually, it won't happen immediately. I'm also not sure if the influx of new users is going to calm down somewhat (which might make some of those changes feel less necessary), but I guess we'll see what happens in the next couple of days as the third-party Reddit clients start actually shutting down.

Anyway, something that we can do immediately is create some new groups, and/or adjust some of the existing ones. This could encourage some more activity on certain subjects, and also make it easier for people to control what they see on Tildes through their group subscriptions. So I'm looking for input on where you feel there are currently gaps in the groups, or some new ones we could add that feel like we might have enough activity to get started.

I also just want to quickly mention a few other things I'm trying to work on in the near future (now that I'm finally almost caught up on all the email invite requests). They're things that stagnated over the last few years but are more important to update if the site's activity is going to increase again:

• Updating the open-source code and development environment, and ensuring people can get a local version running easily to be able to contribute fixes/changes.
• Reviewing and organizing the issues and existing merge requests in the GitLab repo, so it's more clear what changes are wanted/needed.
• Doing a pass through places like the Docs site and the group wikis to clean up and update some of the outdated information.

Let's try to keep the discussion in this topic more centered around suggestions for changes to the groups though, I just wanted to let you know some of the other things I'm hoping to do in the near future.

Thanks! And I've also given 5 invites to every current user, so feel free to use those if you know anyone else that would like to join: https://tildes.net/invite

As I'm sure some of you have already noticed in your sidebars, I've just added a bunch of new groups based on the discussion we had last week. That ended up being a very large discussion with a ton of suggestions, and while we can't add everything, I am adding a fairly large set of groups this time. Some of these are definitely experimental, and I expect that we'll need to make some more adjustments based on how they actually do in practice.

Before I get into the specific updates, there are a few general things I want to mention first:

Many of the discussions about groups turn into debates about how things should be organized in the hierarchy. I want to try to clarify that the hierarchy is not intended to be some kind of perfectly logical system, or that there should never be any crossover, etc. The groups are more of a social organization method, like "for people interested in X".

For example, a common suggestion is to add something like an "entertainment" top level group that could contain ~games, ~music, ~tv, etc. This makes sense from a logical perspective, but not if you're basing it on interest. Someone's interest in gaming content doesn't really have any influence on them being interested in talking about music. There are similar reasons for other cases like having ~comp outside of ~tech and ~anime outside of ~tv, even though they feel like they should fit inside. The current hierarchy certainly isn't perfect for this either (for example, ~hobbies is extremely broad), but it's the general idea.

As part of this, I also want to mention that something being a sub-group instead of top-level shouldn't be seen as being "less important" or somehow inferior. As a convenient example, ~tildes.official is one of the most important groups on the site, but it was the first sub-group (and the only one for a year). It's not significant yet while we're still subscribing everyone to all groups by default, but when we move away from doing that, it could actually be an advantage to be a sub-group, since it would give a larger audience to its content through the parent one(s).

And finally, I want to mention that expanding the groups (and having higher activity in general) makes it more pressing to improve the capabilities for controlling subscriptions, filtering out groups and tags, and so on. This is something I want to treat as a high priority as I get back into Tildes development. I know there are also some existing problems such as topics from sub-groups being shown inside the parent group even if you're unsubscribed from them, and I'm hoping to resolve that one this weekend.

Anyway, on with the changes and some brief comments on each. Note that I still need to do some administrative tasks like adding descriptions to the groups and moving old topics into them, and will be doing that over the next day or so.

• Added ~comics, ~engineering, ~transport, ~travel (everyone auto-subscribed)
  The subjects of these groups are currently kind of awkward to fit into the existing groups, and I think there's potential for good content and discussion in all of these.

• Added ~life sub-groups (auto-subscribed if you were subscribed to ~life)

  • ~life.home_improvement
  • ~life.men
  • ~life.pets
  • ~life.style
  • ~life.women

  Whether to create groups for men and women took up a lot of the air in the suggestions topic (and was the source of some strife—please don't restart that in here). I think it's worth trying them, but it's definitely an experiment. I also think it's important to have them be sub-groups, because having a common parent group enables posting similar topics without feeling like posting in one of them is a binary choice. Much like ~lgbt, moderation will be somewhat stricter for posts in these groups (and yes, we need a way for the site itself to indicate that).

  ~life.pets also needs some clarification: this will not be a group full of images. There will be a weekly scheduled post for posting photos and casual chat about pets (the first one will post tomorrow), but separate topics like that will be removed. The standard content in ~life.pets should be of a similar quality level to the rest of the site, such as articles, requests for discussion/advice, and so on.

• Added ~sports sub-groups (auto-subscribed if you were subscribed to ~sports)

  • ~sports.american_football
  • ~sports.baseball
  • ~sports.basketball
  • ~sports.combat
  • ~sports.football
  • ~sports.hockey
  • ~sports.motorsports

  This is also fairly experimental, and I don't know if we'll keep all of these sub-groups. I'd like to see if this can help encourage more posts about specific sports. I also don't like the name ~sports.american_football much at all, but I don't know what a better option is. Should we just call it ~sports.nfl? That's not quite right either.

• Added ~health.mental (auto-subscribed if you were subscribed to ~health)
  A lot of the topics in ~health are about mental health, and I think having a clearer separation could be useful (including having a more clearly defined space for stricter moderation, as mentioned before).

• Added ~humanities subgroups (auto-subscribed if you were subscribed to ~humanities)

  • ~humanities.history
  • ~humanities.languages

  History topics are probably the most common subject posted in ~humanities currently, and I'm curious if these subgroups will help encourage posting both more history and more non-history.

• Removed ~games.game_design (topics merged into ~games)
  This group has always been quite inactive, and I don't think the few topics in it still need their own separate space from ~games right now.

That's it for this time. If there were other suggestions that you were hoping to see that weren't added this time, don't take that as an indication that we won't add them someday. But this is already a lot of new groups (likely too many), and I had to stop somewhere. Let's revisit in a month or so once these new groups and the new users have had some time to settle.

And as usual when making a ~tildes.official post, I've also topped up every current user's invites to 5: https://tildes.net/invite

Hi. It's been a while since we had a ~tildes.official post, huh? There are a few things I want to discuss today about potential changes to the way that Tildes works. But first, a couple of other things while I have your attention:

Welcomes and thanks

Welcome to all the new users! It's been great to see activity here increasing again lately, and I hope a lot of you end up enjoying the site and sticking around. It's really nice to read so many posts and emails from people who are excited about the principles behind Tildes. (And if you're someone who doesn't have an account yet and emailed to request an invite, I hope to get back to you relatively soon—there are about 2000 requests in the queue right now, and I'm trying to gradually work through them over the next week or so)

I also want to say thanks to all the long-time users who have been welcoming and answering so many questions from the new people. As I mentioned the other day, my time to devote to Tildes recently is more limited, and it's been amazing to find that in practically every thread I open, people have already answered all of the questions (and often more comprehensively and eloquently than I would have). An extra special thank-you as well to @cfabbro and the other people who have been handling the demand for invites via Reddit, and to @mycketforvirrad, the unsung hero of the site who's constantly doing the thankless, almost-invisible job of re-tagging topics and making sure everything is organized.

Reminders

Also a couple of reminders and things to keep in mind:

Whether you're an old or new user, if you haven't set up a recovery email address on your account, I highly recommend that you do. A lot of people who registered years ago are trying to come back this week and finding that they don't know their password any more, and it's much simpler if they did this. (The site itself really should encourage this more strongly—it's done in a secure and privacy-friendly way, and it's impossible for me to use it to send you any email because there's no way for me to see the actual address)

It's already been brought up in various threads a lot, but I also want to emphasize that Tildes is not the same as Reddit, and is not trying to be a "replacement" for Reddit. There are a lot of similarities between the sites, but there are also a lot of differences. The site structures are different, many of the site mechanics here work differently, and the types and style of posts that are appropriate are not the same. Please try to look around at the site and the docs and get a feel for the place, don't assume that things will work the same way here as they do somewhere else (or that they should).

One other aspect that's different between the two sites that's coming up a lot is that Tildes does not have user-created groups, and the groups aren't "owned" or run by specific users. Currently, the only person with "true" moderation powers anywhere on the site (like the ability to remove topics and comments) is me. This isn't because I want to keep absolute control or anything like that, but Tildes has been very quiet for the last few years and more moderators haven't been necessary. If the activity stays at this level or keeps increasing, we will probably need to add more moderators soon. And related to that, the actual main topic that I wanted to talk about:

Should we try separating the groups more?

Even though Tildes has almost 30 groups, until now, it's really always just been one community. New users are automatically subscribed to all groups and need to manually unsubscribe if they don't want to see the topics from that group, and logged-out users see everything when they visit the homepage as well. Most users stay subscribed to almost everything, with only some of them unsubscribing from more-niche interests like ~anime.

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

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

I think we should probably take advantage of this current high activity level to try moving the groups towards being more independent spaces. This would involve switching away from the current "opt-out" approach to an "opt-in" one, and would probably need updates to a few different sections of the site to support it.

A lot of the new users have been asking to add new groups for things they're interested in (sometimes very specific, niche things), and this would allow us to try some of them out more easily to see if they'd be able to sustain themselves. One of the benefits of the groups+tags system here is that it's relatively easy to test something as a group, and if it doesn't work out, all of the posts can just be merged back into a "more comprehensive" group as a tag.

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

So overall, I'm looking for general feedback about whether we should try this soon, and if there are any major concerns we should be careful about. I also have three specific questions I'd like input on, related to how it could be implemented:

1. What should logged-out users see on the homepage? Just a list of links to individual groups, and they have to pick a specific one to see any posts?
2. Should logged-in users still have a homepage made up of all their subscribed groups mixed together (Reddit-style), or should we lean further into the separation by requiring groups to be viewed individually (forum-style)? (I think I'd want the mixed style to be available long-term, but maybe starting without it would help establish the individuality more strongly?)
3. How should we transition existing users over to the opt-in approach? Should we effectively treat everyone as a new user, and get them to select the groups they're interested in from scratch? Or should we do something like use their activity (voting, posting) to pre-subscribe them to some groups?

Thanks, please let me know what you think. The current growth and activity is a great opportunity for us to try some new things on Tildes that would be able to move it forward, and I hope we can figure out ways to do it well. (And if it ends up not working, we can always change things back)

I've also given 5 invites to every current user, so feel free to use those if you know anyone that would like to join: https://tildes.net/invite

(Edit: and to set expectations, I'm not sure how much time I'll have to reply to anything substantially, but I'll absolutely be reading all the discussions)

Tildes was inaccessible for about 2 hours today because the SSL certificate expired, and I wasn't at home at the time to be able to fix it immediately.

I'm going to blame it on Let's Encrypt (the organization that I get the certificates through). They've always sent multiple warning emails starting weeks before the cert expires, but for some reason this time they didn't send any at all. I'll set something else up for future expiries and stop depending on them to be my reminder to renew it.

Welcome back!

Right after making this post, I'm going to update the DNS records to point tildes.net to this server, so everyone should start trickling in as those updates go through.

The switch and upgrades all seem to have gone fairly well, though there were definitely a few issues here and there that I had to work through. I'm glad I decided to do a longer downtime instead of needing to rush through figuring some of it out.

A summary of what's changed so far:

• Running on a different physical server (but in the same datacenter)
• Operating system is now Debian 10 instead of Ubuntu 16.04
• Python version is now 3.9 instead of 3.8 (and updated a couple libraries that needed it)
• PostgreSQL version is now 13 instead of 12
• Redis version is now 6 instead of 5
• Everything was deployed and configured using Ansible instead of SaltStack

There are still a few more changes and updates I want to make soon, but I can just do them normally while the site is running. I'll also update the open-source code soon, once I finalize a few pieces and finish cleaning things up.

Please let me know if you notice anything that seems to be behaving strangely, it's definitely possible that there are some things broken in subtle (or not-subtle) ways.