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• Doing a pass through places like the Docs site and the group wikis to clean up and update some of the outdated information.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)

As suggested, I've created a new group now named ~health.coronavirus that we can use to try to keep the topics about the coronavirus somewhat more quarantined contained. I've subscribed everyone for now, but if you want to segregate the information more easily I'd suggest unsubscribing from it (which you can do from its sidebar or the groups list) and visiting it individually when you want to look at coronavirus news.

I know there are probably some quibbles about the name, but I decided to go with this one for a few reasons, including that it's by far the more commonly-known and used term overall, it's generally easier to type (especially on mobile), and some XKCD-style "the spider" logic.

One specific thing we need to discuss is how to decide when some topics should be in there vs. some of the other groups, especially since there are so many widespread effects. Like most moderation-ish subjects, we won't be able to draw a perfect line, but I think in general we should try to put more "general" updates/advice/discussion in the new group, while topics can go into other groups only when their impact is especially heavy on that group's subject.

For example, I think it makes sense for the announcement that NCAA games will be played without fans to stay in ~sports, because that's a very major announcement for a sports event. E3 being cancelled similarly makes sense to stay in ~games. Those are major, important announcements regardless of the cause being the coronavirus.

Deciding when something goes in ~news vs. ~health.coronavirus will be more difficult, but I'm sure we can probably do a reasonable job of it by trying to base it on only putting the very most significant events in ~news. It's not incredibly important to have everything categorized perfectly and most people probably subscribe/check both groups anyway, so we'll just do the best we can.

I'm going to start trying to move a lot of the existing topics into there, and I'm sure some others will too. This might be kinda chaotic for a bit.

I think it would also be great to start trying to put together some good resources on the ~health.coronavirus wiki. If some people are willing to start taking that on (and feel free to post a topic in there to ask for help/suggestions), it would be much appreciated. And if you don't have wiki permissions but would like to be a part of that, message me about it or leave a comment here asking, and I can give you the ability to create/edit pages.

Anything other feedback or discussion about it to start with? Should we set up any regularly scheduled posts in there or anything?

Alrighty, after the discussion last week, I've finally added the new groups, and everyone will have been mostly auto-subscribed to all of them. I'm still working on some of the details like adding descriptions, and there will be some awkward pieces and interface aspects since we're still in the transition phase before I get those larger changes to subscriptions/etc. in (which I really hope will be soon), but it should mostly be fine.

If you want to change your subscriptions quickly, use this page: https://tildes.net/groups (linked from a button at the bottom of the home page's sidebar)

First, here are the new groups:

New top-level groups (everyone auto-subscribed)

• ~arts
• ~design
• ~finance
• ~space

New sub-groups (auto-subscribed only if you were subscribed to the parent group)

• ~games.game_design
• ~games.tabletop
• ~hobbies.automotive
• ~science.formal
• ~science.social
• ~science.natural

Some of this will be a little experimental and I'm not totally sure how it's going to work out (splitting ~science into the branches of science especially), but we'll see what happens. The names and such aren't necessarily 100% final either.

Since we now have some real sub-groups that people other than me can post in, I made a small behavior change to how sub-groups work until those larger changes are ready. Previously, subscribing to a group would automatically include all posts from its sub-groups in your home page as well. That is, if you subscribed to ~tildes, you would also see all posts from ~tildes.official, regardless of whether you subscribed to it or not.

Now, your home page will only include posts from groups (and sub-groups) that you are specifically subscribed to. So if you want to see topics from ~games but not ~games.tabletop, you should subscribe to ~games and unsubscribe from ~games.tabletop. However, if you visit ~games directly, posts from ~games.tabletop will still be included in the list there, regardless of whether you're subscribed or not. I know this isn't ideal, but it's not permanent and should be fine for now.

I'm going to get back to working on updating these groups and moving some of the older topics around now, but let me know if you have any questions or thoughts.

And as usual, I've topped everyone's invites up to 10. You can get your invite links here: https://tildes.net/invite

It's been almost a month since we had proposals for more groups to add. I apologize for taking so long with it—just as a quick explanation for why it's taken so long to get around to:

I've been working on some major background changes related to how groups and the overall abilities of choosing what to see (and not see) on Tildes work, which I was planning to implement at the same time the new groups were added. However, two weeks ago, someone used Tildes's donation page to test over a thousand stolen credit cards. This made a mess in multiple ways, and it's taken a lot of time to clean up and try to make sure it won't happen again (some of it was my fault for not implementing some protections fully/properly). Dealing with that took priority, and it meant that I wasn't able to finish the changes before being (mostly) away over the last week and a bit.

Anyway, I'm finally getting back on track and am planning to add more groups very soon (and get those larger changes implemented not long after), so let's talk about that as well as some general discussion about the group hierarchy. First, here are the groups I'm currently intending to add and some thoughts and questions about them:

New groups:

• ~arts - This is one that I'm a little questionable about. I do think we need a space for these subjects, but there's some strange and confusing crossover with the existing ~creative. I'm not sure if ~arts should replace ~creative, and if we should just have a sub-group or something else for "things created by Tildes users". I'd appreciate input here.
• ~design - I really like this idea, and think it can cover topics like graphic design as well as physical ones like fashion and architecture.
• ~finance - This covers some of the other current gaps with existing groups. I'd like to try to fit topics oriented around business in here, as well as ones related more to personal-finance. I'm not certain about the name, but I think it might be the best compared to some of the other comparable options like ~money, ~business, ~commerce, etc.
• ~games.tabletop - I think this will be a good way to start trying to split up the ~games content a little. For now, I want to just leave video game topics in ~games though, instead of splitting it into its own dedicated sub-group. I know this will probably be somewhat confusing and unintuitive in some ways, but I also think making it so that almost no content goes into ~games itself would be very weird.
• ~games.game_design - I think this is a useful way to also split out some of the more "theory-based" topics from the other ones in ~games, which tend to be largely more along the lines of news and "ask" discussions. I also want to be able to do some tinkering with a group having multiple sub-groups, and this will make the first instance of that.
• ~hobbies.automotive - This will be a bit of a test as well. So far, ~hobbies has been quite inactive so it's not truly necessary to split it, but a number of users have expressed interest in it, and I'd like to see if the dedicated sub-group helps motivate more activity about a specific subject.
• ~science.social - Both the name and being a sub-group are a little questionable here. I'm open to changes, but again, please read below about the hierarchy in general first.
• ~space - Fairly heavily requested as well, and I feel like it's distinct enough from the existing groups to be worth trying to give a dedicated section.

Those are all the ones I'm planning to add for now. There are some other groups (and especially some sub-groups) that I think are very good ideas and would work well too, but I want to delay those a little bit to get the structural changes in, since I think that will make a big difference in helping people choose their content too. After these additions we'll have quite a lot of top-level groups (depending exactly what we add, we'll have around 25), and we might want to think about merging some of them before adding even more. On that topic:

General group hierarchy thoughts:

I haven't done a good job of defining the purpose of the group hierarchy, or explaining how I think about it. This has caused a fair amount of confusion and debates about the right place for groups/sub-groups, as well as (completely reasonable) questions like why we need groups at all, instead of just using tags.

I think a lot of the confusion comes from the natural tendency to think about it as a subject-based hierarchy. That is, if subject B is a subset of subject A, it should be a sub-group. However, I think it's going to be more useful to try to treat it as a hierarchy of interest (or disinterest), where the hierarchy is based more around a perspective like "if a user is interested in subject A, they'll probably also be interested in the more-specific subject B".

I think ~tech and ~comp make a good demonstration. From a subject-based perspective, computers are certainly a subset of technology, so it seems like it should really be ~tech.comp instead of two separate top-level groups. But if you look at it from an interest-based perspective, someone being interested in technology in general definitely doesn't imply that they're also interested in reading technical articles about programming. That's why they're split into separate top-level groups.

Similarly, ~anime seems to obviously make sense to be a sub-group of ~tv, but I don't think there's nearly enough "interest crossover" to do that. You'd end up with a huge portion of ~tv viewers wanting to exclude ~tv.anime, since it's such a distinct subject.

Overall, the purpose of the group hierarchy is to help people be able to find and avoid certain types of topics. Using a hierarchy for this will allow us to do things like "I want to see the gaming topics, but not from the League of Legends groups", which are practically impossible to do in a flat structure like reddit has.

You can also think of the groups as something like "forced" or "implied" tags that are always on all of the topics inside those groups. With a tag-only system, every gaming topic would need to manually be tagged something like "video games" so that people uninterested in them can easily filter them out. The groups system makes this automatic and much more convenient and understandable.

In the future, I think it will also be very important for the different groups (and some sub-groups) to be able to act as different "spaces" with their own rules, and possibly even different features or design.

I hope that helps clarify the hierarchy a bit and explain why the organization has been done this way so far (and will likely to continue to be). Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts about the hierarchy and the planned new groups, I'm intending to add them later this week unless something else goes horribly wrong.

And as usual, I've topped everyone's invites up to 10. You can get your invite links here: https://tildes.net/invite

It's been over a year now since we first talked about adding some more groups to the site (and ended up adding several). I think the current set has mostly worked well since then, but some people have mentioned being hesitant to post as many topics as they want to on some subjects due to not wanting to flood out the more-general groups, as well as feeling like some subjects also don't fit into the existing ones.

So let's do another round of suggestions. New groups can be either top-level ones (if that seems to make the most sense) or a sub-group of an existing one (for example, this group, ~tildes.official is a sub-group of ~tildes). The functionality of sub-groups is a little weak right now, but I'll be working on that over the next few days to get it into better shape in case we end up adding some new ones.

The general process from last time seemed to work fine, so I'm just going to copy that:

Proposing a group

If you want to propose an idea for a new group (either a new top-level group or a sub-group of an existing one), make a top-level comment with the following information:

1. The proposed name for the group, and a short description of its purpose/subject.
2. 3 examples of topics that would be appropriate to be posted in that group. These can be existing posts already on Tildes, or hypothetical new ones. Just example titles/links is sufficient, it should just give an idea of what sort of posts you're expecting the group to get.
3. A "failure plan" - if the trial group doesn't work out, what should we do with the posts from it? For example, should they be moved into an existing group or groups, with a particular tag?

Supporting a proposal

To express your support for a proposal that someone else made, post a reply to it, saying something like "I would post in this group" (assuming you actually believe you will). I don't want to interpret votes on a proposal as support, and for a group to be successful it really needs people to post to it, so I think it's most important to get at least some indication that there are users that will post in the group if it's created.

I'll let this topic run for at least 3 days before making any decisions, so don't feel like you need to rush. General questions or thoughts about groups are welcome too, it doesn't need to be entirely proposals. I've also topped given everyone 10 invites again as well. Thanks!

A couple weeks back, we had a thread for people to propose some new groups, and then I got too involved in open-sourcing and some other tasks to follow up on it properly. Thanks again for all the suggestions and the patience with the long delay - I've finally gotten around to going through the thread now and selected 4 groups from the suggestions to try adding. If I didn't select a group you suggested or were excited about, it doesn't necessarily mean I don't think it was a good idea, I just don't want to add too many groups too quickly, and I think these ones have some interesting possibilities.

I decided to auto-subscribe everyone to the new groups, but if you're not interested, you can easily unsubscribe from them through the groups page: https://tildes.net/groups

Here are the new groups:

• ~anime - this is one that I'm really iffy about from a hierarchy perspective, so I think it'll be interesting to experiment with because of that. It's unusual because it will probably contain posts that technically could have fit into ~tv, ~movies, ~games, and other existing groups, but having the anime subject split across all of those groups doesn't seem great either. There will probably be some interesting possibilities to play with here, like possibly making ~anime.games and ~games.anime basically point to the same "location".
• ~enviro - we've had a fair number of topics being posted about recycling, alternate energy, and other related topics, so I think this will be a good one to try.
• ~humanities - this should be able to cover a wide range of the topics that have mostly ended up in ~misc so far (and I'll probably move some previous ones here) - history, ethics, philosophy, etc.
• ~life - the proposal for this one was named ~personal, but I think that term has some other implications that might be a little off, so I decided to go with ~life. This is intended to be a group for discussing and posting about general life topics - work, school, families/parenting, and those kind of things.

Let me know what you think, and if any of the names or descriptions of the groups (in the groups page and in their sidebar) are confusing or should be rewritten, I'd appreciate suggestions.

A few updates related to groups today:

First of all, we now have our first actual sub-group with ~tildes.official . I've automatically subscribed everyone to it, and I'm currently the only one that can post in it. So if you'd like to make sure that you're seeing the official announcements and daily discussions but don't want all the suggestions and bug reports and such clogging up your home page, you can subscribe to ~tildes.official and unsubscribe from ~tildes. Subscribing to ~tildes will still give you the posts from both (regardless of whether you subscribe to ~tildes.official or not). I'll be moving the previous announcements and such into ~tildes.official eventually.

Also, as mentioned a few days ago, it's time to add a few more groups. As part of this, I've updated the groups list page a tiny bit to add the Subscribe/Unsubscribe button onto that page, so that you can easily tell which ones you're already subscribed to and change your choices. These are the new groups:

• ~books
• ~food
• ~hobbies
• ~lgbt
• ~lifestyle

I know that there are a number of other ones that people are clamoring for as well (including sub-groups of existing ones), but I think it's important to go pretty slow with this. At this point I think we already have more groups than reddit did for years (and Digg ever had), but the site's population is lower than even a tiny single subreddit would be. Having things organized more is nice, but we don't want to fragment too quickly into a bunch of inactive groups.

One more thing I could use some help with: the short group descriptions on the groups list are pretty close to placeholders that I wrote very quickly. If anyone wants to suggest some new ones for any of the groups we could use to help make their purpose more clear, I'd love to update them with better ones.

Thanks, let me know what you think.