Tildes fundraiser June 2023: Encourage an app developer (me) to work on a Tildes app faster, by donating to Tildes (not me)!
Hey Tildes, with the renewed interest in the site, it got me thinking that we should hold a fundraiser for the not-for-profit company—which currently consists of just one person—that runs Tildes. It's overdue.
Disclaimer: These are my words as a member of the community. I haven't run this message by the admin before posting. I may have gotten some details wrong.
Where to donate
- GitHub Sponsors: https://github.com/sponsors/Deimos
- Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/tildes
History
A bit of history: The site admin, @Deimos ran the first three years of the site working full-time on it, paid only by donations, plus a $5000 GitHub sponsor match one year, which I'm not even sure was fully achieved, or only just barely.
For that time period 2018-2020, a lowball salary as a software engineer with his experience would have been $100,000 USD per year not including benefits.
If he received $5000 in donations per year (almost certainly an overestimate for more recent years) plus the $5000 GitHub match for the first year—for the 5 years of Tildes' life, that's about $30,000.
The remaining opportunity cost of $270,000 was essentially paid out of pocket by himself, as a donation to the community. Plus remember there are server expenses, legal incorporation expenses, etc. And, y'know, rent.
In recent years he had to take a full-time job because the situation was, of course, unsustainable.
App?
I announced in April that a mobile app is under development. Originally, I was planning to take my time and release a first alpha by the end of 2023.
How about if we struck a deal: get the donation numbers up and I will devote more time to the app, as opposed to splitting my time between it and contract work and other projects.
What's the deal?
- 150 active donors combined on GitHub Sponsors and Patreon—I'll release an alpha by November.
GOAL REACHED - 300 active donors—I'll release an alpha by October.
GOAL REACHED - 500 active donors—I'll release an alpha by September.
The dollar amounts don't matter.
As of writing, we are at 46 active donors.
What's in it for you, though?
Feeling like I did a good deed, I guess? I'm not looking for a "slice of the pie," to be clear. In some sense I'd be matching your donations with my time, aka opportunity cost.
If I donate, can I bother the admin to work more on the site?
No.
Again, I haven't run this fundraiser by the admin. He will certainly keep his full-time employment for the foreseeable future, and will not magically have more hours in the day to devote to Tildes.
With a sustainable budget, though, a lot can happen in the future. Contracting out work to others, for example.
But the point of this fundraiser is more to make a small dent in the past debt we owe the admin, not making any promises whatsoever on the future of the site and how it's run.
Let's go, my fellow Tilderinos!
- GitHub Sponsors: https://github.com/sponsors/Deimos
- Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/tildes
Thanks very much for the post and all the kind words, @talklittle, and thanks to everyone that's donated! I just got back home and looked in my email, and it was a really nice surprise to see a big burst of donations.
And just to be explicit about it since I'm not sure if I've discussed it directly before—I've never paid myself anything from the donations, it's always only been used to pay for expenses to run the site and organization (servers, domain names, etc.). The donations over the years have easily been more than enough to cover the costs (and will continue being able to for quite a while, unless something massive happens).
Also, I've said it to you privately, but this is a good opportunity for me to publicly thank you again for working on an app for Tildes. Reddit is Fun has always been my favorite reddit app, and I've used it every day for more years than I can remember. I'm sure the last few days on reddit have made it clear how many other people feel that strongly about RIF too, and having the person who built it want to work on something similar for my little site is amazing. Thank you!
Tildes has settled into such a nice and cozy rhythm and atmosphere. Hope we maintain the same feel even as it grows a little bit and new members bring some new angles and experiences to the discussions.
On the technical side I often find myself in awe at all the convenient little touches that make things work so intuitively. Even tiny things like "navigation link" blue being different from "action link" blue make me nod in appreciation. (My app will smooth some of that over though.) My point is Tildes is quite innovative despite the throwback visual style, and I think there is potential for things to get better and better.
Given our mutual appreciation, I think we can work well together!
This is surreal, seeing the RiF dev posting here casually. Feels like I'm in a secret club, hahah.
This website is what comes to mind when I envision "minimalist" where each element is cleverly designed in a way, where when I want to do something more complicated, the button is hidden in plain sight, and when I am just browsing it almost disappears into the background. It's deceivingly simple and I can tell thought has been put into it.
And obligatory thank you x1000 for the rif app, best android app I've ever bought.
Speaking of link colors... If the Tildes app could mirror the website color schemes that would be pretty awesome. I am loving gruvbox dark.
Hey mate, just wanted to say thanks so much for RiF. Was probably my most used app over the last decade or so after perhaps only Spotify.
As soon as you release your Android app I'll be straight there. Feel free to shout if you need beta testers too, I am a software dev IRL.
Reddit is Fun is the only way I've used reddit since I joined the android phone club many many years ago. Very excited to have a hopefully equally as good browsing experience on Tildes
You're doing a great job. Any plans on fully opening the site without the invites?
In my opinion any attempt to open the invites should come with quotas. Ex: open invites on the start of the month for the first 200 users.
But we could just keep it like it is. The benefit of that is we know that what we have works.
I guess currently invites are given out in a phase wise manner only. And users are not allowed to send invites until they reach a threshold, which I am not sure what is it.
I'm not able to generate an invite myself, being here since 15th May.
Users don't automatically get to generate invites to hand out. Deimos periodically gives a certain amount (usually 10) to everyone, but I doubt he will do that again until everyone who has been invited in the last few days gets more acclimatized to the place though.
Ah that makes sense. That seems like a fair and simple way to limit the invites.
Have you considered selling Tildes merch to raise more money also? You’ve got a pretty sweet logo that would lend itself to just going on some shirts/hats/hoodies, etc.
It had been brought up in the past, but the site's always been so small that it was never really worth looking into seriously. If we keep growing it might be something to take more of a look at though.
I would not underestimate this one. I think the type of user who hangs around on Tildes for any great deal of time is totally the type of user that would love to support the site by purchasing mugs, caps, hoodies, mouse mats, etc.
Amazing idea! How about I sweeten the pot and add some of my own goals, if I may. :D
Your Tildes companion projects are always super interesting and useful. I'm thrilled you are participating. Thank you Bauke!
110 donors between Github and Patreon now. Okay, @Bauke, get to work! I expect it done 2 hours from now! That's reasonable, right? ;)
I was writing this as a reply to your other comment literally as you posted yours so I'm not even gonna change it. :P
What if I don't do it, you gonna kick down my door and drown me in maple syrup?
Also, since we've now reached 100+ donors I've begun on some new graphs for Tildes Statistics. Here's 1000 days of Tildes user growth until I get something on the site.
That's... astounding!
I've been saying that Tildes' growth has been stagnant over the past few years, but I never really had any proof of that - only a gut-feeling.
That graph, going back to mid-September 2020, confirms that gut-feeling and then some. Tildes' user base grew by only 908 users over the 993-day period from Sep 2020 (12,113 users) to May 2023 (13,021 users - referring to @cfabbro's 30-day graph): less than 1 new user per day. (About a 7.5% total increase in users across that period.)
In the past 7 days, the user base has grown by about 2,400 new users. (An 18.5% increase in users.)
I know they're not all going to become long-term users; some people who signed up this week will decide Tildes isn't right for them, and move on. But that's still a huge increase.
I've looked at a lot of graphs like that for a lot of subreddits. That growth is a bit uncommon. A lot of places only grow in spurts, or backslide. This place maintained a slow but steady trickle the entire time, and that surprises me.
That's registered subscribers but not necessarily activity. If you did daily active users you probably would have seen a big backslide over the past year or two.
That would be an interesting additional data point. Hopefully we can hit 500 donors so that we can get all of the good data crunching.
Wowza. It looks far less dramatic over 30 days. Still dramatic, but not "Oh, God, what have I done?" dramatic like that is. :P
Looks like the US unemployment graph circa April 2020.
That cfabbro guy's a straight shooter with upper management written all over him.
So, about those TPS reports....
Topic Tag numbers/popularity would be a nice one to see (and help with discoverability). That would likely require a lot of scraping though. :(
Maybe something like a monthly roundup would be feasible, only scraping that month's topics. But yeah total site scrapes are not great.
I barely know anything about databases but why not record tags that are used in a specific table that is updated when a post is submitted or the topic tags are changed? This can be within Tildes for the popular tags suggestions functionality and be open for the stats.
AFAIK the popularity of tags is already tracked. The "important" tags (the ones that show up on the front page even if people don't have "Show topic tags in listing pages" checked in their settings) uses that data. It's just not viewable anywhere, and currently only used on the backend though. There is a new feature request for it to be made visible to users on the Gitlab issues though.
I was 100th donor on Github right now with my humble dollar-a-month. It's still more than I would be willing to pay for Reddit though. Tildes seems like a good open source project that won't screw over people. So I felt like my words should be backed with
NUCLEAR WEAPONSmy money.I want to get off Mr. Birch's Wild Ride
Reddit ran for a decade with three admins. That was also its most civilized decade, from a user culture standpoint. We can do without reddit's 400+ 'marketing' employees, though. Hundreds of people, just... standing around.
What this site needs in order to start evolving features is a couple of full time employees. That's in the ballpark of a dollar a year from 300,000 users, or a dollar a month from 30,000 users. It is really not that expensive to cover a couple of salaries, and non-profits get perks in Canada too. Your first employee will be the guy who wrote Automoderator to save /r/games (and accidentally, reddit) before he was employed at reddit, where he handled reddit gold. You also get to own the source code, AGPLv3 has no take-backs. You get the same code the server is running, in perpetuity.
That's the other way to donate, by the way - code. You'll find the tech stack is quite civilized, and a slight nudge away from becoming for news aggregators what phpbb is for forums. This will remain the 'official' tildes, but eventually there will be others.
Everyone on reddit does not have to come here, the tildes code is intended to help you run your own reddit-like site. Frankly, most of the subreddits that have survived this long and are still somehow lucky enough to command an actual community would be best served going that route. It'd be like reddit, but with all the noise from all of those other pesky subreddits just... gone.
App developers could as easily support one 'tildes' as they could dozens of them. Any community that thinks it deserves a better website can jump right on this code. We are this close to reinventing usenet.
I guess it's time to think about what having a quality online conversation is worth in 2023.
A safe place for the free exchange of ideas and experience is well worth a monthly subscription. It's a resource I've benefitted from often, in more menacing arenas lol.
That intolerance of intolerance makes all the difference and begs some reward.
Cheers
I'm doubtful Tildes is big enough to have employees, but we'll see where we are after the current influx settles.
Regarding code contributions, I suspect the issue tracker is stale and someone would need to go though it and nominate some "starter" issues. And that probably needs to be @Deimos?
Yeah, it's a nice dream/goal, @Amarok; Tildes' having multiple full-time employees and its code becoming the backbone for a bunch of communities. I genuinely hope something like that can come to pass. But let's try just getting it so Deimos is able to pay himself even a modest salary first (which AFAIK he still hasn't ever done with Tildes donations) before anything so grandiose... that would be a start.
And as far as Gitlab goes, I try to keep it as organized as I can, and add more feature requests, bug reports, and whatnot, whenever people make them on ~tildes... but I can't really assign priorities or recommend "starter" contributions, since I am a very amateur programmer (at best), and don't have enough of an understanding of how everything in Tildes code works. That, and ultimately, feature requests are Deimos' domain... he has to approve or disapprove of them, and there are still a quite a few Stage::Unconfirmed ones left in the pile.
Edit: Although, it should be noted that there is a Beginner-Friendly label for the issues, and when combined with Stage::Accepted, makes a good list for people looking to contribute code to start trying to find something to work on.
Oh man.....I'm not a good coder at all but I would love to tackle "busy work" tier issues. Fix typos kinda stuff.....
That sort of thing can even be done via the Gitlab interface, since they have their own Web IDE. So no need for specialized software. I would hope that there aren’t too many typos to actually fix though, or I haven’t been doing my job very well. ;)
How does that work? Would users need to have separate logins for each tilde they wanted to join?
They would. Each instance of a tildes has its own unique internal identity structure. You can tag people in with @username. I can imagine something more federated where it's username@instance if there are multiple nodes out there all agreeing to communicate. That will take code or donations to pay coders.
I rather like the idea of fifty subreddits just taking a tildes rocket right out of reddit to start their own sites, and letting the app developers handle tying all of those together inside the various mobile clients. It gives third party apps something useful to do that isn't just getting a tilde in your pocket. You'd get all of the tildes in your pocket, and they'll all be independent of one another at the same time.
I question how viable it would be for some things. Hobby subs absolutely, but I can’t imagine the Ask__ or LookAtMyThing subs being able to go solo.
Part of the deal with Reddit was that people from all walks of life are on there to look at memes and read random articles and, occasionally, a question that’s in their wheelhouse comes up so they can answer it in depth. Without the stream of general interest content to draw random subject area experts to check in and hang out, you don’t get those experts’ eyes on the random questions.
Even now you can see how sparse the responses are on AskScience and AskHistorians on Reddit. As the site turned into a political harassment venue those people left so questions just don’t get answered. The changes to subscriptions to be more opt-in also makes it so general interest groups don’t see these questions so all questions are answered by a handful of people who, often, aren’t as expert as they front on the topic.
It's an interesting vision. People would host their own sites with a common interface, like a powerful version of RSS. They wouldn't have to be federated—server-to-server coordination—but rather consolidated by clients.
Kind of like, well, HTTP and the World Wide Web 1.0, eh? :)
Given enough time, everything becomes an operating system.
It looks like July 1st is D-Day, so it's all about what can be done by then. That's going to be reddit's peak pain moment. If a bunch of the reddit apps support letting a user add their own tildes nodes, and there are a couple out there to just show it can be done, people might switch. I certainly wouldn't mind putting more of the wild west back into internet forum culture.
Perhaps instead of federation, OIDC on tildes instances might be better instead. It allows for bringing along a single identity across multiple sites, preventing users from starting all over again every time.
I never fully understood why OpenID fell out of usage in favor of OAuth and proprietary authentication solutions. Maybe that's the answer right there: proprietary platforms wanting a degree of lock-in? Is that really all it was?
I think it's as simple as: If you make money you get a marketing budget.
This sounds like what Lemmy and Kbin do already, using the ActivityPub protocol.
The biggest issue with federation is moderation. It is difficult to moderate users from other instances, without resorting to the drastic option of defederating them outright. Moderation on tildes seems to be very nice, so it'd be quite a shame to see that getting degraded.
There's another problem that federation has which may not be relevant now, but could occur in the future:
Federated instances often have issues whether someone notable joins, which can lead to a massive influx of traffic from both new users and existing users locally and from other instances. This can be impactful enough to take down small or even mid-sized instances or at the very least, degrade the experience significantly. Now imagine this but magnified by large enough communities becoming threats simply by existing, accidentally (to use a term from The Other Site) hugging smaller instances to death. This is already happening with Lemmy instances right now, for example.
This could be mitigated by tildes instances remaining invite-only. However, it only takes one with open registration for the above issues to manifest. It also bears thinking whether there are alternatives to federation that have some of its advantages without its disadvantages, such as easy account migration through OIDC and account data backup/restore.
Sounds like Google / Facebook authentication support is needed.
The main tildes could potentially handle oauth for the other instances. It's fairly easy to set up and doesn't create a crazy heavy load on servers if the tokens only need refreshing every 15 mins or 2 hours. If it's something the community and @Deimos are interested in supporting I could pitch in. Only signed up today so I haven't looked over the codebase yet, the docs looked good though so I'm sure it will be easy to work in.
You're proposing some kind of federated system, but maybe we should think about what problems are being solved, first.
Reddit has a common login that's very convenient when joining new subreddits, but it also means there's a problem with people dropping in on communities without learning their way around first. Tildes has an invite system that adds friction, which is the opposite of having a super-convenient shared login, so there's some tension there.
There might be a way to get both, though? Substack has a common login system, but Substacks still feel pretty distinct.
One way to make communities feel connected-but-distinct would be to share common usernames. You can do that yourself by choosing the same username on whatever instance you're joining (like I do), so I guess it's about reserving usernames from a common pool?
This is assuming you actually want your forum identities connected. It makes it easier for people to get a unified view of which forums you participate in, like they can find out which subreddits you post in on Reddit. But that undermines the privacy you get from keeping accounts separate.
Anyway, none of this is true of Tildes today. If someone wants to run Tildes software, they can, but it's an entirely separate website.
Getting back to the mobile app, I think the modern way to handle logins to a bunch of entirely separate websites might be PassKey support? An older way would be a password manager of some sort, but if I were writing a mobile app, I'd want to avoid storing people's passwords.
We're now at 266 active donors! Incredible! A week ago it was only 92. Thank you everyone! Let's keep it going!
(I'd better start looking up how to install the X-Codes on my Macintosh, huh... :/)
While you're here, I want to address a common sentiment: "Why an app? Just use the website. It's fantastic." I fully agree that the Tildes website is excellent on mobile. And indeed, to set expectations, the first iteration of my app will indeed look a lot like the official website. When I started on the project, it was intended as a side project for me to learn certain technologies, including iOS. Given that it was meant as a learning experience, please set expectations accordingly: it looks like the website.
Then why an app? Well, to answer that, we have another common sentiment that's been expressed on Tildes since I've been here: that the audience feels kind of homogeneous and technical. I posit that to attract more non-technical people, we need an app. Like it or not, "normal people" use apps. That ship has sailed long ago. Even the mighty Steve Jobs, who originally wanted iPhone apps to be web apps, lost that battle quickly. People want apps.
Let me also point out that there is some selection bias in that people who have stuck with Tildes' website-only experience, of course will be comfortable with websites. Those who bounced off because there's no app aren't here to argue otherwise.
So, if we want to get some of those non-technical users back—those who are a great fit for the culture and also bring with them their interesting, non-tech backgrounds—and keep them, we need apps.
One more thing: Shoutout to @wababa who beat me to the punch in releasing a beta for their iOS app. It is great to have different apps with different aesthetics. No single app can satisfy everyone, so I am relieved we will be seeing multiple apps out there to appeal to different subsets of users.
Ooooh I hate that you’re right about this but. . .I gotta hand it to you. You’re right.
Thanks for the shoutout @talklittle! Also for the reminder - proud to add to the sponsor count on GitHub :)
Let me say as a technical person I still want an app, and I believe there are some features that would make sense for an app to have that aren't as important for a desktop version.
For example saving drafts of comments is huge for me, and would help continue to foster longer form in-depth comments.
Also personally I'm a tab addict, keeping tildes in an app will help me keep my phone's browser clean.
I have used RIF for all my mobile viewing, it has been great and I wanted to thank you for it. I look forward to what you bring to the tildes app.
This makes me wish there was a pin feature we could use for this topic so it doesn't get lost in the shuffle. :(
Thanks for doing this though, @talklittle, no matter how many new donors it nets. I look forward to trying out your new app (even if it doesn't come out until when you originally planned).
Great job on the first half-day, everyone! In just ten hours we've gone from 46 to 65 donors. That's a whopping increase of 41%.
If we keep adding donors by the same percentage every half-day, we'll hit 30,000,000 donors by the end of June!!! Keep it up!!!
(Seriously though, thanks for your generosity.)
Only 67 now. We’re slowing down! C’mon people, we should at least be able to get to 150. You can do it.
( making this comment to bump the topic, since it’s been 5 hours since the last one ;)
79 now. Over half way there!
88 now! We’ve almost doubled it in one day!
92. Slowly getting closer to talklittle’s 150 and Bauke’s 100 goals!
One thing this whole Reddit debacle has driven home to me is that we all bear responsibility for seeing that our online spaces remain civil and are positive benefits to our lives, not drains on our souls. Too often we've been content to leave the hard work of keeping our communities safe, welcoming and beneficial to others. I intend to do things differently from now on.
With that in mind, I've just signed up for a monthly donation on Github. It's not much, but I've been very impressed with the civility and decency the userbase displays on this site, and I want to do what I can to support this kind of community. I encourage everyone to do what they can to fight for the kind of online communities you want to exist, because I've come to realize that no one is going to do it for us.
/u/talklittle, you're the man! You made Reddit into RIF, and I'm excited to see what happens ~~ with Tildes is Fun (or similar)! ~~
~~ One consideration for a name/acronym, though - "TIF" is a commonly-used slur by terfs. They call transmen "Trans-identified females," claiming they are "really women." (And the corrolary for transwomen is "TIM" - "trans-identified males.") Maybe an alternative acronym could be chosen instead of "TiF"? ~~ If you can make sure trans folx will be welcome, I'll definitely donate to this new playground!
EDIT: As noted below, a great and inclusive name has been announced - "Three Cheers for Tildes"...So I've joined the Patreon at $2/month. I hope you all will too!
Talklittle has already given it a name - Three Cheers for Tildes
Oh HELL yes. That's awesome to hear :D
And I've officially joined the Patreon.
Thanks for pointing this out and glad I avoided that landmine. Glad you decided to join the Patreon also!
Are you kidding? A tildes version of RIF is a dream! Of course I'd join the Patreon :)
I'm doing my part!
I just sponsored Deimos on GitHub about 8 hours ago! I figured I'd redirect the money from my now-cancelled reddit premium subscription to somewhere that actually cares about its community and could put it to good use with the influx of new users.
Wow! We've doubled the original donor count in just one weekend, from 46 to 92 donors. Thank you everyone! (Thanks @cfabbro for checking in on it!)
By the way, I'm planning to slow down the bumping of the topic starting tomorrow, to avoid fundraiser fatigue. I plan to bump weekly if it falls too far down the feed.
End of fundraiser was going to be end of June, but we can probably include the first week of July too, given the climate. So around that time we can do another push.
Yeah I wasn’t planning on continuing to artificially bump the topic for much longer either. Bumping it every week or so afterwords sounds about right though (if it doesn’t happen organically).
Only saw this now, happy to join the Patreon. Keep bumping it, probably more like me who haven't seen it
As a reddit refugee, if things keep going the way they are over there I'll likely be migrating over here. Will be supporting if that happens!
You can always do a tiny one time donation of $5-10 just as a "check out the joint" cover charge, if possible:) Canadians can just e-transfer to donate@tildes.net
You know, I have $5 a month to contribute. Tildes is worth it, and more.
Well, I certainly get a lot from this site and have for the past few years. I just signed up to be a github sponsor at $5 a month. I really encourage others, even new users, to pitch in a little bit if their finances allow for it. I like to think of this site as something of a digital commons that we all contribute to and all manage. We’re responsible for the community we build here! Thanks @talklittle for starting this drive.
362 active donors as of June 27!
What say we give this one more week, ending on July 4, US Independence Day? Seems appropriate somehow.
Let's get to 500!
Hear, hear! I just invited another 250 people through /r/tildes today, and Deimos is finally almost done his huge backlog of email requests. So there should hopefully be some fresh interest in this too.
Well I'm late to the party I guess, but I still donated
In light of the info from Deimos that previous donations have been enough to sustain the routine expenses and that he hasn’t (and seems like won’t) take donations for himself, I think it’s important to know a bit more on how additional money can/will be used when asking to significantly grow the pool.
As much as I love Tildes, if the money is going to sit in a pile indefinitely, it’s hard not to feel like it be better to direct that money somewhere that could use it now, or grow it through personal investment, and donate to Tildes when there’s a more concrete plan.
A fair concern. Right now the admin is deadlocked, because he's employed elsewhere and can't work on Tildes, and there's not enough donation income to make it worth it to quit his job.
One hypothetical path forward: The budget could be very useful to pay contributors to continue working on the Tildes open source code base. Although people contribute to open source for free all the time, money is a useful way to direct people to the more difficult and time-consuming tasks.
Earlier this year I privately expressed to @Deimos my interest in helping with the code base, and he seemed open to it. I might possibly end up taking on a maintainer role, although nothing's been agreed on. It's early to be bringing this up, too, since I am busy with my mobile app for several months. Furthermore, money was never discussed, so I can't give any answer on how this relates to the Tildes budget, but I could imagine some part-time paid contractor arrangement.
Give it to @skybrian and let him invest it /s
More seriously, I think there is an advantage to investing at least some of the assets, if not into the stock/bond market, then into something like a CD ranging from three to twelve months, to help hold off inflation while still keeping things relatively accessible.
I'm not qualified to invest anyone's money. (Coincidentally, I did recently buy some CD's, though.)
From an effective altruism perspective, there are surely more worthy causes. But I think this is meant more as a show of support, so you could think of it as coming out of a different budget.
You just seem like the most capitalist-y of the older Tildes users, so I figured I’d make a comment about that. I wasn’t going from an EA angle, more from a “increase the money available for funding staffing and site upgrades” perspective.
I do think that longer term, an endowment model might be a handy way to park Tildes’ money and get some revenue. We’ll see how things play out.
I applaud the effort and commitment put into this site. I had thought this was a side project Deimos kept up. Will definitely be supporting.
The 300 goal has been reached
I threw in my own $5 a month yesterday via github. I used to pay more than that to use their private repos, which became free a couple years ago. If that was worth it, this site sure as hell is worth it so much more. Thank you @deimos and all others for your amazing contributions.
Committed to $5/mo on Patreon
Added $10/mo Patreon. Fuck them big corps.
Threw a donation in via Github, and signed up monthly on Patreon.
RIF-for-Tildes go go go!
I’m curious, @deimos, of all the donation options, which one gives you the biggest cut?
I have a recurring donation set up, but if one particular avenue has lower fees so that more money ends up going to the site, I’ll gladly switch to that.
According to the Donations docs page:
Well I guess I read that at some point, since that’s where my donation has been going for the last 4 years.
Wow! If my eyes don't deceive me, we're at 197 total donors! Three cheers for the community here :) If I'm not mistaken, we've hit the criteria for @talklittle's and @Bauke's first tiers, and are only 3 donors away from hitting @Bauke's second tier! But I bet we could get up to 300 by the end of this.
We're now at exactly 200!
At the rate this is going, I'm hopeful to see how far we get, and interested in what this might encourage others to make. (Especially with a bunch of new people interested in helping with the site -- who knows what we'll come up with!)
Now I see 265! (120 on github and 145 on patreon)
I've been including a link to this post when giving out invites
It's the last couple days of the fundraiser, ending July 4.
Anyone who is enjoying Tildes, and believes in the site's philosophy, please consider signing up for a donation to the not-for-profit company keeping the site running.
We started with 46 active donors a month ago, and now up to 377. I know we can do even better!
WTB Sticky Topic feature for posts like this. :(
Regardless of if we make it to 500, this was already quite an amazing accomplishment talklittle. So thanks again for doing it. :)
Very cool, I'll see what I can do as well!
Recent reddit refugee here, signed up for a few bucks a month on Patreon
Count me in for $5 per month!
Hopefully a nominal sum per month will actually tie me to this website. :-)
Okay, last intentional bump, I promise. But we're only 2 donors away from forcing @Bauke to fulfill his promise and improve Tildes Statistics, which I'm always in favor of. ;)
I donated on GitHub a few mins ago. Not sure if I'm counted in the 2 away figures or not.
Hmm... I dunno if it counts new additions instantly or not. Still shows 2 short. :(
Thanks for becoming a donor though. :)
FYI I switched my sponsor from patreon to github, so I'll be double sponsoring for 1 month
You just got another patron! I’m here for the long haul, let’s do this!
I know we don't do stickied threads here, but I do think that newer people (like me) may not be used to the fact that if stuff doesn't get bumped they might never actually see it.
Anyway, I hope that among the many refugees here, by putting a little bit of monetary contribution, they could be encouraged to reading a few things here every now and then.
I appreciate this encouragement. Between this and the RIF announcement today, it reminded me that this was on my mental to-do list. Just chipped in $5 a month on github.
I can't up the active donor count as I've been sponsoring since the Github Sponsors page first opened, but as I'm in a better place financially now, I can double my donation. Massive thanks to making this, by the way — this is incredibly cool to see!
Solid idea. I'm in. I miss the old Reddit days.
I'm in for 30 dollars. My income is variable, so I will do one time donations as is feasible. Happy to support the effort.
Will this also be used for server expenses? How much are those presently?
That’s something only @Deimos can answer.
But it’s worth mentioning that Tildes actually used to have a financials tracker page (snapshot from 2019). And I think the only reason it was removed was because things stabilized here, so income/expenses never really changed from month to month anymore. But if this donation drive is successful enough for things to dramatically change (like Deimos finally being able to take a wage), maybe that page might be worth bringing back.
you are exquisite. thank you. <3
@deimos @talklittle thank you for reminding me to donate! One suggestion is I would love to see a scheduled post reminding me to donate again. Does anyone else agree?
I'll be there day 1. I've been a user of RIF for about 9 years now, so I'm excited to get to continue to use more of your software.
Is there an API for Tildes or how are you implementing it ? I wanted to do something similar but couldn’t find any docs. (I stumbled on this post instead)
If I had to guess, the answer to your question is somewhere here, but also you could ask in this thread and almost certainly get an answer. https://tildes.net/~tildes/15my/new_users_ask_your_questions_about_tildes_here
Thank you for addressing that question that I missed. Turns out @earlsweatshirt already figured it out and has been making insane progress on their iPhone app, Surfboard.
(The answer is there is no Tildes API yet; must rely on scraping the HTML.)
Is your plan for your app to also scrape initially? Or contribute to building an API? I haven’t looked through Gitlab a lot, not sure if work has started on one.
Replying to bump this for people who haven't seen it and might be interested.
@deimos, why don't you consider a for profit consumer cooperative model? The difference here is that you eventually transition the site towards community ownership. Yet, with a profit motive hopefully there are incentives for community expansion.
I think a small problem with contemporary coops is lack of participation from most owner members. I think problems with participation can be mitigated using a sortition, lottocratic style of governance where small samples of owner members are drafted and compensated for participation in governance.
This seems like something that pretty explicitly goes against what Deimos has said he wants for Tildes, given the design/philosophy docs for Tildes.
The problem with a profit motive is that you need a profit. Tildes can't even pay for one developer yet, so obviously monetization is not a strong suit of the site. Cramming ads on here isn't going to make it profitable either, you need a hell of a lot of users for ads to really pull money.
Right now, Tildes just needs to grow users and survive. If it becomes big, then they can think about making it a real company with employees.
Spectria/Tildes is a registered non-profit and has been making enough from donations to be sustainable for over 5 years now. Monetization of users and making a profit is explicitly not the goal, and there will never be ads here regardless of how much it grows.
https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes#non-profit-no-investors
It shouldn't. Are you using wababa's new iOS app to log in to the site? That has a known issue with certain characters in the passwords not working. But that's specifically a bug in the app, not the base site, AFAIK.