228
votes
20,000 Tildidgeridoos!
It has been exactly 4 years, 3 months and 2 days since Tildes hit 10,000 users!
Congratulations everyone!
It has been exactly 4 years, 3 months and 2 days since Tildes hit 10,000 users!
Congratulations everyone!
Thanks @Deimos for not slapping the door shut when we all knocked. I assume it must be a somewhat scary sight to have 10.000 emails of more or less random people wanting to join your little, well protected corner of the internet all of a sudden.
I've finally got that inbox under 1000 messages left!
...but I'm still 9 days behind.
Just got my approval and account made. Thank you so much for letting myself and everyone else in!
Exactly same here. Super grateful. It feels like ye olde internet again 🥲
Hah. Same here! Loving it.
Same here.
I have only been here a couple of days so far.
Your username is killing me, lol. Do you know The Fix? They had a clip a while back about what superhero could save a Jamaican man, it had me rolling.
Haha glad my username made you laugh. I actually haven't heard of the fix but I will try and find it online and give it a watch :)
Thanks for giving us a new home.
Hey you got mine approved which is all that matters, kidding. Thanks for all the hard work, it's appreciated!
Dude I joined yesterday and have been really enjoying this. Love the sense of community you got here.
I just got my invite and signed up! Your site is very mobile friendly :)
Who helps you do all that? I'd love to learn more of your filtering strategy and managing all other communications and responsibilities in life.
Noone.
Deimos has previously explained that responding to requests for invitations is one task he can't delegate to anyone else.
Knowing that's a limitation makes me feel like I snuck in by posting in the r/Tildes invite request thread.
You and hundreds of other people! cfabbro has been handing out lots of invitations over there.
Thousands, actually. I've handed out about ~3000 invites via /r/tildes since the wave started. ;)
I originally wrote "thousands" because I was pretty sure I'd seen you say something like that, but then I changed it before posting because I wasn't quite sure.
That's a lot of invitations!
I feel like I shouldn’t have replied earlier today after you helped me with an issue logging in… just added to your email list lol.
Just joined today, happy to be here!
Jumping on the "thank you for adding me " thread!
Thank you so much. Tildes looks great. It seems like a wonderful community.
Hear, hear. As another one of the recent influx of newbies, thanks for tolerating us.
Yes, I second that. Thank you!
I just got an invite after emailing. Given the Reddit drama I was not expecting a response, but pleasantly surprised! Happy to be able to contribute now.
I didn't even know 7k people outside of Tildes knew about this site.
Tildes is now getting mentioned positively in just about any thread I find online talking about reddit alternatives. It's safe to say the secret's out. I still haven't seen anyone in the tech press talk about Tildes, though. We're not worthy of a Forbes article yet. :)
We had a post about a Lifehacker article that came out. Is Lifehacker tech press?
Nah, that's just a generic bucket of reddit alternatives that reads like it was written by chatGPT. I'm talking about a real human-written article that's just about Tildes, covering the corporate structure, the open source code, the privacy first design, and the rest of the ethos behind this project. Nobody in the tech press has gone down the rabbit hole that starts on the blog announcement post yet. I have a feeling there's going to come a monumental invite wave once that happens. There are certain podcast audiences that are born for this forum and haven't found out about it yet. Once it's in the tech press it'll percolate over to them and then things get really interesting.
Damn. After watching this place kinda drift quietly for so long, that chart sure is something to look at! Makes me feel hip, having been a Tildork for years already. Here's to careful & steady growth!
Yeah! I've been looking for alternatives for years but somehow never found out about Tildes until recently. A lot of the alternatives suggested before things went down were very alt-right or toxic.
I think my googling must have been terrible too. I was nostalgic for the old internet and kept looking for forums as alternatives but they were mostly dead. Tildes is exactly what I've been looking for.
How did I not find out about it earlier?
I think the first thing I raved about when I found Tildes, but didn't have an invite was that it was text! It was all text! That's all I really want! More text!
Yeah, Tildes was pretty quiet over the last few years. I checked Tildes about once a week and there were always interesting articles posted, but usually limited discussion (usually zero discussion). As such, it was a reddit alternative, but not a particularly active one. About the only topic that really dragged the lurkers out of the shadows was when a post concerned reddit. Then everyone wanted to talk.
Super glad to see a lot more people here. It's nice to see this place lively for once. Hopefully people, such as yourself, will stay long-term and keep contributing!
Same. I've been looking for a replacement site for ages. So glad I finally found this place. It's amazing here.
I can’t remember the username off-hand (edit: /u/TinmanJones), but at some point there was a young Tildesto in ~food who used to chat with me every week about the curries that made with their father (and whatever I was making that week). Shout outs to you young Tilden, wherever you are.
@gaywallet just posted a week and some change ago. They have their own deal, but I think they are still around.
I'm still around, just very rarely. It's busy work running a site. Also it's gay month and I'm gay
Those are some names I haven't seen in a while!
I think I might know alyaza from another site
She is one of the BeeHaw admins along with GayWallet.
Just checked their Open Collective page. That's them.
If they were banned from Tildes, it must have been interesting. I recognise alyaza as a regular of the alternative social media site cohost.
Still is particularly aggressive at points but yeah. I just try not to move towards those kinds of people anymore, not the best thing for my mind and... better people to pay attention to y'know?
And may we have many more!
The last month on this site has been very invigorating and has inspired me to get back into a lot of different topics just from discussions and articles here. Its amazing what a good community can do!
I ditto the others in saying how I’m grateful to have a safe space to learn, explore and just be myself. Where is the donate button? The money I save on Reddit premium will go to this awesome app.
Details and more options here, but if you just want some quick links, there's a Github Sponsors page and a Patreon. :)
ETA: talklittle (the Reddit is Fun dev) is also running a fundraiser as well that the above pages count toward; we're ~350 out of 500 active donors towards getting a Three Cheers for Tildes alpha one month sooner!
What exactly is a Three Cheers in this context? Something to with financing an app in development maybe?
“Three Cheers for Tildes” is the name of the app.
@Bauke do you have any stats about how many users there are that have made a post or comment in the last 30 days? I want to see how many users were active before the recent influx of users.
Not quite what you were asking for, but here's some stats about comments - number of unique users that commented on each day, and total number of comments:
Just post another topic about the Reddit outrage du jour and I'm sure you can get that count of unique commenters above 800 in no time :-p
There may be another bump when the API changes actually take effect on July 1. I'm still able to use my third party app at the moment but once that's gone my reddit use will be limited to desktop and will drop considerably, so I'll be here more. I'm sure there are others in the same boat.
Hello! You mind tell me how you use tildes in your phone? Is through an app or just the browser version?
I just use the browser version in Chrome, works fine for me. I do end up with many many tildes tabs after a while though, haven't figured out a good fix for that yet
Do you have it set to open a new tab when you click on a post?
No, but I don't typically close tabs when I'm done, I just switch to a different app. And every time I hit the Tildes shortcut on my home screen it opens a new tab so they stack up.
Seeing the scale of this growth, what do you think would be the "cutoff limit" where no other invites would be sent and/or handed out for a while?
Not an admin, but the cutoff limit is more likely to be determined by the need for moderation than headcount. As long as people keep on being lovely, more people is great. But if more moderation has to happen, and more development is needed to facilitate that, it's likely to draw attention away from adding people and redirect it to preparing for future waves when we're ready to welcome them.
I do not, I believe at the moment only @Deimos can answer that question.
And even though I'm one of the new, it already feels like I'm getting used to it very nice. I really like the atmosphere and the friendly, polite way. Luckily I was active on mostly friendly subs and used to write longer comments myself, so it's easy to feel comfortable here.
This is cool to see. Even cooler is that we went from 15k to 20k in the last 15-16 days. Wonder how many new users will end up sticking around and remaining active.
For now I am lurking =)
Though I visit the site almost daily and the quality of discussions seems very high!
Still getting used to the text only approach though. Glad you guys seem to be okay with Reddit refugees, though I totally understand the concerns one might have.
It’s interesting to see the most unsubscribed groups form that data. Anime, lgbt, health. Would be interesting to see a chart on this
Those are available as of 2 weeks ago, as part of my 100 donors fundraiser goal! :D
They're pretty much identical, as new users are subscribed to almost every group by default. I think most new people aren't yet changing their subscribed groups and the differences are largely from the older guard.
I was here 5 years before unsubscribing from any groups. There just wasn't enough content to bother for the longest time, but now I've done a little pruning with the recent influx of users.
Good stuff, what I was thinking was one single graph for all. Top horizontal line is the tildes member count with a bar/marker beneath to show how far off 100% they are. Or just all groups on the same graph.
Ah, I see. I did something similar once years ago and it didn't really look great or all that useful. But I can try again at some point soon and see if I can make something work.
Even a delta % in the table would be cool. I’ll be honest I’m just lazy to do the maths myself on mobile. But great work otherwise!
Do you have a version of the users chart that goes back to the launch of Tildes, Bauke?
The earliest numbers I have are from 2020-07-13, so missing about 2 years and 3 months of data. I did make a version with 1000 days 2 weeks ago. Maybe I should add a chart to the site that has everything from the beginning in it, that's not a bad idea.
Is there a non-truncated version for this as well? Truncating the y-axis sort of makes sense here given the continuously monitored nature of the data, but might still be very deceiving.
There isn't as that one was a one-off, but when I get around to adding it to the site there will be.
Edit: I have added it.
That's about the effect I was hoping to see :D
We should get Tildes merch! I would happily slap a sticker on my water bottle and computer.
Hey I’d actually purchase Tildes merch lol. Feels like a small club, something actually worth repping.
Exactly!
I wag my finger in your general direction for using an axis that starts at 13,000!
Cool stats though, thanks.
There is a link to the untruncated version underneath the regular one.
Haha appreciate it, just don't start doing pie graphs and we're cool!
May I ask why? Is it industry / field specific? Just considered manipulative?
If there are graphs that track hundredths of millimeters of movements over the last year, (tracking, say, changes in elevation of a survey marker installed at elevation 500m) it couldn't possibly start from 0?
Holy fuck! That's a... <calculates> ... 53.7% increase since 31st May!
No wonder this place is suddenly so busy again.
I appreciate you all taking me in, fresh off the lifeboat from reddit. I've really enjoyed the discussion and community around here. It's a breath of fresh air.
I was thinking Tildites would be a good Tildes demonym.
I kind of enjoy tildidgeridoos, as it is objectively ridiculous (which was probably @Bauke 's point :p)
Someone suggested Tildren. That works for me.
Is it possible for you to share some of your ideas for revenue? Running the site can't be cheap. (Do you feel like sharing expenses?) Would like to see a path that doesn't involve the ad-based thing.
Tildes has been set up right from the get-go to avoid "traditional" monetization avenues such as advertising and VC investment. You're correct that running a site like this isn't cheap, but it's also not terribly expensive as it is almost entirely text based and so doesn't incur storage/bandwidth costs for image or video.
If you're interested in contributing, there are several avenues for donating to help cover costs. Deimos has stated in the last few weeks that costs are more than covered for now, even with the recent surge. However @talklittle (RiF dev) is running a fundraiser to help encourage donation and build a Tildes app.
Congrats, MaTildas...Tildaswintons?
Hmm... somehow, I feel like Tildidgeridoos isn't the official demonym but then again who am I to question.
Flanders voice
Tilder-inos!
Alright tildren, let’s calm down now.
Caaaalm down Tildly Widly, They're naming their best shoddily-iddly, tiddly...
I prefer that everyone can have their own title for Tilderinos. I usually don't like demonyms (I don't even want to be called a Michigander!), but when everyone can just make their own random one, it's pretty fun.
Not that I'd ever call myself a Tilderino. I'm just some guy who visits Tildes.
Inventing your own term is essentially tradition at this point.
Yeah, I mean you can’t get much worse than Tildoes was, so have at it :)
You mean you can't get much better than Tildoes heh, sounds like dildos... right? ;)
You know, not even you voted on that, back in the day
https://imgur.com/a/aNsrgCE
Who nominates something, then never votes for it, honestly....
edit: Smiley face for tone because I am just joshing you :)
"one for Martin, two for Martin".
Shall we have another poll?
Where did you get that from?
The only previous data about demonyms I've been able to track down is this old demographics survey, which says "The first Tildes-specific demonym present is Tilders/~rs, with 13.4%." But that graph of yours shows different data, so it obviously comes from a different survey, but I've never found it, in all my searches for these results.
Yeah, I think the original survey done by @kat has been removed from this site, but I created a link to it a while back.
Edit: found it. The original link is from you buddy.... https://tildes.net/~tildes/7x5#comment-24th
Look for your comment in the thread.
Interesting. Thanks for that.
I wonder where I got it from, then? Probably @Kat posted it, before she erased her posting history and left Tildes (for sad reasons), which is why I can't find the original.
I miss @Kat so much. I hope they're doing alright. :(
Based on what she said while she was active here, and then given that she's no longer active and wiped all trace of her account years ago... I'm not sure she is all right. :(
But, yes, she was a mainstay of Tildes back in the day.
I actually heard from her about half a year after she deleted her account, IIRC, but nothing again since then. And yeah, her health situation was unfortunately not looking good even before she left. :(
Edit: Someone just informed me she's still alive. That news made my day. I hope she's happy and doing well. :)
While I miss @kat's contributions too, I am always amazed how she identified that social media wasn't making her happy, and she simply walked away from it all.
If I remember correctly, the original survey also gave you access to the live survey results.
So I think you just grabbed a screen capture and posted it for posterity.
(It was the second survey by @ducks where we ended up with a fancy spreadsheet with all the responses.)
Sounds like me!
It's a pity those early surveys were lost forever, when @Kat deleted her account.
The timing's not right.
That comment of mine that you found is dated 27th October 2018, as is the image that you sourced from it.
The survey that ducks did was posted on 8th December 2018. That's the source of my quote that "the first Tildes-specific demonym present is Tilders/~rs, with 13.4%" which I've been sharing everywhere for the past few weeks.
But October 2018 is before December 2018, so it's highly unlikely that I got that screenshot from ducks' survey (unless I invented a time machine back then, and then subsequently used that time machine to erase the existence of the time machine and my memory of it...?).
The screenshot probably came from this earlier survey done back in June 2018 - the original one done by the now-erased Kat. And, because she deleted that post, along with all her other history on Tildes, that's why I can't find the original source any more.
@Kat did the original survey early June 2018.
Original Survey results were posted by @Kat a week or so later.
@Kat did the second survey here
The second survey incorporated some fairly... urm... robust "feedback" from the first survey and included the question about demonyms. It also allowed a preview of live results. So we didn't have to wait for the analysis thread to see the answers. You grabbed a screenshot of the demonym question.
@Ducks did the initial analysis of the second survey here
@Grzmot did further analysis of the second survey here
(I have a copy of the original survey results on an old laptop, so know the demonym question wasn't in the first survey.)
Thanks for all that research.
By worse you mean hilarious?
So would a woman from Michigan be a Michigoose?
Only because it sounds like meshugaas.
Maybe! (But not usually.) I'd never looked at that page before my comment an hour or so ago, but of those, I think I prefer "Michiganite." Though I think I just don't like belonging to groups. I've always just been a loner; a rebel.
Let's keep our Michigoose status to ourselves. 😉. And I'll settle for Tildemigods.
This one suits me just fine. :)
Hello from Ypsi fellow Michigander! ✋
Livonia, Laughonia, Loveonia.
🖖Traverse City, represent.
I don't know if it's Canadian influence, or just a bit of a self selection deal, but we have a lot of folks from Michigan.
I noticed that on /r/Permaculture, too--but yeah, maybe everyone feels that way, and we Michigan folks only notice our fellows. Hi from Newaygo to all my Michigan neighbors!
Given that I've never seen this word before today... somehow, I think you might be right.
However, there is not an official demonym for the users of Tildes. And @Bauke is acting in the best traditions of Tildes by inventing yet another name for us. sigh