Tildes growth
Do we have any information on how Tildes growth is going?
I only use Tildes, used to only use reddit until they pulled their bullshit last year. I don't use any social media and I feel like I am missing out on a lot of news and things. When I used reddit I had curated my subs to my interests and I feel like I was up to date on everything I wanted to be.
But now, due to Tildes being a much smaller community, the news I receive is much more generalized and I've been noticing a lot of times I miss things. For example because all video games are clumped together in one Games Tildes, only the most popular kinds of gaming news gets posted there, so more specific or niche things I miss.
Another example, I had never heard of Ozempic before the South Park episode, and a friend was shocked and told me I was so out of the loop for not knowing what it was. I'd never seen anyone talk about it on here, so how would I know?
I also notice there's just significantly less engagement overall on Tildes. I can scroll through the front page of Tildes every morning, see maybe half posts I've already seen and half new ones, and by the end of the day there will be a handful of new posts but not many. In its golden years, Reddit would have new posts every few hours with new info or news about different things. Tildes feels really small still.
Point being, I'm curious how Tildes is doing in terms of growth and whether it looks like it'll be getting larger communities which will split more subcategories into the broad categories we have now. Or if it has plateaued and this is how it'll be for good?
I think it's ok for Tildes to stay small or grow slowly. There are more than enough examples showing how focusing on growth is bad thing overall. The very actions you say drove you away from reddit are the result of a company that put growth ahead of everything else.
As for missing stuff because Tildes is small - just use other sites in addition to Tildes. I use Tildes, Bluesky, Mastodon, and still some reddit and twitter for stuff that hasn't moved off of it yet.
+1 for Bluesky, it's much better than Twitter. The concept of "choose your own algorithm, even if it's just 'sort chronologically'" shouldn't be radical, but it is.
I'll look into those. Thank you.
I agree you don't want to grow for the same of growing, but for something like Tildes, which relies on user posts and engagement, I would expect steady growth and expansion of the site in order to provide those avenues of information and eventually have large enough groups to constitute further splitting of them for more niche interests once the population is enough.
If Tildes doesn't grow some, it will end up declining and spiral with more and more content and discussions disappearing.
I disagree. We just need a trickle of users to replace those that leave. The site can plateau without dying.
In fact, June of last year was a pretty large influx, and it took a solid 3 months or so for people to more or less settle and get detoxed.
Tildes can handle growth, but it needs to be a trickle barely larger than the leaving to avoid trampling the culture (which does far more moderation than anything else).
Maybe it's just me but the trickle of growth doesn't feel like it's larger than however many are leaving. It feels smaller. Tildes feels a lot less active than just 6 months ago and of course 12 months ago when it was near the peak after the reddit drama.
Activity has definitely declined since the Reddit drama, but my impression is that it has pretty much stabilized. There are multiple fresh posts with 10-20 of comments each day, and one or two posts with a healthier 50+ (this is one of today's). I remember before The Influx a post would be lucky to get about 10 comments. Most of mine went completely uncommented. I enjoy the excitement of big influxes but this seems like a good equilibrium as well.
Out of curiosity, I ran some numbers from my own topic submissions.
I took point totals from my 25 most recent posts before the reddit influx last year, 25 from right after it, and my last 25 posts to Tildes. This isn't exactly scientific, but I figure I'm a regular enough poster with a decently broad spread of submissions that we can at least get a general "feel" for what things look like.
Here's the data:
Topic Point Totals
Full disclosure: I did discard data for this topic as an outlier.
I then tallied the number of comments for the same sets of topics. Here's the data for those:
Comment Totals
We're definitely not where we were after the reddit influx (which, to be honest, felt a tad frenzied to me), but we're also above where we were prior to it. I think that's a healthy place for us to be. The amount of activity here currently is pretty much to my personal liking.
EDIT: I mentioned in another post that I don't really see or care about vote totals on the site anymore. Putting together these charts was an unintentionally good exercise in that.
My brain saw the total vote counts and did a rough sum -- over 2000 if you total the three columns -- and had absolutely no emotional response to that information. It simply doesn't care. The number is effectively meaningless to me.
It then did a rough sum of the comment counts and gave me some warm fuzzies along the lines of "you started conversations that resulted in ~1900 different comments." That one felt good. Not because of the high number on its own, but because the number feels like a proxy measure for "meaningful." Whatever I posted was meaningful enough that people took time out of their day to respond to it and the others discussing it.
1900 times.
That's a cool feeling.
Frankly, this site is the most successful forum project I've ever seen, and I started with usenet. It did everything it set out to do with a forum software - build a tool and a mindset aimed at more quality oriented adult interaction. It did that without turning to cheap gimmicks, either. Just a handful of good, simple, insightful choices in the design informed by the collective wisdom of reddit's eternally navel-gazing mod communities. This software is at least as ready for a beta state as PhpBB was. Just needs a little polish in the admin side and setup, as some of that doesn't have a UI yet. Still it's nothing monumental.
This thing is a seed, not a website. Seeds take a while. Those numbers are healthy and they indicate sticky users - that is all one needs to be successful. This is just the very first (and only official) Tildes. Right now this place is like a small cozy subreddit or a new usenet group. It won't stay that way. Plenty of people out there are plenty ticked off at the current social media ecosystem. When they finally decide they'd like to do something about it, this code has their backs. It's a simple ticket to unplugging your communities from those corporate prisons.
@Deimos, you might consider reaching out to FUTO. I figure if they can pay Louis Rossman a couple million to pick a fight over right to repair and for all of these other open source projects they can pay you to BDFL this thing full time. Your original blog post announcing this project reads like their manifesto. They already have a posse of developers, what's one more? Ping Louis and ask him if his suggar daddies want to start some real trouble for x/reddit/etc.
This has been a pattern for years now, Amarok, and it's still continuing strong with this post.
Every time you talk about Tildes and online communities, I get so damn inspired.
You're an excellent hype man!
In retrospect I should have probably been a salesman rather than a sysadmin. :P
I’d throw money at whatever you’re selling!
Of course not! :)
I've been here since the beginning as well. But it was more or less dying before the influx last year - I'm much more active than I ever was, that's for sure. So I think I like it better now.
I also recommend checking out Lemmy. It's like Mastodon, but a Reddit version instead of Twitter. There's an app for it called Voyager which is inspired by Apollo for Reddit which makes using Lemmy really nice. OP, since you're specifically looking for "the current events that Tildes missed and big happenings in your niche communities" that you used to get from Reddit, I've found Lemmy to be decent for that.
I don’t think tildes is going to be your one stop shop replacement for reddit, and I don’t think it’s supposed to be. You’re better off checking subreddits that have decently sized communities for the interests you have, or finding separate websites for every interest.
All that aside, is it so bad being out of the loop? Reading a newsfeed about gaming is one thing, but hoping to stay up to date about Ozempic seems funny to me.
Also, I'd personally appreciate it if the trend of consolidation from big sites would get at least somewhat reversed. The 'the winner takes all' dynamic of social media has led to, well, we all know what it has already caused.
This too, tbh. We've gotten so used to staying in the loop for everything all the time. But its not necessarily the best thing.
It's not so much being up to date about the latest Ozempic news, but I literally had no idea it existed, and no context for what the episode was making fun of. Until my friend told me about it and I realized that was a pretty big news thing that happened (just in general) that I had entirely missed.
Being out of the loop does suck because if someone mentions something that's big news, and I'm like huh? Then everyone looks at me like I'm an idiot.
Also it sucks finding out about something related to my interests so much later. If a game announcement happens for an IP I love and I don't hear about it for months then I'm a little upset. Similarly with some TV shows, I hadnt heard anything about a new season and suddenly come across it and find out the new season came out 6 months ago and I had no clue. Things like that
I don’t think you’re an idiot for not keeping up with trending events. Maybe you could view interactions like that through the lens of “I get to hear my friend share something interesting” instead of “everyone thinks I’m an idiot.” Would you think someone’s an idiot for not knowing Hollow Knight: Silk Song got a release date (not true)?
Apologies for giving 2 cents instead of providing information more relevant to your original question, I hope you find it helpful anyway.
that hurts :(
I think it's a difference of scale. If I haven't heard about a new show or release date, sure that's great. If I haven't heard about a major event in the world, people look at me like an idiot. And that isn't hyperbole. Friends have berated me before for not knowing about some major thing going on in the world.
That doesn’t sound very kind of them.
It's kinda fair though, people should know what current events are happening
Not really though. At least not in detail, because nobody does. Unless you want to be glued 24/7 to all sorts of news feeds and even then you will only ever see a fraction of the things that are happening world wide. Even if you could ingest everything it would mean that you are not participating in the world. Just consume.
If people make the argument that it probably is a good idea to have some knowledge about major big events. Sure, that is reasonable. But even then you don't need to know all the ins and outs.
People who claim otherwise are, in my humble opinion, slightly naive or delusional.
I don’t think being made fun of for not knowing things is fair. If it’s light hearted, like my wife not knowing who Charlie Brown is, it’s fine, but there is a limit.
I actually just let people tell me what’s important post Reddit. I figure if it’s important enough, someone will tell me.
I also did not know about Ozempic and my wife looked at me in awe. I just laughed and let her explain it to me. Now I know and I’ve moved on. The media today is mostly aimed at keeping you in a state of panic.
If you want a reddit alternative you can try Lemmy. It is not a full replacement (as noted by me missing out on stuff), but a lot of that stuff is honestly not important in the long run. (And this is not me trying to discredit your feelings or experience, but hopefully trying to set you on a different path for a different state of mind) Unless you need to get a preorder exclusive for a video game, those games will be there, same as the television shows. And if you really do still need to keep up to date for other random stuff, then there is the subreddit Out of The Loop, that will catch you up on things as well.
I have Feedly set up to show me news stories from a variety of subjects including medical advances
I feel like you also kinda need to be the change you see in the world. I try to post interesting things in gaming that I see most of the time, and if I want to have more in depth discussion I'll post a couple of questions about it or something.
It's kinda like the difficulty with torrenting. If there's a bunch of leechers and no seeders, well... it's gonna take a while for stuff to go through.
I'll second this. Active participation goes a long way.
I joined in 2018. I'd had my eye on other reddit alternatives at the time, but they were all ghost towns. They couldn't keep an active userbase.
Thinking that the worst thing someone could see when they came to Tildes was the digital equivalent of tumbleweeds (because that's exactly what stopped me from joining other places), I just started posting.
That was six years ago.
I don't have an official count or anything, but I'd wager, in the time since, I've posted over 1000 top-level topics to Tildes. I didn't set out to do that. I wasn't a reddit power-user or anything. Initially I was posting what I did because I didn't want Tildes to fold, but over time, it helped me see that I genuinely liked posting here better than anywhere else.
Tildes's slower, smaller nature made more "room" for my posts.
On reddit, it's easy for something you post to get ignored. If you don't get a few upvotes early on, it's dead in the water. Even if something is well received, it's shuffled out of everyone's feeds after roughly 24 hours. Why bother putting time and effort into a really thoughtful comment when it's just going to be gone tomorrow? reddit's perpetually ephemeral nature has a way of making things feel insubstantial -- a structurally-enforced hollowness.
On Tildes, meanwhile, I feel like my posts are more likely to be seen because they don't have to fight for eyeballs in the first place. I feel like there's more metaphorical "space" for my topics because the feed is a lot less crowded. I feel like they have more staying power, because they're not being artificially aged by an algorithm that's perpetually drawn to only the newest, shiniest things. Someone might take full days to respond to one of my topics or comments, and I think that's a great thing.
I didn't necessarily feel it when I first got here, but gradually I realized that I liked posting on Tildes because it felt meaningful. It took me
somea lot of time to undo that "votes tickle my brain" wiring that reddit had given me, but I can honestly say I'm at a point now where I don't even really notice vote counts on this site anymore. It's no longer about the numbers for me. I'd much rather post things that I think are meaningful to the people here because that makes it meaningful for me.For anyone reading this, if you're someone who mostly browses Tildes but doesn't post much, I highly recommend trying to be a bit more active.
I'm an internet nobody who started doing that six years ago, and I feel like I'm genuinely better for it. This place has been the best online community I've ever been a part of, but I don't think I'd feel that way if all I ever did was just read.
I agree and I appreciate the things you post!
One small confession from me, I don't have the "vote when I check out a link" habit that most people seem to, I do vote on comments and stuff though!
But I will encourage people that are not as active to post things they find interesting and more importantly, if there are no comments or votes, to not be super disappointed! People who might be interested might be taking breaks or just doing life. (i.e. it's really obvious when I'm on vacation since I tend to disappear for a couple of days with minimal comments)
One thing I try to do more is to read the comments and try and pick out things that other people enjoy, and if I don't see any posts about that particular subject and it comes out on my other feeds, I'll just share it here.
Agreed - Tildes has been awesome. My friend mentioned that somebody they knew was cooking up a new social network and I'm happy at how it's turned out so far.
For me, I love the conscientious topics from all disciplines and areas of expertise that appear in my feed. On top of that, I sincerely appreciate that a topic will remain on the main page for up to a day sometimes. That I can see people who I've shared quality conversations with (whether argumentative or friendly) adding their two cents in a post I'm scrolling through gives me the forum vibes of old. Call me lame, but I'd love something akin to a custom avatar or icon on posts. Usernamea are fine, but I dig extra symbology so that I can recognize who's who.
Lastly, Three Cheers For Tildes makes the Android experience simple yet contemporary to other apps that I've enjoyed (RIP Boost).
Keep it up, team! Also, I'd love to donate regularly. Is there a service for that?
https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/wiki/donate
This is a good point. I hadn't thought of this. I have posted a few times on Tildes when I had come across something.
The only trouble is that I come to Tildes for my new info so I don't usually see much elsewhere.
But I will definitely make a point to make more posts when it does happen. And another user recommended a few other sites to check out as well that may help with that aspect of it too.
Thank you for your input!
Would recommend BluesNews for general gaming, and Slickdeals is where I pull for the Save Points thread most of the time!
Good to know I'll take a look at these! Thank you!
Ozempic’s been discussed lots of times on here, though if you’re not subscribed to the health group you probably wouldn’t see it.
Engagement has gone down significantly since June 2023. I remember my posts getting a ton of votes back then and it’s subsided since.
Yeah I don't think I am subscribed to that group actually. But yeah engagement does not seem to be growing at what I expected it to from how Tildes was described as the reddit replacement when reddit went to shit.
Well Tildes has been around since like 2018. The 2023 exodus provided a little bump, but prior to that we were all just chilling discussing things here and there.
Am I crazy, or did a lot of older users leave in the last year? Prior to the reddit bump there were a handful of users that I'd see in most the threads and I feel like I never see them anymore.
There were some who left or were banned over the Israel/Hamas conflict, as those threads have a bad tendency to get heated.
One other long-time user left due to an unrelated reason.
I miss AA.
Same here.
Well he was a very active user and usually had great input and brought thoughtful comments to discussions. But when October 7th happened he had some really controversial opinions about Hamas' attack
Edit: I think he got a 1 week ban? But just completely left.
That makes sense judging by the general vibes in the political threads these past few months.
I do worry that
the reddit wavespecifically I've personally lowered the quality of discussions to the point where a lot of the existing users have become rare sightings.I did have to unsubscribe from talk because it became AskReddit 2.0
I hadn't paid much attention to talk specifically. What would you say are the defining differences from how it used to be that make it resemble AskReddit?
I wrote it down at the time, but posts on there used to be infrequent. Questions used to also be more meaningful, introspective, and philosophical. After the Reddit exodus posts became much more frequent, lower quality, more surface level. Many topics that were also frequent on AskReddit.
I'd recommend resubscribing.
The recurring weekly "what did you do this week?" post is about half of all posts now. It's not busy at all and the other posts are perfectly fine too I think - some good discussion about alcohol recently for example.
Becuase I’m usually in movies I still see some of the same regulars a lot. I’m sure it’s a case by case basis what happened to the users.
I think many people had unrealistic expectations for what would happen when reddit "went to shit".
The sad truth is that the people in charge of reddit probably have not made any catastrophic mistakes. Everyone seems to have expected a Digg-esque exodus, partially because that was a salient reference point, and partially probably due to wishful thinking and confirmation bias. But turning reddit into a husk of its former self in order to increase monetization seems to be working out just fine.
This isn't the 00's Web any more. The average interaction is shallower, more fleeting, mediated by a smaller screen with a keyboard less well-suited for in-depth long-form discussion. The average attention span is probably shorter, too. And even though the userbase of the old Web is still around, there are so many new users, most of them less discerning and less interested in quality discussion. And they're where the money is. Well, them and LLM training data.
My guess: there won't be another reddit, at least not in terms of scale and ubiquity. That era is over. If we want a similar level of overall quality, we will have to be willing to try different paradigms, use smaller platforms.
Tildes can be a reddit replacement for some people, but it's not intended to be the reddit replacement. It's proven it can be sustainable with less engagement than it has now, and there are advantages to the relatively small tight-knit nature of the community here.
Out of curiosity: does it really matter how "in the loop" you are?
I actually feel rather proud when someone asks, "have you seen this meme?" "Have you seen this news?" "Have you seen this new thing?" because it feels like I'm no longer being subjugated by the algorithm.
Ultimately, I really don't care what the new thing is. It doesn't matter and it's going to have blown by and be replaced by the other new thing in a few days time. I feel no FOMO.
I still keep up to date on my hobbies, which ends up being a more deliberate choice on my part now. I have to actually go to specific websites and remember to do so if I want to catch up on the news related to things. Honestly the only thing I really miss is my music subreddit, because even though I didn't bother to listen to 99% of the stuff posted, when I felt like checking out something new it was there in front of me.
Not all the time, but for some major things that are in the social zeitgeist and missed I don't like being out of the loop.
My South Park example works here as well I think, because I didn't get as much enjoyment from that episode because I didn't have the context for the broader story going on in the real world they were making fun of. If you don't know about major events you won't get peoples jokes or references and then everyone looks at you like an uninformed idiot when you go "what's that?"
The Trump assassination attempt was on Tildes and was how I first heard about it 3 hours after it happened. But if that hadn't been on Tildes for some reason, on Monday when I went into work and everyone was talking about it, they'd look at me like a crazy person that I didn't know it had happened.
I am an introvert and socially fairly awkward so the small amount of interaction I do have with other people is big and I hate that feeling of being the odd man out. Call it FOMO if you want but for major news I don't think it's bad to know what's happening in the world.
I think there are a few things going on here. First of all I think you’ve possibly got some very unkind and mean-spirited people around you. You sound very young to me. If I (M45) could give advice it would be to slowly move away from judgemental people by forming relationships with people with some maturity and empathy. It’s the single best thing I did in my life. Following the vacuous discourse, news and trends is not living life. But if and when you have a vote, sure, follow the news a few weeks beforehand.
The other thing is that the presidential candidate getting shot at was not important news. I feel like giving a pep-talk on what’s important in life. Life is a better teacher than me and you’ll find out when life brings you a real crisis.
Finally, as a fellow introvert I wonder if you have social anxiety. Maybe those people aren’t as judgemental as you imagine. The two bullet points above seem very charged with how others perceive you. This is not a healthy motivator, nor a great way to be true to yourself or live a fulfilling life.
You are a free person to pursue the life you long for deep inside you. Only you know what that is and nobody can judge you for it. Maybe you want to be an ascetic. You don’t have to defend where you do and don’t place your attention. You owe nobody an explanation. If they’re surprised, then that’s a reflection of how little worldly experience they have. Don’t let their misplaced confidence sway you.
I think there is a balancing act. I don't know big influencers or celebrities outside of film and music or what the hot gossip is (I still know almost nothing about the Kardashians). That is fine with me. When I do hear about them it's through my Gen Z team at work or my partner who is an instagram user. I'm absolutely fine learning about these things through people whose world view I understand rather than an algorithm.
For news I rotate my subscriptions through NYT/WaPo/WSJ/FT and I listen to podcasts like Ezra Klein, Kara Swisher, The Daily, Pod Save America. That is how I heard about the assassination attempt and Biden dropping out: I got an alert.
For entertainment news, sports and video games, I also listen to podcasts: MinnMax Show, Easy Allies, Giant Bombcast, P1 w/ Matt and Tommy, and Late Braking.
So yeah, when things like JoJo Siwa or Huktaw girl happen I'm not "in the loop" until someone I know tells me about it. Generally I think they appreciate telling me about it and share it with me and see a genuine reaction. It means we get to have a conversation rather than "you see this?" "yep."
And out of Tildes I get an online community and I get some really interesting topics surfaced I never would have thought about.
Do you read the news at all? Seems like you could have a steady diet of that and still be pretty informed.
Generally, I read through my Google News feed in the morning, which keeps me up with current events and a hobby or two, check Tildes once or twice a day and that's about it.
I feel like just having a decided news site would be all you'd really need to stay up to date on most stuff.
I only read Tildes. I don't have a news site, mostly cause I don't know where (other than Tildes and Reddit) to find an impartial news source with little to no bias.
Tildes will also be heavily biased though by the people who post on it. It is just a different filter. A highly specific one as well as the user base is so small.
The same was true for reddit, there was and is a ton of bias on there as well. Not only that, on reddit it is even more so a race for karma as well. So you tend to see much more dramatic events and all that. Yeah, the state of the world is shit, but we don't need to tune it up to 11 on top of that.
If you want to be kept up to date of what is generally happening in the world you don't need totally and utterly unbiased news sources.
If you want to just get a general idea of what is happening around the world I'd suggest just checking up on public broadcasting news websites. I am going to assume your are from the US so some obvious choices for you would be:
You don't even need to visit them on a daily basis or all of them. Or read all the news articles. Just a few minutes here and there to see headlines and sometimes read a bit more will honestly give you a better overview of world events than tildes or reddit will ever do.
Truly impartial news doesn't really exist, unfortunately. Even very dryly reported news sites still have to make editorial decisions, and those will inevitably be influenced by the beliefs and assumptions of those making those decisions. Getting a wide variety of sources is more useful than trying to find the one perfect source.
I didn't follow any subreddits that really talked about news or current events when I frequented reddit (mostly because the big ones had shitty culture in the comments), so I've ended up more informed since switching to Tildes. I also scroll through my Google News feed and usually get at least some information from skimming headlines that I can use to do more searching if I know more. The algorithm definitely tries really hard to cater to what it thinks you like to read, though, so there can be limits to its utility if it gets too pigeonholed. I've also been frustrated with not being able to block certain sources only for certain topics -- I had to block The Guardian wholesale because I kept getting transphobic articles of theirs bc the algorithm knows I care about news about trans rights from other articles I read.
I often get the "breaking news" type revelations (like news about the Trump assassination attempt and Biden stepping down) on Tumblr before anywhere else these days, simply because it's got a chronological timeline and I can see everyone reacting to it. I also follow some people there who are very far to the left of your average Tildes user, and their discussion of current events and politics provides me with much-needed perspective on issues even when I don't fully agree with them. Not recommending this as a strategy for you specifically, but more using it as an example of how even someplace that would be horrible as your only source of news can contribute in positive ways when it's one of several sources of information for you.
I've seen ads and recommendations around for specific news aggregators that give daily news and attempt to balance sources from different political perspectives, but I've never tried one myself. Seems like something like that may interest you, though. Following specific sources for news topics that you're interested in or want to stay informed about is also good, but it definitely relies on your finding good word-of-mouth to direct you to the good ones.
Ground News.
This is from their About page - it's a bit corpo-speaky but yeah:
I’m pretty sure that growth is a non-goal … I think this community is intended to be a throwback to the forum era, where online communities were just a place you hung out in, not an investment fuelled tech company hellbent on innovation and infinite growth (to pay back the investors).
I’m not terribly concerned when my local cafe seems to merely stay busy year over year, instead of spilling out into the streets, growing multiple locations, vertically integrating into roasting, etc. I treat Tildes the same way … it’s a change from something like Discord, whose VCs would raze the earth should their daily engagement ever trend downwards.
Practically, to poke an eye out from the under the rock, I have an RSS feed reader pointed at:
News Minimalist is really nice. Maybe the best use of LLMs I've seen. The to the point, dehyperbolized headlines it presents is how news should be reported.
Aah, this is off topic, but can I pitch you on another product which might be useful in a similar vein?
DeArrow is a crowdsourced extension (by the developer of SponsorBlock) that uses community feedback to remove clickbait from Youtube titles and thumbnails -- imo, I find that the descriptive titles work better than the clickbait to draw me in, but they're often admittedly less concise.
+1 for DeArrow. After you install the extension, it has this fake trial period screen that's really just a masquerade for asking for donations, but you can click past it for instant access. It's open source too, of course.
(Although if you've got the spare change, the $1 donation the developer asks for could be your good deed for the day)
I've never setup something like that but I like the idea, how would I even start looking into something like that?
Not OP, but for me it was as easy as signing up for something like feedly and poking around the interface. You'll also see the RSS symbol (looks like this) sometimes on websites that provide an easy link to their feed that you can import into a reader (like feedly)
I'm not sure what the best way is, but I can tell you how I do it 😅 there've been a few threads about this on Tildes, too, in case you want to compare notes!
Same as @Mendanbar, I use feedly as my RSS aggregator. Then if I find a blog or news outlet I like (through reading an article, getting a suggestion from a friend, etc.), I just paste the website's front page into Feedly: if they have an RSS feed, it'll typically be included inside an invisible link on the webpage, and Feedly (as well as any other reader) can pick it up. Basically everything that involves articles being published will have them, so that includes Patreon, Youtube (for now), DeviantArt, etc. Twitter used to pre-takeover, and most Mastodon instances will too.
Worst case scenario, you can normally type "$service_name RSS feeds" into Google and someone might have figured it out for you :)
You can get email newsletters delivered as RSS feeds via kill-the-newsletter, too, if you prefer to keep all your reading in one space.
Wow that was very detailed! I didn't expect anyone to go to that much trouble! Thank you so much!
Hah, no worries XD I was a little concerned that I hadn't gone into enough detail, but hopefully it's enough to get you going. Hope it works out well for you!
This isn't me making fun of you or trying to be funny or rude, honest question, have you never heard of RSS feeds before this comment?
Only in the context of podcasts, but I use a podcast app for my podcasts so I've never done anything with RSS feeds specifically
@Bauke has a page on his website that graphs the ~tildes.official subscriber count over the past thirty days:
https://ts.bauke.xyz/
Historically, the site's activity level fluctuated noticeably. I can't recall from previous discussions if these fluctuations were regular every year though. What I mean is: I don't recall if Tildes historically experiences a slow-down during the summer every year, for example. Or, if the site just has irregular fluctuations, that don't correlate with the calendar, seasons, or holiday frequency.
I'm also not sure, with the influx of so many users in 2023, whether these fluctuations will continue to (noticeably) occur. If they do continue, whether they will be more or less noticeable than they were in the past is yet to be seen.
Tildes pretty much had plateaued for months, years maybe, before June 2023. The numbers are fuzzy, but I seem to remember the monthly user count growing by less than two dozen for a long, long time.
I have no doubt that Tildes will continue to grow, likely in irregular explosions, as Reddit (the company) continues to make Reddit (the website) worse, the site inevitably gets posted on Hacker News again, someone inevitably starts using Tildes (the code) as a replacement for Discourse, etc.
Basically, Tildes is on the Deep Rock Galactic strategy to success.
Well, a good while ago, a user here made a website called Tildes Stats that tracks the number of people making accounts on here, and it seems 30 new people have made accounts here in the last month. That's more or less normal for this place. This user had also used the Tildes API at other points to measure that, although there are ~25,000 total accounts here, the regular activity of this site comes from more or less 300-500 active users in total. This is consistent with an internet principle called the 90-9-1 rule, which basically states that the overwhelming amount of users of any social media platform or everything are lurkers. We also used to do census-es of this website at that time, and we came up with 200-300 responses for these census-es. So that basically explains the small town feel, because that's the population of a village posting on a social media/forum-ish website.
This user did this stuff a few (3-ish I think) years ago, long before Reddit ended third party apps, but in my experience the picture hasn't changed much over those years in terms of raw activity except for the weeks/months after reddit banning third-party apps, when this site became way more active, which was when the last round of subcategories was added, and to some extent it's still more active now than it used to be, but it isn't going to grow fast and everyone else in this comment section has said they want this to be a small community and don't want it to grow fast, which is more or less what people have said about this site's size and growth for the last 4 years I've been aware of people asking about it. (And probably asked about it myself.)
When I joined this place, I remember some of the more ambitious proposals of this site were this very democratized wiki-esque moderation system where anyone would be able to suggest what a post's tags could be but people who had gradually gotten a lot of trust from people via exemplary comments and what not would eventually basically be able to quasi-moderate Tildes alongside Deimos and what-not, which was basically Deimos's proposed solution to Power-mods and big Subreddits becoming basically unmoderated whenever they grow bigger than this or if whoever is in charge simply goes away for vacation, which to me at the time at least implied Tildes becoming a platform for use on the scale of something like Hacker News or even the Mastodon Fediverse was considered. But ultimately, this place was made to be very opposed to mass-use social media, constantly focused on growth, user data, infinite scroll, hot-takes and intense poasting, and newbies flooding this website and ginning up the latest hot topic to be The Discourse before having learned that this place isn't supposed to be like that has always been a big concern for everyone including Deimos, and this is a concern that is based on the history of many past online communities. So I guess a digital small-town like this tracks with that.
Also had a few other thoughst after writing my other comment. Considered an edit but feel like they are better off as a seperate comment.
Overall I do think that Tildes is doing pretty okay though. I just don't expect it to be my one stop shop for all things and just see it as the neat little community that it is.
There is an underlying issue that is unrelated to growth of this site: neither Reddit nor Tildes is a news site.
I would not be comfortable with any link aggregator being the point that I get the majority of my news from. I suggest finding a news site and getting your news from that site. Ideally it would be a news site that is relatively local to you, but if there are not any good options, then CBC, BBC, AP, Reuters, NPR are all relatively good options (though I'll admit to a very left-leaning bias myself). I am not saying that everyone has to read the news; however if you feel like it is important to be informed about news, then it is probably important to actually visit a news site. Reddit, Facebook, Tildes, Twitter - none of these are news sites, and I strenuously suggest that you avoid treating them as such. These are all social sites where people gather to chat about news. They are not primary source sites.
There is another underlying issue that is unrelated to growth: you should not be mocked for not knowing something.
If you do not known something and are uninformed, that doesn't give anyone the right to make fun of you. If your friends are mocking you because you don't know about Ozempic, I don't really know what to say about that, but generally it's better to try to foster Today's lucky 10000 vibes instead of putting people down for not knowing something. Not knowing something does not make one stupid, it just confers an opportunity for learning. At one point in your commentary, you say that their behaviour is fair, and that people should know about current events, but that's also something that I would challenge. Unless you are a person who claims to know a lot about politics or events, you aren't contractually obligated to follow anything, and it's arguably much better for your mental health to not do so.
Now with regards to actual growth on Tildes: it's probably worth reading the Tildes Docs and exploring past discussions on ~tildes because the overall site intention is not to grow as big as reddit, nor to be a reddit replacement. It's just a site that does discussion and link aggregation differently from reddit. It will not grow to be a similar size to reddit, and that's not the intention. That's not to say that it doesn't have the potential to be much bigger - it certainly does - but that's not one of the actively pursued goals.
Not to discourage new discussion, but back in March the topic was also brought up although in a different context. You might find some discussion there also interesting.
Yeah I get the desire to keep Tildes small. As other users have suggested I think I just have to find a few more avenues of info, especially for more niche interests rather than relying solely on Tildes to provide me everything.
As a counterpoint to a lot of the comments here - I don't think Tildes growing or getting larger is a bad thing. What corrupted Reddit was how it was financed and what incentives it had. If Tildes can be user supported and avoid third party investment (PE/VC), advertising, etc... then it's purpose can remain pure.
To a certain degree you are right, but after a community reaches a certain threshold of people and activity it becomes really difficult for it to maintain the original identity and purpose.
This is not something unique to reddit or other commercial platforms. The biggest risk by far is growing too fast, the principle of Eternal September for example dates back to the early 90s.
I don't think that Tildes is currently at risk here. I am just providing this as general context and information.
Do you actually care that you didn't know what ozempic was? Or did someone who is chronically online just try to make you feel weird for being less online...
I also bailed on reddit and feel like it's a little harder for me to keep my finger on the pulse of some stuff. I do have instagram which I've carefully curated for myself. And discord groups for knowing what's going on more locally, like in my area. But yeah reddit going away left a big void. I sometimes feel a little social anxiety here, because it's small and more personal. And I think it makes me less likely to post or comment sometimes. I wonder if others feel the same.
I post the same way on here that I would everywhere else apart from one golden rule:
If I'm posting to the original poster as a top level post, it needs to be thought out and of quality content
Anything one level down and I'll post in my usual sarky or comical way. Due to how Tildes is though, I steer clear of "me too" and "I was gonna say that" type replies.
So no, I don't really post much different apart from if I have a real opinion and feel I want to be actually heard.
I don't really care about Ozempic personally, its more the fact that the situation showed me I have a glaring gap in my knowledge that used to be filled by reddit, and that Tildes has only partially replaced. When I was on Reddit, something of that caliber would never have been missed. It's not like I need to know every detail of the story but knowing that it's in the zeitgeist (and important enough for South Park to make fun of it) and it was brand new to me is where this came from.
I've found that Lemmy is more of a direct Reddit replacement, in a far nerdier and smaller sense. But compared to
TilersTildes it has substantially more content.In my mind Tildes is focused on higher quality content, and more thoughtful / detailed responses. I swear some of the longest text posts I've seen online were in random Tildes comments, it's honestly impressive. I have often felt like I'm not even worthy to post here, because I don't want to take 10 minutes trying to type out a detailed post on my phone, and my automatic response to most things is to make a joke (which I feel is frowned upon here).
Frowned upon for top level posts, but perfectly acceptable the next level down.
Tildes is also supposed to be a nice, friendly and fun community. Please post the fun stuff too!
I tried Lemmy+Tildes as a Reddit replacement, and I found that Lemmy was too hard to curate effectively. Maybe I didn't invest enough effort in it, but it was difficult to find a reasonable subset to opt into, too hard to discover things (to start from scratch whitelisting), and too noisy to opt in to everything and try to opt out of things. I mainly tried the latter strategy, but most of my interaction was blocking topics.
I think that's where Reddit's curated default subreddits list for new users really shone. It was a reasonable introduction to the community, and there was enough traffic there that you could hear about other niche subs from other users (or the front page). Maybe the tools have or will advance to a state where curation is possible, but it seems like a big ask from a largely volunteer distributed community.
FWIW, I am happy with Tildes as it is now.
On the humor end, I appreciate and will make the occasional joke. Mostly I find them ignored or perhaps responded to by the immediate parent. I think it's like everything on tildes, it needs to be higher effort than some of the cheap meme responses that were (seemingly) 90% of Reddit content.
I think Tildes is more the kind of site that grows like lichens, rather than like cancer.
As a remedy of the small and often niche nature of Tildes, I also regularly consume posts from a high quality news aggregate about my culture (Hong Kongers), and supplement with some CBC/BBC.
I see your point about catching important zeitgeist and bigger cultural trends, but I also see other's point about not feeling like one needs to completely know even a little bit of everything. It's not possible to, this day and age.
Once I stopped doom scrolling headlines from Reddit, I've had to slowly switch to scanning headlines from a few news sources, and subscribing to journals that often have higher quality content of interest to me. Sometimes I also hear about financial news + silly new things to keep me in the loop from wealthsimple tldr - they offer a weekly spread of headlines ranked by dual axes of "Who cares - important" and "crash and burn - to the moon". The silly humour is a good mix for me. You might have to find a journal or newsletter or video channel mix that gives you your favored mile high glimpse of current events
I had a similar feeling after reducing my time on reddit a ton. As an aftermath, quite a few threads have popped up here, where people ask for good and unbiased news sources. One recommendation that stuck with me was https://www.newsminimalist.com and its summary newsletter. With this it's very unlikely you would've completely missed something like Ozempic (which - as others have stated - isn't necessarily a bad thing). Maybe that's something that works for you.
It it an ethical/moral thing for you, that you don't use reddit?
I never left and to be honest I don't know where else I would find communities for my hobbies or certain games or tv shows or niche interests. No other social media has anything even remotely resembling the type of discussion and posts that you can find on (some) subreddits. Especially ones that are moderated well. r/all is full of crap as per usual but you can filter out the vast majority of stuff that you don't want to see through RES.
It's understandable if you don't want to go back to reddit or other social media, but on the other hand, there's also nothing wrong with continuing to use it.
It's an ethical thing I suppose. I try not to use companies that have blatantly terrible business practices, and reddit pulled a lot of shit over the years and that was just the final straw for me. I almost exclusively browsed reddit on my phone using the RiF app. The official app was so garbage I refused to use it. The rare times I used reddit on a PC I always used old reddit. The new UI is horrible.
And yeah it has been a real struggle not having the dozens of subreddits I used to for all my interests. I look a little on steam forums for games and YouTube videos/comments for some other things but it's not the same. I know there's discord but I find it really hard to use discord in the same way.
I still have my reddit account and have posted once or twice, and I frequently add "reddit" to my google searches, but I don't browse anymore. Most of my reddit time was while I was sitting around bored, either on the toilet or the train, and I thus browsed mostly on mobile. The app I used shut down, and I wasn't downloading reddit's official mobile app in the wake of the API fiasco, so I put a shortcut to tildes there instead. Overall, I haven't really missed it, so I haven't really been tempted to install the official app.
Not sure if it's the same for OP or not. But just giving an example of how it can play out.
Missing out on things is a positive in my book. I feel that one of the problems with big social media sites is "information poisoning"; you overdose on info and it causes negative effects. You can't properly vet things in that state, both because you couldn't possibly vet the sheer volume of statements you read and because you will be biased from the repetition of how many people echo those statements. The end result is that you become misinformed, aggravated from conflicting statements, and the worst case scenario is that you become a misinformed political "useful idiot".
To give you a sense of scale of what I mean by this, take a look at News Minimalist, which reads all the news stories being published and runs them through AI to determine which ones are actually significant. Today it red over 10,000 articles but only 2 of them actually pass their benchmark. That's 0.0002% of the total. And that's in the context of news. Social media is much more inane and voluminous in comparison.
Tildes is a 'check in once or twice a day' sort of thing -- where Reddit is 'inject this between your toes and never leave' thing.
You could make RSS feeds for reddit to pull the top posts from your favorite subs -- e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/Pizza/top.rss?sort=top&t=day -- top pizza posts for the last 24hrs. You can get really specific about what makes it through, too.
RSS is the best way to go.
As for posts here, if you want to see more content, make more content. You've got three posts for a year. Seek out some new sources for news and unload it on us :)
Yeah I definitely am more of a part of the discussion type of person than starting the discussion, but it's a good point to be contributing those starting discussions as well.
I mean this post has exploded, so I suppose I have helped a little by asking this question.
I think I also still think in the reddit mindset where new videos/trailers are often posted within seconds of them being released due to bots or people being fast on the draw. And its usually frowned upon to post the same thing multiple times.
But after this thread I am realizing this is quite a different situation for Tildes
if you haven't already, it's worth digging through https://docs.tildes.net/philosophy -- its smart and way different than most communities.
For news, you might also like the NYT podcast, 'Headlines' -- it pairs well with 'The Daily'