This site is fast
I have decent internet at home.
I have great internet at work.
Despite the speeds of those though, seemingly every website out there feels laggy and heavy. You click, you wait, you get a skeleton of the page, with different elements that rapidly pop in until you're staring at the full site. You see the little loading animation on the tab for one, two, three seconds. It isn't exactly "slow" by any means, but it's far from instantaneous either.
Clicking around the web these days feels like I'm playing a game with unignorable input lag.
And I get it. The modern web is complex. It's genuinely a miracle that this is possible in the first place, so I really shouldn't be complaining that the bits traveling through the internet from dozens of servers thousands of miles away aren't getting here immediately.
I get that high resolution screens require large images, and the ubiquity of video these days adds even more weight. I get that many websites are closer to applications than they are static pages.
I'm not trying to take away from the awesome magic that is our modern miracle of connectivity in the slightest, and I'm appreciative to all the people here who spend their livelihoods working on it. Y'all are awesome.
I'm just trying to say that, well, sometimes moving around on the web can drag. And when you've been using it for a long time, the dragging can get under your skin a little bit.
However, my real point lies not in the rest of the internet, but here. I'm talking about this "heavy web" baseline as a contrast for one of the things I love about Tildes:
it. is. so. snappy.
I click, and BAM, the page is there. Immediately.
It's sharp. It's crisp. It's no-nonsense. No waiting for elements to pop in. No subconsciously watching for the loading animation to stop so that I know I can start to interact with site.
For general design reasons, I've always loved that Tildes is text-only, but more and more I appreciate that aspect simply because Tildes feels good to use because it is so quick and responsive. I don't know how much of that is due to the text-only part of things and how much of it is Deimos being a genius code wizard who made an amazing platform, but I'm happy about it regardless.
This site has got zero input lag.
And that feels great.
It's part of the site design actually, from the docs
These technologies already do help in keeping the website fast. Mostly because server side rendering means that when your browser is served the page it is already done. But it also is a very explicit choice.
Which again is reflected by
As well as
The reason the internet feels so heavy today, other than ads, is because most websites have flipped the web pyramid Deimos mentions. Meaning that the browser is responsible for not just rendering HTML and CSS but building the majority of it in the first place. This is made even worse if it is broken up in a myriad of API endpoints where the browser needs to fetch pieces of the website depending on context.
You know, it's been a while since I looked at the docs. In those early Tildes days when I would consult them regularly, I was much more interested in the site's pro-social and privacy stuff, and any of the technical information would have slid right by me because I don't really have the background for it.
But reading it now, it's clear that the site's speed isn't an accidental byproduct of its content but a deliberate design decision from the outset. Very cool. Thank you for highlighting this for us.
Not to diminish Deimos' tech savy, but it also helps that Tildes is still invite only :)
That benefits both performance and the pro-social stuff (moderation is easier at this scale.)
For the longest time it also increased privacy, because posts weren't publicly visible.
Diemos made some... unorthodox decisions in the social media sphere, and has largely been unyielding in his original principles.
McMaster-Carr's website is the gold standard for this sort of stuff as well. If you wanna see another snappy website check them out.
https://www.mcmaster.com/products/magnetic-separators/
I sometimes go there just to marvel at the responsiveness. The devs who built the site need to teach a class on web development.
Maybe it is my location... But this site is a bit slow. Loading spinners, images drawing in over a couple seconds... I have gigabit download speeds... What am I missing?
It's relatively fast for me here is a screen recording of me clicking around. It is not exactly instant, but for how much information it juggles it is quite impressive.
It's also relatively small, for the modern web, 3.6MB on initial page load. Clicking around, a few more things are loaded in but surprisingly little.
Could very well be. I don't know where in the world you are located, but if it isn't in a country or region they ship to they might simply not have invested in the infrastructure to make it snappy. As I said, the initial page load is small, but the server is located far away latency and packet loss starts to play a significant role.
As an example, Youtube's front-end might not be the shiny example of snappy responsive websites, but the backend is damn impressive. It's capable of delivering videos across the globe at high volume. In order to do that Youtube basically has servers everywhere across the globe with a lot of the video data duplicated (based on popularity of said videos, etc) so that whenever someone starts playing a video they don't need to wait ages for the initial load.
On a smaller scale that also applies to websites like this. But, having servers across the world for caching is expensive (even if you lean on infrastructure from parties like cloudflare), so it would make sense for them to only do it in the regions where they are active.
From what I recall reading previously, the website pre-loads the full html of links you hover over, making transitions to them fairly instant as the html has already been downloaded
Look at Mr. Moneybags here buying magnetic rod filters at 2500$ apiece.
Tildes is fast for a reason: it’s not an advertising platform.
Sure, there are other reasons, but all of those other reasons are secondary. It’s the primary reason why I refuse to use the web without an ad blocker.
I get reminded of this every time I accidentally use a web browser without an ad blocker. Granted some heavily scripted sites like youtube still take a few seconds longer to load than others but it's nothing compared to what ads and trackers will do.
I have the same thought frequently, whenever browsing around sites that you would think would have a high focus on speed. Like YouTube. It's baffling to me that I can click on a YT link, and click the play button fast enough in regular use, that the video won't play correctly.
The other one that gets me is Home Depot. If I'm standing in their store, ready to buy thing, and I load up their website to try and find an isle location, it is infuriating slow, even on wifi.
Home Depot’s website and app are both appallingly slow. There’s no way anyone in the c site uses either.
The comment posting the mcmaster carr website upset me because i immediately thought of how truly attrocious home depot (and honestly all the home hardware-type box stores l around me: home hardware, rona, canadian tire) website are.
It's less that the modern web is complex, it's more that non hobby websites are running on unnecessary levels of frameworks (backend AND frontend). Every shit text that could be displayed blazingly fast with ease with a simple read on the backend and normal basic html + css has to go through multiple layers before your browser actually displays it instead.
We are talking:
All of this can usually be done in simple and performant way, but the industry jumped on too many trains and now everything runs on this giant mess.
In the end, it dumbs down to complexity, yes, but the complexity is artificially forced for something that does not even need half this level of complexity.
In addition to all of this, some years ago, it became public that many dev teams are even forced to add completely made up delays and loading bars that take longer than the actual load that is happening, because customers (and employers) complained too much about "feeling like nothing actually happens" when something loads "too fast" without an indicator or an indicator that's gone in a blink.
It's a byproduct of broadband and pc power bloat.
Back when the average person was topping out at 56 kbps bandwidth and a 266 MHz CPU was blazing fast, websites got optimized to high hea ens, stripping out every unneeded character to keep your load times reasonable.
Something about limitations fosters creativity. You can see it in modern TV...when you had a clear, rigid pattern for TV shows, the editing was much tighter. You can see a lot of new shows, even good ones, play fast and loose with pacing and it can really hurt an otherwise great show.
Off topic to the general post, but:
I call this "chasing the buffy era". Buffy significantly shaped how TV shows were written going forward. No other TV show had such an influence on writers and producers as Buffy the Vampire Slayer had. Virtually every headwriter with a successfull TV show that features big season specific arcs from the early 2000s till around 2015 either was very obviously inspired by it in many key aspects or even openly talked about it in interviews.
When the buffy era shows ended, it became very obvious that companies like Netflix started to mass produce series in hope to land a similar success as those shows had. For many of those, they even straight up hired the writers of them.
There is one giant issue: The successfull buffy era shows were successfull because they spent their entire first season with character development, very slowly from "I fight my fated role, someone else should take it, why is it me?" and a majorly inconvenient threat (mind you, not world ending, unbeatable, just majorly inconvenient, we don't want to fire our big shot of literally fighting satan or something in season 1) to "I accept my role, there is no one else who can do it but me".
These new shows throw out a first season of like 8 episodes in hope to land something big. The entire character development is literally done in a single first episode and this episode already ends with the major threat, the main villain, the big boi being introduced and often times already having a shot at the protagonist. Then they spend 7 more episodes of getting back at them and the season ends with them defeating them already. Bam, there is literally nothing to be done in a second season, messed it up.
You guys missed the most important point here. ;)
It's low-bandwidth. I tested it myself and it's in a class all its own on that front. That's where the speed comes from - well that and having a robust/simple backend database that can respond instantly. Tildes is so low-band that it even works when your cable internet is 'disabled' because you missed a bill - that's right, it functions slowly but well on their heartbeat-level 4kb/s internet connection. At 10kb/s it's fully performant. At traditional dialup modem speeds of 56kb/s to 256kb/s it's instant.
I think a web proxy in front of it that can cache pages and maintain a lot of really slow internet connections using extended tcp timeout settings would improve that further. Also a good place to hook-in a Tor node - it'll run like lightning on Tor unlike most everything else.
Compare this with reddit or twitter who shove 30MB of tracking scripts at you with every page refresh. They are forcing you to download and execute the software they use to invade your privacy. Small wonder their sites run like molasses.
In the event of a major power grid disruption or anything that damages and shuts down a lot of data centers, most of these internet sites will vanish overnight because they can't exist on an internet that's been knocked back to 1994-style bandwidth and intermittent connections. Tildes nodes will yawn and continue on as if nothing happened. I'm sure the entire Tildes backup fits on a small thumb drive with plenty of room to spare, moving servers is easy.
This software is old-school BBS-era DARPA-class internet survival software. Not that it was the goal, that's just what happens when good, efficient engineering is the goal. It's the most overlooked feature of this software. Anyone can use it to set up a bulletproof internet site. Taking the survivalist mentality to the next level would be adding some form of file hosting capability, so people can send files through the forum or maintain a directory of things to share. Not that we'd ever need that feature on this node but it'd be a nice feature for the ecosystem to have available.
Tie in a self-hosted torrent tracker and you're not far off from everyone in the streaming game being able to use a Tildes to replace Patreon and self-host all their own video content on their own sites. Bundle in some form of node-to-node association and then the mobile apps can find all the nodes and weave them together. Then you've outclassed all commercial websites, and most of the centralized control and tracking with it. Bots have a zillion times more work to do trying to infect all the nodes.
Tildes is dangerous software. It can get an awful lot more dangerous with a handful of serious code sprints in a rather short time frame, so remember to donate to the project! <3
Nice to know there are more people that notice it. For me, speed is a (mostly) subconscious indicator of quality and trustworthiness, and I think it is sad that for most it is not a strong enough factor to encourage websites to pay more attention to it.
At the same time, developers may not be encouraged to actively work on speed by their bosses, but I am regularly surprised how little intuition some have for what is achievable with modest means. We have been sending text and other data around the world for decades now and sure it looks a lot prettier these days, but if you take a moment to appreciate the huge improvements in hardware and connectivity that were made, you cannot be baffled by how little of that progress we get to enjoy on a day-to-day basis.
This is what the web is meant to be.
Not a gigantic OS compatibility layer so companies can hire people who only know JavaScript and make it everyone's problem.
Well, they used to use Java for that, but rather than expanding the JVM into a Java-only browser-like thing, they dragged everyone down when it was abundently clear that Java and ActiveX plugins needed to die a horrible death.
For what it's worth, Java was a major component of early web applications. Applets allowed for interactivity in the web that wouldn't be possible with Javascript for at least a decade (especially with how broken the web was during the Internet Explorer era). Java was one of the choice options for backend work regardless of weather the frontend was a webpage, an applet, or a java web start application. I wasn't in on this era on the Java side so I can't say why it didn't flourish, but if I had to guess, it was squeezed out by the open source crowd who did perl and php, at least one of which were easier to learn than java, and the enterprise people who wanted to use Microsoft's framework - the name of which I can't remember, but I know a lot of websites used it because they would crash all the time and I'd see the familiar error screens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActiveX
I’m often outside city limits where most of the stuff is slow. I can still use Tildes reliably. It’s nice.
The internet connection at my work is unstable, but I always use this website to see if there's something wrong with the internet completely of it's just slow. If this website doesn't load on my phone then I know the whole system's down.
This reads like ChatGPT.
It doesn't. It reads like kfwyre's usual upbeat attitude and friendly demeanor.
Honestly, I'm not a big fan of accusing others of using LLMs to write their posts, especially on Tildes. A core tenet of the site is to assume good faith in others. By making this comment, it feels like you're either implying the submitter is a spammer, or downplaying their contribution as "AI slop". I find that unfairly dismissive in either case.
Even in situations where people do utilize LLMs, they often do so to help themselves articulate points they struggled with, or to better organize thoughts. I've used them on occasion to help tighten up text that I felt was too loquacious or imprecise. Many ESL students use them to make their English easier to understand.
I'm sure you meant well, but try to remember that being accused of being a bot is not a nice feeling, and Tildes is largely free of the kind of spam and promotion you might see on other sites. If you believe that somebody is actually using an LLM inappropriately, you can report their comment to Deimos for review by flagging it "Malice".
Well the thing is, this isn't a judgement or an accusation. kfwyre is pretty clearly a real person with a lot to say and I value what they have to say and have followed their comments before. I think everyone reading this post is likely aware of that.
But, that's the exact reason I commented. The post feels off, it feels unusual. Now maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm just becoming too cynical with the glut of LLM in social media. Which is also why this post reads exactly like that, to me, because a lot of LLM reads exactly this way (again, to me) .
There's no malice here but rather making an observation. I don't think kfwyre is some kind of spam bot.
But it doesn't feel completely genuine, and maybe that is just the writing style, but I do find it a little disheartening to see other comments making such assumptions about judgement and nobody actually seeking to understand. If I were a writer, I would certainly want to know.
It’s admittedly not my usual style. It’s much choppier than what I typically write (which tends to be longer and more meandering to a fault). I can definitely get where you’re coming from about it feeling “off.”
I was lying in bed last night and the thought was dancing around in my head, so I punched it out on my phone really quickly and submitted it, mostly as a way of clearing my mind. I honestly didn’t put too much thought into it other than getting words down.
Alas, I am not so spectacular. I am little more than a small language model contained inside a limited human brain. But oh how I wish I had the grand powers of ChatGPT within my own mind!
It doesn't at all.
I am vehemently anti-generative-AI, more than most people, but I wholeheartedly disagree, and I also echo the other sentiments here in that I don't think calling it out is always necessary or conducive to a good faith environment, especially when it's not massively or unignorably obvious, and when it's an environment like Tildes trying to curate a particular environment of discussion. I do think there are times and places for calling it out, but I don't think someone's post, which I easily read as sincere, is the place. It's not spam, it's not some boilerplate, it's not making things up, etc. Even if it were to have an LLM involved, what would OP have to gain here from it, for a compliment/appreciation for the platform we're on, and what do we gain by calling it out? They're not operating in any way that would reflect bad faith. Even if I felt like an LLM was involved in the original post (which I don't), I still don't see the benefit of calling it out in this circumstance. What upside is there?
Also, some of the patterns LLM text has are patterns humans have used prior to LLMs. It's like people calling others out for em-dashes because they think that's a tell-tale sign- people are getting way too overzealous and confident in thinking they know what is and isn't AI output and it's causing "witch hunts" (talking about other more extreme situations, not saying you're doing this) and false accusations all over the place.
I've seen numerous real artists, including people I know, that put many hours of work into things they draw by hand, and that hate AI themselves, have their work called out as AI-generated, and that is why this kind of thing gets me worked up. I never want my extreme distaste for AI to just turn into bad faith assumptions everywhere that unnecessarily get people tangled up in it.
Do I discuss album covers with other music lovers that I think are generated? Sure. Do we have our own discussions about lyrics or images or memes, or other things we think are generated? Sure. Is there place for calling someone out (outside of Tildes) when it's obvious they're trying to lie and acting clearly in bad faith? Sure. This is just not one of those times.