Is there any interest in building a Tildes successor?
I love Tildes. I am not the most active member here, but I do make an effort to contribute. This site fills a hole for me not even close to be filled by other sites. It has that small local pub feel. All names are familiar, even if I haven't interacted with people directly and there is a general sense of people being aligned with wanting to be part of a 'better' community.
I know there has been a lot of discussion about missing features here and that ultimately leading to some users wanting to leave, because they can't block the content they don't want to see.
With Deimos's announcement that the site is being sunset, it immediately made we ask: Can we build a successor?
That has to be immediately followed with acknowledgment that it would be extremely hard (both in building the software and building the community) and very unlikely to succeed.
With that out of the way, is there any interest?
If there is, I'd like to here from you in this topic with your thoughts on how it should be run, must have features missing from Tildes, any features of Tildes not needed in an MVP (minimum viable product) and really any thoughts you have on the subject. What would be a deal-breaker?
I am especially interested to hear on thoughts of how it should be administrated. Do we like the benevolent dictator model? Would a committee be better? Are there other examples of systems that work well?
Tildes isn't going anywhere for a long while by the sounds of it, which I'm really grateful of. Please don't read this as any kind of descent, mutiny or call to leave. I mostly just want to make sure that if there's desire for this community to NOT be sunset, there's at least an option.
To clarify, Tildes is in maintenance mode but is not being sunset. There is no end-of-life date, and I think it's likely that Deimos will continue to support us for as long as we wish to stay.
I know you covered this at the end, but I wanted to emphasize it for anybody that only skimmed.
My feeling is that it's premature to discuss a successor. Tildes continues to work, and though the software isn't perfect, it's still very good. I suspect that building an alternative right now could have the harmful result of splitting our userbase. Rather than acting as a lifeboat, it may sink the ship.
I don't wish to discourage anyone else from building a project that they're interested in or passionate about, but that's the perspective I'd approach this from.
Sadly he was a bit more explicit about sunsetting in this comment.
If we want this community to survive I think a deliberate attempt to make a successor is necessary. The initial seeding of a userbase is the hard part of any new community sites. Like you said, letting there be multiple attempts by different peolle would just splinter this existing one and kill both sides faster. But not doing anything means this existing group will just gradually dissipate away, especially since there doesn't seem to be a plan for having new members either.
If most of us could move together to a successor then we could maintain the existing culture and relationships we formed here, with the added benefits that any needed features (some the current admin already plan to implement but just not have the time, user blocking is one of them iirc) can finally be implemented.
He could even be a regular member on this new site too! So it's not like we're abandoning anyone.
Seeding the community is one thing but I think there’s a second challenge just under the surface people may not be cognizant of. There’s a fundamental tension within the Tildes community about what the purpose of the site is and what type of general vibe the moderation approach ought to create. You see these in any discussion touching on matters of personal identity, gender, and sexuality where they almost always go off the rails and end up locked of have half the comment chains in them deleted.
This has been a perennial flashpoint for forum drama on this site basically since the beginning, and I think the main reason things keep humming in spite of it is a combination of inertia and the people dissatisfied with it not really having other options that hit the community vibe they want. In other words, some people just rub each other the wrong way and a segment of users views this as a moderation or a technical problem and another segment of users views it as either an interpersonal problem or problem of community size and composition. I don’t know if you can actually stand up a new community without coming down decisively on one side or another of that debate, and you’re gonna lose one or the other camp when you do.
I'm continuously surprised and fascinated by the fact that people think its a technical issue that there are sometimes just values and principles people of different backgrounds fundamentally disagree with. As a dev I think this is a human problem you can't solve with tech at all. You can attempt to mitigate it but its usually a pretty feeble attempt.
Most suggestions for a technical fix are basically to request devolution of some kind of moderator or demi-moderator powers to screen those users out, create features for users to soft-censor each other, or create hard partitions in the community about who can talk where or about what.
Those would probably all work at addressing the immediate problem of experienced discomfort -> build tool that will staunch the source of discomfort. There’s going to be profound side-effects obviously, but none of them as immediately apparent as “something happened that made me not enjoy my time here.”
Tildes is a small community. Tools that enable half the people to block the other half would seal its demise.
...i concur; while there are abrasive personalities i'd rather not have to read around, that the option's not presented is i think a strength of the community rather than a liability, presenting a tamping effect upon combative discourse...
Perfectly said. Have literally noting to add. Gonna copy your whole thing and add it to my notes for my own project.
Cheers mate.
Yeah, it's wild. I don't come here because I agree with what everyone says. Sparks flying is the point -- just make your point and see what happens. If you don't like a person's response, reply to that, too.
I often don't know what to say to them. Other people are going to disagree with you, sometimes in profound ways. Across cultures, religions, generations, you're going to encounter other humans with different values and beliefs than yours. You can't moderate that, you can't use tech to make that go away.
If you are a secular French guy from Paris talking to a Marsh Arab in southern Iraq, you are going to disagree on a lot of stuff, and are going to offend each other in many ways. The most a community that contains those two people can do is tell them to knock it off when they're going too far, and ask them to be civil to each other.
Exactly. I mean anyone who has worked with anyone from a different culture should know this. Like even if they grew up in the US or EU, you can also find subtle differences in every aspect of life when it comes to base assumptions.
I think its actually a great thing to learn from different perspectives and it reinforces the notion that you aint the center of the universe and as much as one thinks they are an rational intellectual, your knowledge domain is actually very small. ChatGPT will easily beat you in a random subject lmao. That grounds me in humility and pushes me to learn more things.
Therefore I find it almost eerily strange that a community like Tildes with so many creatives and smart people have such an reactionary response to something so fundamental human.
Honestly any major "drama" here are still much more understanding and civil than elsewhere on the web, which is why I would love if we could preserve what we currently haveas a starting point, then continue the work of building a better moderation methods on top of this. Finding one better or starting from scratch is a much greater hurdle.
My experience running a guild for an MMO, you cant, you have to declare yourselves a “safe space”
Otherwise you eventually get Nazis, cause one shows up and no one bans them, so the good users leave and more Nazis show up.
The previous leaders had a Laissez Faire approach and the whole guild nearly died because of like two users. It was crazy. It doesn’t work.
Edit: to be totally fair, because its an online game chat with a limited character limit, bans happen really quickly cause theyre coming in and saying things like “humans can only be man or women” and boom ban. None of this getting into massive threads of 1000s of lines of text essentially saying the same thing, which I really feel like is a purposeful move by the bad actors to muddy their own intentions. Its fine to not know what you’re talking about, but when multiple people “well actually” you and you double down, continuing to spread your dumb ideas on threads AFTER we done told you you’re wrong, that shit needs to be bannable.
There’s a very wide spectrum of behaviors between being a fully padded out safe space and admitting even one Nazi. In fact, basically up until around 2014 or 2015 almost all of online culture managed to inhabit that space. Monolithic social media sites that design for maximum engagement tend to drive people towards extremes, which is where you see the tendency towards fringes.
For example, I really don’t think a couple of guys hopping into ~life.women saying “I think this link between patriarchy and jars being hard to open is being oversold a bit” is some kind of a foot in the door for Nazis to show up. There’s some basic differences in the cultural norms of a discussion space vs. the cultural norms of a venting zone for an insular community and it’s not an easy circle to square.
I just meant that in my guild we put that in the description that people read when they join and that actually got rid of a lot of the really hard to moderate nonsense cause the people who think that we cant redesign jars to be more accommodating for people that cant open them because physics don’t really want to try and be a part of a community who will reject them. Its just a virtue signaling phrase to help people find their people.
I do think this was always sold as a more woke version of Reddit, or a place to join if you thought Reddit was too reactionary. That was the prevailing attitude whenever discussion of this site came up on Reddit.
I do think there’s more leeway now than there was a few years ago, now I know it’s because we have less moderation. But I got tempbanned a few years ago for linking to the Cass Report. Because it was just the report itself, I’m sure if it was critical of it it would have been allowed. And it speaks to what the most active users here want.
Also a few of the users who were most trigger-happy about slinging the malice tag around and declaring blood feuds in those threads have either been banned or significantly scaled back their participation.
I don’t know if it was initially sold as woke Reddit though. I think in the very early days it was more like a non-idiot version of Reddit with higher quality discussions and no shit posting. That inherently will make the place more “woke” IMO, since a lot of what passes for “woke” these days is merely “not being an asshole” and that association has only gotten stronger and stronger from like 2020 on. Wokeness and not being the sort of troglodyte who can only talk in bumper-sticker phrases and trollish provocations just kind of go hand-in-hand.
But if this place was “woke Reddit” then I think you’d see more Bluesky type users who chime into every discussion with glib one-liners about how citing economic data means you think the world is perfect and “Did you know you stubbing your toe is because of CaPiTaLiSm!?”
I get where you’re coming from, but… see any post on Tildes mentioning Elon Musk, AI, a right-wing political party, or, indeed, capitalism. There will be users doing basically exactly this. I’m not saying that’s inherently a bad thing (it’s not my preference, exactly, but I’ll certainly take it over the alternative), but I do think “woke reddit” is a fairly reasonable label.
I don't know, that doesn't sound right to me. Reddit is considered woke by other social media circles and even some redditors themselves. So people saying that Tildes is a woke reddit feels wrong and doesn't match what I've seen - not saying that you are wrong or denying what you've seen, to be clear; just expressing that in my personal experience, I'm having a hard time picturing who is saying that.
PS: it's been years and I still have no clue what "woke" even means. I swear I'm not being purposely dense or cute, I really don't know. It seemingly keeps changing meaning depending on who says it and the situation
The difference is that reddit’s culture varies enormously by subreddit, whereas there’s just the one homogenous tildes culture. A few years ago, there were both socialist and MAGA (pre-ban) subreddits existing on the same website, which makes it harder to argue that reddit as a whole is “woke.” (Agreed re: what does that even mean.) Here, though, if there’s a single poster who supports Trump/RN/AfD/etc., they’re too afraid to make that known.
So while Tildes is not as far to the left as the most far-left parts of reddit, it’s still clearly a very left, very progressive website. Even more so than reddit, in fact, because there are no pockets of anything else, whereas individual subreddits tend to be focused on their particular interests. I see people arguing sometimes that Tildes isn’t actually very far to the left because they see people express views that are not as progressive as their own views, but those are super different things.
There’s two different camps. Redditors who think it’s too woke and Redditors who think it’s not woke enough. Subreddits like r/negareddit or r/shitredditsays that critique the average redditor as being reactionary.
When I first started using this site it reminded me of those subs and other adjacent subs. Just in the way that people talk and the opinions they have. Not to pick on you, but “I don’t even know what woke means” is par the course for these places as well.
I think everyone has a different definition of woke so the discussion is starting to trend towards what each person's definition of woke is back then and now and whether Reddit or Tildes fits that definition.
I'm pretty new and I don't care for politics, I just know a tiny bit of it to make sense of my world. My personal take being here for 2 months is that most users or at least the active ones are more left leaning and does not like the current admin. Almost miraculously in 2026, the fewer right leaning users are able to stand their ground, argue their point in good faith. I love that about Tildes. Mods also don't instant ban right leaning opinions as they often do in most popular sub reddits. In addition, as @NaraVara mentioned there's very little of "Oh you believe in X, you're a stupid person" or "You voted for Y, you must hate children, women, the Earth, and aliens!".
A co-worker literally posted that latter one on LinkedIn and he thought he was doing the world a favor. No, he's actively making society worse. Everyone has multiple identities. I'm both an designer and engineer. Similarly, one's political identity shouldn't 100% define who they are and US politics has made that the norm. Any place that offsets that is doing the world a service.
In my offense, many of us think this and just don't say it.
It has reputation though. And, from what I remember seeing on Reddit, it’s had that reputation pretty close to the beginning. You’re told if you have a differing opinion then you’ll get banned. Whether that was Demios’s intended goal, it comes across that way with everyone. Like, he is also clearly left wing and because he has this ability to ban people. It does feel like you need to go along with the consensus.
So, if you read all that. And you still join. That means you’re okay with that. So then that’s what gives off the “woke” Reddit vibes.
Well it came across that way to people actively seeking Reddit alternatives because most of the driving force behind that was people dissatisfied with Reddit moderation being hard on them for being assholes. That’s a selection bias with which Redditors show up to look. I don’t think it would have registered as turbo-woke by the median Redditor. The more likely criticism of this community would probably be that it’s full of tedious and supercilious nerds honestly.
This is how I remember it too. This site was never really extreme one way or another.
Thank you for introducing me to the word supercilious. That's a good one.
Initially, the main commonality between users was wanting a more thoughtful, serious, and kinder evolution of Reddit. There wasn’t necessarily an explicit political aim, but there was definitely self-sorting (as right-wing folks went to Voat, Saidit, Ruqqus, and others), and over time it definitely got to the point where the bulk of users were of some left-leaning/left-wing persuasion.
Not having an explicit political aim was actually a big draw for me.
At the point I made my Tildes account, the Reddit algorithm was awful, and I’d see hateful or just overly negative content all the time being promoted on /r/all and /r/popular. On top of that, I’d been watching the discussion quality drop slowly over the years, arriving at point that was practically one step above YouTubes comment quality.
I’d tried other Reddit alternatives in the past, but so many of them were truly terrible, and completely ignored the importance of good moderation. So Tildes seemed perfect from the moment I learned about it, because it styled itself as you described. Kinder, with more thoughtful discussion and strong moderation.
I do think at some point we created a bit of an echo chamber though. The 2024 election was a wake up call for me in that regard, because I was so confident Harris would win, partly due to discussion on here. But early on, things were a little different. I still remember the “first Trump supporter on Tildes” post that got nuked years ago under Trumps first term. In hindsight the whole thing was kind of funny, and completely predictable. But regardless I think it shows we had more broad political appeal early on.
I’m still happy with where our community arrived though. All I would really want to change is my own browsing habits to ensure I’m reading broader opinions, regardless of whether we stick we Tildes or try to build a successor.
Tbf the 2024 election blindsided even those of us who aren’t solely in an echo chamber. I spent a lot of time on Twitter back then, as well as TikTok, and would get right winged content. And even they were surprised by the results. Really, no one saw him winning the popular vote.
I saw this post when I first joined and was aware that that sort of stuff just didn’t exist after that moment.
I mean, I think that your username and specialized knowledge would end in you not being tolerated in some of the more reactionary left wing corners of the Internet, but I've only ever seen people genuinely interested in what you have to say. So it can't be too extreme.
Also, the anti-nuclear crowd is mostly older than Tilde's demographics.
I think we should avoid using the word "woke" because it means different things to different people.
If by "woke" we mean progressive/left wing, Tildes is almost certainly more so. But that's not how most people use the word. For most it's not really just about being left/progressive, it's about how those ideas are expressed.
For example, let's say we are discussing homeless people: On Tildes I'm far more likely to see unanimous opinion that the homeless need more help, support and compassion. While on reddit I get at least a few right wingers argue the poor should help themselves, complaints about them being lazy, stuff like that. In that sense, Tildes is more progressive.
But on reddit I'm also far more likely to get some angry tumblerina delete my comment, proclaim I'm a bigot because I said "homeless" instead of "unhoused" and then ban me from 17 other subreddits I didn't even participate in because I failed some arbitrary purity test. In that sense, reddit is far more "woke".
Tildes was not sold to me as being more woke, it was sold to me (correctly) as being more reasonable, and that does include the excesses on both the left and the right.
No offense like, there’s really no space for any moderate right winged thinking. For example, saying tumblerina is barely allowed now and five years ago when I first joined you’d probably get tons a reports and maybe even a temp ban.
I’ve been temp banned before, lots of people have been temp banned.
I also find it irritating when people go “woke could mean lots of stuff” but give you the specific definition that most people use and just do arbitrary separations.
I strongly agree with this sentiment. I saw your post on the other thread and could not have agreed more.
Communities get stronger when there is buy in from more individuals. I have found you stay strong by keeping those interested in putting effort forth engaged so they feel like they can truly contribute to the community outside of the occasional post.
Thank you! Glad to know I managed to reach a fellow member. I feel this comment by Staross also help explain why keeping the spirit alive is necessary.
Wouldn’t other attempts just lead to the same end point though? Sites like this attract a certain user, with certain philosophies, and if they want the same exclusivity and rules then it would also lead to a decrease.
I think it depends on funding, right? Part of the arc of Tildes' history was that there came a point where wasn't enough money to pay for Deimos to do further development and he needed to make a living. With that, the theories of scalable self-moderation were set aside, and without that it never became open to the public.
This is above my pay grade. But something I never understood about Demios’s goals was that they seemed contradictory. The intention was supposedly to grow in a controlled manner, but that means less people are gonna be inclined to join just on invites. And once you do get an invite, you’re in an environment that could be unwelcoming depending on who you are.
So that in it of itself is gonna limit the user base and also limit the amount of money you can make, even just from a donation stand point.
That’s why I was surprised when I learned this was supposed to be anything more than a niche place.
My suspicion is that the assumption was there will always be people wanting to join as a baseline. Eternal September was an often repeated lession among old-school online community users. But nowadays most people more or less settled into the major platforms. The drama with Reddit and Twitter basically revealed that once they're big enough, they no longer have to worry about users leaving. If a smaller site were to grow in the current time, it needs to make active effort in being attractive and not just wait and see. This is something we could do better.
One potential upside would be having multiple developers instead of just one. Nvm the philosophy, just being able to execute existing development plan is already much added benefits and keeping the momentum going.
Yes, well repeated. I think that's important for anyone interested in this to consider.
I'm not sure that it is. I agree that it could split the user base if not managed correctly. But if there is interest, I think it's something that should be done with a lot of planning and agreement and it would be good to capture that well before it's needed.
Here's the thing about a successor. I trust basically none of you to run a social media site.
Not saying I'm correct in doing so, but the proof would be in the pudding. There has already been one attempt at a Tildes spinoff, and it was terrible. I enjoy the no-nonsense moderation and aversion to drama that has typically been the case here. Also, a lot of the recent features people have been asking for are poorly thought out and actively harmful to a community so I personally would not participate in a new community built around championing these.
Same. I only trusted this site because it already existed and worked well. I honestly don't hate Reddit as much as the rest of you seem to do. I was just very turned off by the API situation. Tildes filled a different, but good purpose than Reddit. Which is why I'm down to stay on this site.
As a software developer, I also know that maintenance mode is not a bad thing. As long as no major bugs exist, this site runs well as is. Part of the mantra is simplicity.
I understand if it's not enough for some people. But trying to spin up a whole social media site is a bigger monster than most people realize. Reddit is huge, so grabbing a portion of their audience during the exodus was great for Tildes. It was also lucky in the sense that Tildes was prepared for the opportunity. You'd be better off finding a similar existing site and trying to enact change there
Yes, but also no. Before reddit took over and people just started making subreddits you had people self hosting forums. That is still possible and from experience not as big of a monster from a technical perspective. Moderation is a different issue and can be a challenge, no doubt about that. But if you are not after a huge user base and go for slowish growth quite reasonable to keep up with.
From a technical perspective, it all depends on how well designed your architecture is in serving content at the same you intend to serve. Like forums are super easy, they're already made software you purchase and host. Some are even free.
Like as per your answer, the answer really depends on what exactly does one mean by social media site. There's too many variables. I have a ton of real-time stuff on my side project and I'm fairly confident I can easily handle thousands of concurrent users. 500k? Probably not.
Something of an aside, but a lot of the OG posters here quit Reddit for good at a point when it may have actually been worse than it is now. In spite of the API thing (which I’m also salty about) I think the platform as a whole has actually improved in recent years. I mentioned it in another comment but when I joined Tildes, I did so out of disgust for the endless hateful and negative content I was seeing on Reddit and the seeming lack of moderation in response. Now days, the comment quality still sucks but at least the hateful content is gone and they’ve gotten rid of a lot of subreddits that didn’t comply with site wide moderation rules.
So that may be why it seems like a lot of users here hate Reddit.
Reddit is less hateful and bigoted yeah, but it’s gotten really REALLY stupid. The average comment is just much dumber and there’s a general sense that it seems like everyone is fishing for engagement. Everything feels a lot less sincere and more affected. I think basically every testimonial post these days is basically lying.
No argument here, but if I’m being honest I’ve felt like this has been the case for several years now. And as one other user has pointed out, LLMs have made this issue even worse. My only point was that I could understand why a newer user would simply dislike rather than hate Reddit in its current state.
I think widespread LLMs have made it pretty unappealing. Even on our local subreddit there are accounts bombarding it with very offensive, conservative talking points and when you click on the user it's clear it's a bot that is deployed on local subreddits across the US. Anywhere with that large of a userbase is a target of campaigns like that.
I still check it semi-regularly. The FP seems worse off. World news doesn't ever seem to hit the FP like it used to. That may have been because of bots, but at least it was quality content. If there's less hateful content though, then that's good. I mostly just check on a few subreddits
Neither of the features were proposed as fully featured thought out features ready to go. If anything they both attempted to use them to highlight an issue perceived with the community and both also tried to open the floor for alternatives.
Both got shot down by a lot of people about the technical merits without giving much thought to underlying question. To add insult to injury, tone deaf comments saying that people "can just leave" got upvoted the most.
Which yeah, I guess I don't trust a lot of y'all either to run a community website.
In my opinion there is no problem with the underlying question itself. It's just lacking in a satisfactory answer. No one has really provided any indications about how such a feature would be implemented in a way that isn't obviously bad. Rough implementation details kind of needs to be the starting point for something like this.
I could flesh it out. But I don't see much point in pie in the sky thinking as the world around us stagnates anyway. And my own thoughts are based on my own philosophy to social media anyway, so it's not like they are the best ideas for everyone.
The other thing for me is as simple as "I don't think one or two small features is my primary issue with Tildes". Any serious social media initiative would need to fix the balance between gaining a community but also moderating a community against obvious bad actors. Not necessarily a mass amount of users to compete with Reddit or whatnot. Just a more realistic goal of "a community large enough that we obviously can't all fit into one group/sub/community". Features like how we block/ignore/mute is minutiae in comparison.
I actually have some concrete ideas about how such a feature could be implemented, and the main thing is opt-in community moderation. The idea is basically, you and your friends can collaboratively filter posts or comments — it doesn’t affect anyone else, and the net effort for individuals drops proportionately to the number of moderators in each pool, so many users might never encounter an objectionable comment chain in a typical day. At the same time, users who are not so inclined can see and say anything they like, aside from things that Deimos prohibits.
IMO it seems like the top voted replies shutting down the video did give thought to the underlying question? Just because they came to the conclusion of “it’s not worth the cost” doesn’t mean it wasn’t given thought.
What about one just completing the missing features that Deimos himself already approved but not yet implemented? I recall Bauke said they and talklittle already done a lot of work contributing to the codebase on missing features, just waiting for Deimos to push. We could think about what new features are needed or not later but that feels like a natural first step.
Deimos has been excellent as a moderator, I genuinely mean it. I would prefer to keep contributing if it will help us achieve a better place, so it's unfortunate that he seems to have hit his limit. If anything by continue staying here we're giving him more burden than needed.
Which one is that?
I am aware of beehaw, which is still around (though currently seems to dealing with down time due to AI crawling) but didn't really take off. But I don't think it was the team behind it or the community itself that was the issue. The platform they use is lemmy and at the time (I don't know now) it had a lot of missing moderation features and other growing pains. Not to mention it being federated (with the lack of moderation tooling) caused a constant influx of people from other instances just oblivious to the beehaw specific rules.
But their community and moderation philosophy is actually quite good imho.
I can't double check for now because it's down, but if it's what I think it is, the community and the team behind it were exactly the problem for me personally - it seemed like an overmoderated (western) leftist safe space with the same issues that similar subreddits have. I am on Tildes specifically because, despite obvious western left bias, it is not overmoderated, most people don't have extreme opinions, and even with controversial issues people don't generally assume you're a troll if you go against the grain.
I honestly have no clue what you mean with this. I can guess but you are using a bunch of word in succession there that in the modern day political climate have lost all meaning as depending on who you ask they have extremely different meaning.
Personally speaking, I like communities who have put thought and effort into what they want to be, what they stand for and how they try to achieve that. Frankly, also why I was drawn to Tildes as Deimos put in similar effort in the docs you can find in the footer below.
As far as moderation goes. Tildes gets away with relatively light moderation because people can't easily sign up. People need to be invited where there already is some selection happening (some would already call this pretty heavy moderation in a sense). Even to those who simply got handed an invite will be less likely to go against the rail, simply because there is an actual cost to loosing your account as you can't simply make a new one.
Beehaw is a lemmy instance, meaning they are federated with the rest of the internet by default. Which also means that they have no gate or moat as Tildes does. This by extension means that more moderation will be needed.
Moderation is one of these topics where many people who have not been involved with moderating communities simply don't realize how much of it is needed if signup is open. Often the difference between perceived over moderation and not is not even the amount of moderation but how visible it is. Whole different discussion though.
I will explain. Being from an ex-communist country, I don't like spaces that are strongly US-style progressive because they tend to be quite dogmatic, which is only made worse by first past the post system in the US - something that is not present in other western countries, but the online polarization of the political debate that it creates tends to spill to them anyway.
The political system and debates that take place where I live are quite different, so many opinions and debates that I see in such spaces just seem stupid in a "been there, done that, clearly doesn't work" kind of way, and it's also annoying as hell being regularly called a member of "the other side" when in reality I just have no reason to call myself a member of either and I'm almost always closer to their side than to "the enemy" in my opinions.
This approach tends to require overmoderation, whether it's on reddit or elsewhere. And yes, due to the nature of Lemmy and Reddit it also creates constant vigilance and ideological checks, judging whether some dissenting people are worthy of being members or just trolls. The problem is it's really easy to be labelled a troll if you're just outside of their political worldviews.
Tildes also has a western progressive bias, but it's less extreme on average and outside a small minority of topics that create strong emotions dissent is not a problem in terms of moderation or in terms of the community turning against you, so while I'm not entirely happy here, it doesn't overshadow the other qualities.
No, I do understand this. I just don't care - if the community or moderation sucks as a result, then they chose the wrong place to run it and I'm not going to use it.
I do believe that some sort of gatekeeping is a crucial part of any healthy online community and is the reason why Tildes is what it is.
There are still issues with Lemmy and the developer's vision, but without a strong team who's willing to migrate us off to another platform which would be it's own potential issue (needs to be attached to the fediverse but with better choices on permissions of offsite platforms/sites) I don't see us moving to any new platform anytime soon.
We've investigated a few Lemmy alternatives which are still on the fediverse, but none of them have truly come to fruition yet - seemingly stuck in development forever.
I still lean the other way, but we also had this conversation ages ago so I won't restart it here either way :)
I mean I think it's worth revisiting with the currently engaged leadership on Beehaw - I'm generally in agreement based on what I've seen at this point. But I see membership being an issue if we aren't federated and we don't have folks who are really dedicated to spreading the word to the right spaces. I don't have that kind of capacity, but that doesn't mean there aren't others who do.
I don't think I'd classify beehaw, lemmy, piefed, or any of the others Tildes spinoffs. They were more just Reddit-likes for the fediverse even if the format is similar to Tildes.
Lemmy in general not. But beehaw, a lemmy instance very much originated from a group of people here. As such it is a spinoff of sorts. Not in the sense that it tries to be Tildes from a technical perspective but that the founders came from here.
Interesting. I had no idea that is who founded beehaw. I would likely have chosen that instance in that case, oh well.
Agree. And just to add. I believe that social issues vee-ery rarely can be solved using technology.
Do you have any examples of what you're talking about?
The requests for misinformation and related labels.
The only place that has solved this to any degree of usability is Twitter/X, and look at what is required to do that: you need extensive user tracking/profiling to build the algorithm for that kind of feature in a way that's both cost prohibitive and actively harmful to the principles of a site like this. At best you can asterisks it and shove all meta discussion into a talk page like Wikipedia but that doesn't really solve the problem imo.
I suppose too, if something is misinformation, you're bound to have people correcting it (it is the Internet, after all). You don't need a big label to suppress or flag it. I think we all learned what happened in ~2016 with cancel culture.
I'd also argue Twitter's implemention is flawed - I won't see a community note until a while after originally reading the tweet. Everything is so vapid over there, rarely do I see a tweet again unless someone quote tweets it.
It'd be interesting if it notified you about a tweet you read recently being community noted.
What was the Tildes spinoff?
Already asked and answered in this chain ;)
This one of those comments that my Redditor brain fired up and I really just want to reply with "based".
Why a “successor?” My use of a social media/discussion site isn’t some kind of project I’m engaged in. It’s just a place to spend my spare time. This mindset that there has to be one place that’s where you hang out I feel makes sure whatever that place is will always be dissatisfying. I think there needs to be more like “let a thousand flowers bloom” focus on building a healthy distributed ecosystem.
The core technology Tildes has is solid. I don’t think it should be a single platform, I think you can build many different Tildes sites with their own communities and cultures. Something more like the old blogosphere where it’s more distributed and people drift around across different communities.
Man I wish more people share this sentiment. There seems to be strong expressed desire for new communities or Reddit alternatives as evidenced by this and many other threads but most are understandably looking for one that's already established. No community starts with thousands of users and interesting content.
I think that mindset comes from modern social media and Reddit hosting every community under the sun. Of course, you want to be where other people are, but if everyone does that, you end up all under the same roof.
Smaller, distributed, websites makes a lot of sense to me. I think it's just going to be harder to find quality ones with AI making it so accessible to generate slop websites.
Yeah the main point of friction is just enabling people to sign up and having to keep track of their credentials.
This is why I was kind of excited about how ATProtocol works. They focus on maintaining a federated identity, so you can have a single “persona” or user credential that can travel across a bunch of different types of sites and services. But unlike Mastodon the ONLY thing they care about federating is your identity, there’s no going through a bunch of server hosts who run their instances like little personal fiefdoms.
You could have a million different online services that have nothing to do with each other and don’t care about syndicating their content across all the world, but a user can just login with their Bluesky or ATProto account and they can hop in anywhere with a portable profile.
I hang out in several places. But I feel in all ways they haven't truly given me that mid 2010's Reddit experience I'm seeking. It's not like I'm planning to leave Tildes, but I will likely still continue trying to seek out such a community all the while.
The technology here is indeed solid. But I don't think it's the tech that's held Tildes back from what I feel is its full potential. It needs a mix of serious funding/advertising in addition to disciplined leadership (which I feel this community certainly has). So I suppose in that regard I'm looking more for a potential "who" than a "what".
If you have time, can you elaborate on this a little more? You mention its not the tech so would it just be an issue of growth and becoming bigger?
Yeah, it's hard to really put into words. Reddit was always pedantic and aggressive, but it was put into overdrive around 2016. I was never someone who got moderated (except once on r/news) but moderation felt like it responded in kind with more aggression and less nuance as well. Then ofc COVID cranked it up yet another notch
The changes to how blocking worked on Reddit (from a "mute" to this very aggressive block) in 2022 or so really seem to up things a notch as well. Conversation overtime ended up a lot more "circlejerky" than usual. Add in the influence coming more from Tiktok (which Reddit always did; aggregate from other popular sites) so now discussion feels like it was starting to really dumb down. Both in comprehension of the topic and in discussions within threads.
Then the Reddit blackout events in 2023. It didn't change much of the larger site habits, but it did seem to particularly hit smaller communities I was apart of. Some of them began to stagnate, and a few outright collapsed as mods either left or simply gave up enforcing anymore than the most basic rules.
Maybe AI was another final phase, but by that point I more withdrew to using Reddit for a few specific communities only.
I don't know if these "phases" are just coincidental with "Reddit kept getting bigger", but yes. There was a difference of reddit c. 2014 vs. 2025/6. I wanted a relatively bustling community with a themed, steady newsfeed/discussion forum hybrid where you can have varied opinions without tearing off people's heads (which still happens, but moderation discourages that).
I suppose the issue is that many communities I try don't quite have the community size to truly be that "themed newsfeed". Which isn't a dealbreaker; it just means I subscribe to several communities.
Hmm interesting account of events man. I don't really have much to add cuz as you said this is really just the butterfly effect of stacking multiple things:
I chose the word 'successor', because that's specifically what I'm talking about. I don't disagree with you about letting a thousand flowers bloom. But for me, I'm motivated to make sure there is a space just like this one.
I wouldn't even be opposed to building something based off of the existing code, or at least matching the existing API so theoretically existing third party tools (like Three Cheers) could remain compatible.
I want more of what you've described too, but here I'm specifically talking about something I'd describe as a successor.
Having done a bit of work on this for Tildes. Let me tell you that there is effectively no API...
Why is that?
Tildes is just built based on server page rendering. Not API driven. This is generally fine but its terrible for interopability. The 3 cheers app needs to effectively parse HTML to function.
You know, I never realized that as a downside to server side rendering.
Eh it is a bit more complex. Old reddit is also fully server side rendered for the most part, but still comes with an API for example.
The API is just not required for the website itself to function (for the most part, I am simplifying a little bit), it is/was there for third party usage. However, the data you need is still the same so even if you have serverside rendering and a seperate API it only adds a little bit of complexity. For one road the data is used on the backend to already build html and for the other it is send out over an API endpoint for consumers.
The API part for tildes was never build by Deimos. Polle had a go a adding that API bit but that never got implemented due to... waves around the whole situation why this post is now a thing.
I'm not sure I would've ever known that about old Reddit. I never really thought about it, but I guess I always assumed they used the API themselves. Thank you for explaining!
It’s not really opposed to server-side rendering, it just means you need to program separate API routes that return the data as JSON, in addition to the existing routes that return HTML.
In practice even if your own frontend fetches JSON data, it’s rare that you use the public API and create your own private functions instead, so effectively you end up with 2 methods anyway.
That makes sense. Thank you for the explanation!
Apologies, I for one, would not be interested in rebuilding some sort of social media site especially from scratch. And especially one where media is hosted internally or has less focus on text based discussions. There are already plenty of alternatives. I am partial to @creesch 's list of ye old forum boards structure, complete with user icons and signatures.
Like I said, I've enjoyed my time here very, very much, and the best thing about Tildes is the people. I'm actually quite content with the benovelent dictator model .... But perhaps skew slightly towards small committee of elders with one chosen as "first among equals".....
If we all want to stay and chat, I'm sad that we're apparently not welcoming more people: new accounts (at least as of Dec 2025) apparently do not receive invites anymore.
But I understand there's a cost to everything and would not want to place additional burden of time and energy on Deimos. It would only be on that thankful and "but I'm not ready to stop partying" basis that I would entertain any discussion on "should we leave".
I am most likely to dual-participate if @Bauke and @Talklittle want to maintain + add to a tildes branch.
Other than that, if Deimos wants to re-open invites or allow further collaboration from others, I'll be staying here.
I don’t recall him saying it’s gonna be shut down any time soon.
He didn't. He said the site is naturally being allowed to sunset. You'll notice that invites are not being regenerated for anyone, so there is a limit to how many new users can join. So the user base will only move in one direction.
Invites have to be manually generated and handed out.
I could be wrong but my reading is that @Deimos just hasn't really bothered to do this in a while, because is there any real demand? I don''t think the tap has been deliberately closed.
That is my understanding too. Anyone could probably dm Deimos for more invites. And I believe they still add people who ask through email.
Sadly not, at least on the email front.
@Deimos - is non-response to emailed requests for invites official policy? If so, could the contact page https://docs.tildes.net/contact be updated? It seems unfriendly to direct people to send an email and claim an invite will be issued if that is no longer true.
Well, I don't know if I'd call it policy, but it's true that I very rarely respond to them any more. The invites@ inbox is completely flooded with LLM-written requests, and it's very difficult to sort through them. There were several cases where someone wrote a completely reasonable invite request email, I sent them an invite, and they immediately started posting blatant spam. In another case, I invited someone and it turned out to be a banned, abusive user who was able to start harassing someone here again. I believe that they're creating new email addresses and getting LLMs to write emails in different writing styles to try to repeatedly circumvent their ban.
Of course, things like this were possible before, but it's now completely trivial for people to do and only takes them seconds. Unfortunately, "write a message" is no longer a meaningful barrier, and it's disheartening when I spend time going through a bunch of emails and just end up feeling like I've created issues on the site. You're right that I should remove that from the Contact page and anywhere else that suggests it though.
Thanks for clarifying, Deimos. You do so much behind the scenes I've taken it all for granted as "stuff just works" . Forgotten that since LLM nonsense became mainstream you must've been having a much harder time with it all.
Will also admit that I was feeling all kinds of emotional and unsure how to express shock about the idea that perhaps you've decided not to open for any more invites.
(Just a random thought...)
Something I remember from the old "Live Journal" days is that many sites based on that code used an invite code system and had people pay a trivial one time amount ($ 5) to join if they did not have an invite code. While joining at a financial cost is not an idea solution at all, it did limit who could cause problems (at the time). Financial processors also do some anti-fraud stuff on their own so it also limits out "not people" from registering.
While the recent "Digg relaunch" didn't work (somewhat after when they allowed anyone to join for free), they did initially require that people pay a trivial amount of money to join.
While this pay idea isn't great, it may be better than the "no way to join" alternative.
I appreciate all that you have done and continue to do Deimos. Don't see my suggestion as criticism but simply as an idea or where I am thinking a bit too much.
Implementing a payment processor and everything else that goes along with it is very much outside the scope of the "maintenance mode" that tildes is currently in.
I admittedly haven't noticed because I haven't used my invites. None of my friends have asked about using Tildes (for all I know they're already here) and I don't interact with enough social media elsewhere to see people asking to be invited. However, I have seen a few instances within the last few months of people getting more, so I don't think that creating more invites is off the table entirely. They just haven't been necessary, since Tildes isn't designed for rapid growth.
Tildes is not alone, there are a bunch of smaller communities out there. As others have said, we have forgotten that on the older smaller web it used to be a lot of different smaller communities in forums and such.
You can still do that I talked about that earlier or last week. As far as open source forum software goes (non threaded, linear).
Not to mention that the source for Tildes itself is open source if it is Tildes itself you are after with possibly some modifications. There is also the whole fediverse, though I think that federation makes it next to impossible to foster a small community properly.
I'd also say that there can't really be a successor to Tildes. Deimos made his post because of some events unfolding over feature discussions. The perceived need for those features came from somewhere. I don't want to rehash that discussion but people already left in response to some of it.
So no matter what, any offshoot isn't going to be the same people. It will need to stand on its own and not just be Tildes v2.
The idea of a Tildes “successor” seems doomed to me. Forever trying to match its predecessor, living in its shadow. It doesn’t sound appealing.
However, if anyone has new ideas and wants to start something different, inspired by tildes and other communities, I’m interested in hearing you out. There are tons of different communities on the web, each with their own successes and failures, and you can draw on that history to make something new. Trying to recapture the same lightning in a bottle just isn’t going to work.
I’m hoping to hear ideas about more radically different communities, departures from feeds & posts, focusing on interaction between community members rather than how content is distributed and moderated. Pubnixes/tildeverse sites like tilde.town are a good example of what I would consider radically different from what tildes is doing. A space where users’ participation is via presence rather than content curation. Also there’s no such thing as upvotes:)
I think at least one interesting angle for a Tildes successor would be to try to make user-led sub-communities work, and thereby facilitate better scalability than Tildes.
In my head I imagine a system whereby sufficiently reputable users could suggest new groups, which is approved by site mods could be created with the suggesting user becoming an organiser for that group. You can build up a pyramid of trust where group organisers primarily moderate their own groups, but are monitored and held to account by the (more highly trusted) site mods, who in turn a held to account by site admins / a BDFL.
TBH I think user-led subcommunities are basically what ruined Reddit and also the brief resurgence of Digg. There’s several anti-patterns involved.
1.) They tend to attract the sorts of users who get off on being “power mods,” which is a psychographic profile that cannot be trusted with power.
2.) They give random people the ability to squat on what are basically trademarked terms. So, for example, if I’m an indie game developer any asshole can create the /r/NaravarasGameStudio community and suddenly that asshole functionally speaks for my studio. This happened with the new Digg where they opened the floodgates to user create communities and there was a gold rush of people coming to squat on the valuable e-Real estate.
3.) Conversations about the same thing happen concurrently across a bunch of different groups.
4.) They end up being zones for coordination where people plot about brigading other communities, creating weird forum drama and dynamics. They also create groups, like /r/TheDonald, which basically coordinate to boost their own content in site-wide propaganda campaigns.
5.) This is kind of a problem I’ve sort of newly become more cognizant of since having kids, and I call it the I want to fuck a toaster issue. Which is basically that online services ought to have a responsibility to not pull susceptible people into cogito-hazard territory. It’s touchy because it can very easily veer into censorship, but you can’t read a story like this without walking away thinking “yeah it’s kinda messed up that we have these pitfalls all over the internet where otherwise socially functioning people can completely torpedo their lives and their families after cooking their brains on some inane nonsense.” Maybe there ought to be some amount of friction involved before getting into weird shit? You don’t have to ban the weird shit, but just don’t let people marinate in it too much maybe? Have some kind of nudge to push people to take a break?
I don't know how I haven't seen this before, but it's so accurate.
I agree in principle, but that is obviously a joke/troll post. There's some bits in there a little too on the nose.
You must submit to the reality of the shitpost or be destroyed
Cha cha real smooth
Discord solved #1 and #2 nicely.
It gives users near total control over their discord servers - which I think is critical for the possibility of "good" moderation to exist - but the nature of how servers and invites work mean that you can't really "squat" a term, and you can't squat an invite link without having an actual community behind it.
That solves problem #2, but Discord has serious issues with problems #1, 4, and 5.
Problem #4 is actually bad enough that I basically don’t volunteer any personal information in any Discord server that isn’t 100% people I know IRL despite it being closed from the open internet. It’s rife with bad actors.
Also, I’m not in any servers like this, but I’ve heard it’s basically the incubation site for a lot of the kinds of communities that engender problem #5 too.
I don't consider bad moderators a problem, so long as the friction to create new social spaces is low. In fact, I think that having extensive moderation options is critical for the possibility of "good" moderation to exist, whatever your definition of "good" is.
Those same tools do allow bad moderators to exist, but I consider the alternatives of no moderation and user-delegated moderation to be much, much worse. The availability of user-driven moderation is why I don't visit Reddit or Hacker News anymore.
#1 is as much a problem for the moderators as for the community. It not only makes the community brittle and subject to the foibles of an individual person, but it also means a volunteer moderator who takes it seriously is signing themselves up for a lot of stress and the risk of having the whole thing unravel if they’re not able to get worthy backups or successors.
Sure, that's a problem. I don't think that allowing for the possibility of bad volunteer moderators is a good thing. I just think that it's the best "bad" option among worse alternatives.
For context, I grew up in the era of web forums, where the moderators of a forum ended up being whoever the person paying for the forum hosting said they were. As you might guess, the quality of forum moderation varied significantly between forums. Discord very much reminds me of this model, with the caveat that the friction necessary for creating new communities is much much lower than having to pay for and having the know how to host a web forum.
Yeah I used to moderate a fairly large forum back in the aughts. There were days where I had to log on at 3 in the morning to block and delete people who went through every thread and spammed a (probably not, but certainly appeared to be) CSAM gif all over the place. It’s not something I, a 19 year old at the time, should have been on the front line of dealing with.
I think at least that sort of thing doesn’t happen as much anymore due to technical approaches to auto-detect anything that crosses those sorts of lines. But there’s still just a lot of seedy underbelly stuff out there that ends up being way more socially dangerous now that the internet lives in your pockets instead of being through a portal in a room in your house. Lots more kids are on it unsupervised, there’s lots of people with mental health issues, eating disorders, etc. just sort of floating around with way more sophisticated tools and infrastructure out there capable of exploiting them.
Like even on a more prosaic note, WallStreetBets and assorted communities based on stoking degenerate gambling tendencies have almost certainly ruined many lives, flushed lots of inheritances down the toilet, and destroyed families.
I don't see this as a shortcoming of allowing volunteer moderators in user-created social spaces as it is a refusal of the company running them to do anything about it. As far as I'm concerned, neither Reddit or Discord have clean hands here.
Thinking about it a bit, the idea of giving users the power to create and moderate their own social spaces has quite a bit to do with the fact that it's the only way you can possibly create good social spaces on corporate-owned social networks, because you can't trust the platforms to do so, nor the community at large via gamified moderation tools.
Regardless of the specific points I 100% agree that the Reddit approach to user-led communities has big problems. And that isn’t what I was suggesting. I think it would be interesting to see if there is a way to take a less laissez-faire approach to it, where new communities require approval, and only people with a proven track record can moderate a community. I’m not saying that magically solves all the problems, I am just interested if there is a middle ground here.
I agree the pyramid of trust moderation sounds interesting. But there’d need to be a larger sized community, I don’t think it would work at a small scale. Personally I prefer smaller communities where most people know or at least recognize each other. A pyramid of moderation feels at odds with that.
Oh absolutely - the point would be to enable the site to scale batter than Tildes has, but with some mind to keeping it sustainable. Which I have seen some people saying they would want, but clearly not everyone wants that! I think it would be neat though.
You check out mine :=
Once again I think this is an interesting moderation model. It’s like a formalized take on how a small group of people moderates themselves. I admire the originality.
I like the media views idea, maybe not for here but for Reddit it would be a huge improvement.
I made a comment in the mega thread about an idea I've had for a new social media site. The gist is to assign users into a random cohort upon joining where each cohort is designed to fluctuate around some fixed size and posting/commenting rate. When a cohort gets too large it gets graph partitioned into two. When a cohort gets too small another cohort adopts it. By default you only see content from your cohort and/or their content always appears first, but you could also have some optional ways to both boost especially good content to more site wide visibility and also ways to restrict posts to just be within your cohort.
I think smaller communities are better than larger ones but they're fragile, not able to buffer large ingrowth or exodus. The thrust of the idea is to try and give small communities a chance to weather those ups and downs by weathering them together.
Another more radical idea in this space could be asking the cohorts to do their own internal moderation and governance and reserving admins for only most egregious stuff. This would probably look like having a random jury from a cohort approve/disapprove flagged posts from a cohort member (although I can also see benefits to having a cohort jury approve/disapprove posts only from another cohort).
But what if I liked those people :(
Have you seen Staross’ comment sharing their site? It has a nearly identical moderation strategy.
I appreciate you sharing your thoughts!
This place is remarkable for actually being able to hold people with wildly differing opinions without all of it going to shit. I haven't seen anything like this anywhere else, and I have been swimming in these things since 1996.
Somehow it manages to work even without a blocking/muting feature. It's not the technology that does it.
...i saw places like this before 1994, but even mighty usenet was ultimately overrun with commercial interests, bots, + noise until the signal just wasn't worth the effort...
Usenet had pretty much unrestricted speech in many groups, with
*plonk*being the main way to moderate. In many ways, 4chan was its most faithful continuation....moderation was entirely hierarchy-dependent; i moderated a couple of rec.* groups...
No it's not the tech that does it, but it's important that the right tools are available. Without doubt though, it's the administration, policies, and the community that has been attracted that does it. And I'm not trying to pretend that would be easy to replicate.
For what it's worth (and do mark this noise if appropriate), my personal interest in this is low.
The main reasons I joined and have been as active on here as I have - in order of importance:
None of these can be easily replicated. For example, you could copy some of the documentation about the purpose and goals of the site but that wouldn't be enough for me. Deimos wrote that himself so I could trust that he actually understands what he's doing and will be able to implement it too.
Nowadays there's another reason for me to want to remain on Tildes: the fact that AI slop generators can't easily get in. I can more or less trust that most users on here are real humans with human reasons to be active on the site.
I made a post recently where I attempted to workshop a new label. Not because I don't like it here - I do. I just had even higher hopes for the site because the starting point is so amazing. Had Tildes been able to develop in this desired direction, I would have wanted to up my participation by writing more in-depth posts about topics that are important to me. Things that would take a lot of effort and putting myself on the line professionally (and as a human being). If I can't trust a forum to handle it with care, it doesn't make sense to do it. I've never seen a forum that could, so my online communications have been limited to things I can drop any time without feeling bad about it. Tildes, the way it is now, is perfectly adequate for that and I don't believe any spinoff can achieve the same level easily, or at all.
I'll be happy to be proven wrong of course.
Great feedback, thanks for sharing.
I think for me, the entire purpose would be to replicate or at least model on the existing foundations written in those documents. There are plenty of link aggregators, discussion forums and Reddit-likes out there - so building just another of those would not be the goal.
The real goal would be to build a platform that has the tools to enforce and enable those values, with an active maintainer and a cycle of community feedback and development.
This would certainly be a priority with any new platform. I think the existing invite system is a great filter for that, and would likely be replicated. I think we can also build tools to help identify, or let community members flags suspected meat-proxy interfaces, which is inevitable at some point.
All your points are great, and I think this would only work with at least a small committee of existing members from community who want to help build something based on those values.
I understood as much. That's the first step out of three in the bag. The other two:
I'm sorry that I don't have help of advice to offer. I will say that I appreciate your desire to build a community and that you recognise the value of kindness.
In short yes. But there are caveats.
First, I hadn’t seen Deimos’ other comment that you linked to elsewhere in the thread. It does indeed sound like his view is to allow the site to gradually wind down. And that is a shame because I really love Tildes, it’s by far my most used “social” platform (really the only one I use).
Imo what makes Tildes great is its community, and I believe a good successor would be one which curates a similar social experience. I think it’s plausible you could scale it a bit larger, but it would be detrimental to let it grow too fast or too large. I feel like you could reasonably try to maintain a similar culture at 10x the size of Tildes, but 100x would probably push you over into something else. And that would demand both a very deliberate approach to moderation (as exists here) as well a mind towards what features you do or don’t include - for example one that comes to mind that one might think to add to a Tildes successor is image posts or images in replies, but I think Tildes focus on text-based discussion is crucial, and adding such a feature would not only miss the point but encourage/allow the wrong type of interactions.
I have relevant technical expertise that means I could help to run such a site, and the will to do so. I think the really question is whether or not now is the right time to set up a “new Tildes” when there’s nothing essentially wrong with the current one. Also, if it was a goal to encourage a significant portion of current Tildes users to move to a new site, I think it would benefit strongly from some continuity in the form of existing Tildes moderators being involved. I find that not entirely likely however (I’m sure people are busy enough as it is).
If a social media network isn't growing, its dying. Count me interested in a Tildes successor.
Not really? The general lifecycle with online forums is that they spend most of their time in a fairly steady state or might slightly shrink marginal users. From there one of several things can happen:
Infinite growth forever is an exception that only a few communities ever do. Though since the 2010s I guess the big ones got so big that they swallowed up the whole internet so that’s all most people know anymore.
Big surge in growth = Growing
No big surges implies small growth = Growing
Slowly shed members = Dying (We're here)
Drama = Dying
But by your framework basically all forums are “dying” basically all of the time, because they’re not “growing” most of the time you’re in them. It’s kind of like saying you’re “dying” any time you get thirsty. It’s technically correct in a way but also kind of catastrophizing to think of it that way. You just drink some water and you’re fine.
Given that (to my basic understanding) Tildes is open source and can be forked/used for other sites, is not a lot of the work to build a "successor" already done? If we like the basic framework with some desired tweaks around the edges, it's right there. The link to the source code is in the footer.
Yes, but it's a very dated codebase. Forking would be easiest, but for something maintainable and extensible it may be better to build fresh with a more modern stack.
I am happy to help out if an effort was put forth further down the line and there was a need for a successor.
To me the main issue with tildes is the size, it's just a bit too small. The issue with being small is depth : you can have quality discussions about a lot of things here which is great, but if the topic become too niche you're basically talking alone. It's just a matter of raw numbers, if you have 100 active users and you want to discuss something that interests only 1% of people then you're talking to yourself. It's also problematic for groups and creating sub-communities. I doesn't need to be massive either (I think you could retain the small community feel), maybe 10x bigger.
There's several factors that lead to this I think, there's some design issue with the groups, and also the moderation doesn't scale. I'm not a big fan of the benevolent dictator model, it can work to some extend but it's not super sustainable (what if the dictator is tired ?). Moderation should also be based on rules, not on personal appreciation.
I think being text-only is also a somewhat sub-optimal solution, what's so wrong about art or photography that they need to be second-class citizen on the platform ? I think the solution for images taking over text posts is rather giving each media type their own place to live so one doesn't cannibalize the other.
I've actually experimented with all of this myself.
The big reasons for excluding media are hosting/storage requirements and because images/videos are, on average, worse at promoting thoughtful discussion. That’s not to say you can’t have such conversations, but it’s a lot harder. Look at any of the pic/video-dominated subreddits, they tend to have far more one-liner comments (or just GIFs as comments) than one which focuses on text.
If a spiritual successor allows for media uploads, it needs to be done in such a way that it promotes discussion, rather than just becoming a dumping ground for memes and ragebait.
I agree you'd have to be careful with the rules and design, e.g. I would probably not allow short videos, NSFW content, promotion of any kind (I was checking oddsrabbit earlier, there's a bunch of onlyfans spam...).
That said I'm not sure "thoughtful discussion" should be the sole aim of a plateform. On Flickr you can post a photo, and getting a star from a photographer you like is all you need to be satisfied.
Thoughtful interaction then? But ultimately you don’t want it to degrade into a meme fest. I think the easiest rule for a site with pictures would be (at least initially) limiting it to pictures taken by the user; nothing third-party.
Yeah a precedent to look at is maybe art focused platform where people posts their own stuff and help each other, or tumblr where curation of particular aesthetics is valued (not sure how that worked).
I'm a software developer and I could help build such a thing. And the idea is interesting to me. But I would not want to be responsible for maintaining it, except through occasional pull requests. I'm not worried about unpaid work, but I don't want to on call in the evening or weekends to put out fires. I've already done enough of that shit in my life.
I'd be interested in participating in the design too, but you can't design such a site with just developers or people who are trying to fix what's wrong with reddit or lemmy. Because it's hard to anticipate the unintended consequences and people like me haven't done anything like real market research.
It seems like there are two main problems that happen to social media sites:
So it seems like the simplest strategies are to keep it small and build a system of trust with the users. Either with some kind of real id thing (I know, that's awful) or an invite system like tildes has.
I have an interest in the formula being further developed with the goal being almost exclusively helping this space be one in which more people can feel comfortable in community with each other, because it makes me sad when interesting people with interesting things to say feel the need to leave. As others have written, people rub each other wrong, so that has to be a group effort all the way. I don't think we should be looking for technological solutions with complex moderation paradigms, and I don't believe moderation can be fully crowdsourced (I also didn't believe this back on reddit or stack exchange).
Some people seem to think this isn't worth the effort. All I want to say is that it's easy to not care when we aren't the ones who will benefit. It's easy to not make any effort to engage in any real discussion about the subject and to deride the attempts of those who do. I get it. I'm fine with Tildes the way it is, too.
I much like your goal but I'm not sure if there's anything to do other than to tell people "hey its OK to disagree as humans" or "disagreement doesn't necessarily mean they invalidate your experience or the sole purpose of their disagreement is to invalidate your experience".
Interesting people at least those I met IRL also tends to have strong opinions and they tend to love defending their opinions. I think it is pretty natural for an strongly opinionated interesting person to engage in long rational debates and coming to terms in the end that there are too many other intelligent people not agreeing with their take. That's something you don't often see in a friend group, like usually there are only a few strong opinionated people and you'll rarely get a massive amount of disagreement on something you believe to be a first principles, fundamental "truth".
Of course if anyone else do have an idea to help people get along I'm all ears.
If there's a community effort to build a successor, I'm happy to help and contribute on the infra and tech stack decisions as well as UX. I do a lot of UX at work and its a personal hobby of mine.
On the side, I've been working on my own vision of a Reddit-like forum for a while now. It's definitely not a successor to Tildes but shares the same vision as Tildes - a place for great discussions, less engagement bait, not owned by large corporate, and intentional UX. Some screenshots in the details below.
A few points about IndieGamesCafe
Yes. As long as it was just Tildes but they implemented all the features that were already planned from the start and nothing more.
Is there some easy way to see what that set of features was? Im curious what's "missing".
https://docs.tildes.net/future-plans
Thank you, really interesting.
Given this was the future plans, I can see why there would be hesitancy in creating a system like this. I was under the impression that the moderation on Tildes is working fairly well, and something like this has rather uncertain gains. But I'm at best a light user, I probably don't have a good idea of the motivation for something like this.
I wonder about possibly something that lives on top of tildes. Like a userscript, or even a full facade that proxies requests, that would allow for the sort of collaborative filtering that a subset of users wants. It would scratch the itch of people who want a more censored experience, while not extending that censorship to people who want the full tildes experience. I’d be interested in helping facilitate something like this.
Userscripts and extensions are already a thing, including filtering users. They are talked about extensively in the filtering topic from a few weeks ago and listed in the documentation. They
In the case of filtering blocking people they are not a solution. Even for the people requesting it they are often a last resort. Extensions and userscripts can offer other neat functionality that is missing, so I still recommend you try them out I guess. But that is sort of besides the point.
"a more censored experience" is not what most people are after. in general Censorship implies suppression of speech, communication, etc. Which, technically is what happens when things are moderated in the absolute sense. But in practice equating moderation with censorship attaches a severity to the latter that frankly is unnecessary and ignores the reality of how online communities work.
Every time I hear people call moderation censorship I can't help but feel that it is a slap in the face of people actually dealing with government censorship.
Any online community will need moderation or they will just be overrun by all sorts of spam, bots, assholes, more assholes, etc, etc. The question is only how much moderation do you want/need and where do you focus. On.
This is really the crux of what I’m taking about. As it turns out, different users on this site have entirely different requirements for how much moderation they want/need. I think there’s a way to accommodate all the users here.
I’m aware of the current user scripts for removing users. I’m talking about something a bit more granular, at the post or comment level, with something more distributed. I’m envisioning people being able to subscribe to and contribute to moderation lists, so for example maybe I and some other people get triggered by negative discussions of trans rights, or abstract art, or women’s issues (the recent hot button topics I think) — we all join the same list, and any one person blocking a comment would then either collapse or even remove that comment from everyone else’s experience of the site.
Personally, I’m never going to use such a thing. But, if it makes the experience of tildes for other people pleasant enough that they stay and continue contributing then making it exist would be a win for me.
I am not much of a software developer/ engineer so I can help with thr build of a replacement but I'd be happy to contribute some funding to start this up
Two things hold me back from doing so.
I'm not a programmer and I live in a country where online safety legislation would shoot such a website down if I hosted it here.