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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am happy to help out if an effort was put forth further down the line and there was a need for a successor.
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.
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).
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
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.
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).