I'm not ready to let this place go
With the announcement of Tildes maintenance mode, it's finally official. Tildes has an expiration date. We don't know when it'll be, but we'll surely know when it's passed. I... I don't want to go. I love this place. I love the people on it.
I got here after Rexit, like many of my peers, because reddit was my home online. I participated in discussions. I spent so much time there. I met my husband. It was my little corner of the internet, because it had exactly what I wanted and nothing else.
All that's gone now. When Apollo shut down, I deleted my account out of protest. I regret that now. People pointed me here, to Tildes, and for a moment, just a moment I could smell the musty carpet of the first websites I was ever on. This was it. This was it. A tiny forum with just enough modern convenience to tolerate using it, full of people who were interesting, discussions that were respectful, little to no drama, and a minor legend of the former web at the top, generally content with ruling as a benevolent dictator.
I posted. I participated in discussions. I had such a grand time talking to people, Season One of the Minecraft server will forever be in my heart as the "golden days" of it all, if I had to look back. I check this place religiously. It's in my favourites bar. I still post. I still comment. I still like the people. It's small enough that I can go "hey, there they are!" when I see Creesch or Bauke or Tea. For the first time in a long time I could call a communal web space my... home. It's cheesy. I know.
And now I hear that it's supposed to end? That the experiment has run its course, that sooner or later, but probably sooner than I'd like, it'll all be gone? That I have to pack up all my shit again and find a new place, a new community? What a sick joke, I say, with metaphorical tears in my eyes, because getting mad is at least something. Getting mad is more than removing the stupid bookmark and forgetting about this place like I forgot about LiveJournal, about MySpace, about Blogger, about fucking Ello.
I don't want to go. And I know nobody's asking me to go. But everyone expects everyone else to go at some point. And even though none of you actually know me, truly know me, I still feel like we're familiar. We have tiny, tenuous, brittle relationships that could snap at any point, be it from hostility or apathy. I know that none of this is real, but god damn it, I liked it.
Now you'll say, oh god, Delphi, shut up, this is a forum, it's not that deep, and you're right, so damn right, I couldn't agree more, none of you should mean anything to me, I have friends, I have a life, I have people who love me out there, for real, I shouldn't care about this, but then tell me, why do I have tears in my eyes?
What's the point of this post? Catharsis? Maybe? I didn't expect to feel this way about a little corner of the internet that's sometimes a little snobbish, sometimes a little too high on its own farts, sometimes a little too elitist, but that's where I'm at.
I don't want to let this place go. But I also know that I won't be the last one here.
So if this is the last time I see some of you, I don't blame you. Just know you were part of my life, and that I quite liked that part.
—-
A little edit after crying it out: You’re all right. I hope that Tildes won’t change. I certainly won’t, I’ll stay here, and I hope we’ll have many more years together. This entire thing just dredged up memories of losing online spaces before, and… well, you can imagine the rest. Love y’all.
I don't really feel like anything changed or any new information was released in the post the other day. Like the site hasn't been updated in forever, which is fine, and Deimos is relatively hands off, which is fine, and we've just been riding on the fuel left in the tank for a while now, which is also fine.
I mean I love this site, but I also don't feel like anything has changed unless we let it? Or unless the lack of any future features is unbearable and at complete odds with your preference (which is also, also fine!). Not knocking you directly, @delphi, but I don't really get the doom and gloom of a few of these posts the last day or so.
Like to the point where I feel like I'm missing something? A community isn't in the features, it's in the people. And if the people decide to stick around, then there's always going to be a community...
I also don't understand why everyone is acting so melodramatic. The feature requests weren't going to add much value to the site, and likely intended to target other users, right or wrong, so the community got told to knock it off, buckle up, and figure it out ourselves.
If people want to leave over that, fine, but I think it's counterproductive to the health of the community to do so. If anything, in doing so the "expiration" comes nearer. There is no perfect community for everyone, and Tildes is one of the best options we have. Sometimes the right answer is to disengage instead of continually working up frustrations. Take a break, lurk for a few months, take care of your mental health however you see fit, but don't stop fighting the good fight.
I made the analogy in the other thread, but I really do see this place as a kind of digital pub after work. Sometimes I just have a drink, sometimes I chat with people. The owner is responsible for the pub being open and clean, and to occassionally tell some of the patrons (me included) to knock it off. For particularly nasty people, they get trespassed.
You can't expect anything from the owner beyond that, because tech can't save you from people being people. Communities police themselves. I think we have a pretty good community. It's not perfect and lts not one that agrees on everything (even really important stuff), but we disagree politely, try to steelman each other wherever possible, apologise, and disengage when things grts heated.
Same. I do hope @Deimos clarifies what he means by this place "sunsetting," because clearly not everyone had the same reading of it. I read it as "business as usual, but in case you didn't notice, I'm no longer motivated to improve it." I gave up on this place being anything close to a Reddit replacement like 5 years ago, and I've been fine with that. Here's to another 5 years!
Edit: Just found a new comment that supports our reading of the message:
For me the more worrying part is that emailing for invites is no longer an option now. It's understandable due to LLM but then there has to be an alternative right? I could understand if the plan is just to wait till the storm passes or till there being new LLM-specific filters or something. But not only that, now users are not given new invite codes either. How to interpret that as other than closing the tap?
I really hope nothing changes. I really do, but... I mean, at least, before I could pretend. Now we all know. It feels like the head of the AV club looking into the clubhouse and going like "oh, you guys are still here? well, lock up when you leave". Yeah, we can stay as long as we like, but the vibes have changed.
Heck, I'm emotional. I might delete this post tomorrow. It's not exactly great for the digital footprint to get mad over a guy not-even shutting down a forum I liked.
But fuck, man. I don't want to find a new community again.
Don't want to invalidate your feelings, but would it make you feel better to flip the script in your head a little? We're used to things always updating and changing, and then things were dead if they stopped. That was never a healthy way of interacting with stuff. Tildes is solved, all of the features that were needed are done. Just like you might've bought Super Mario 64. There were no more updates, it was done. That was a good thing. You could play the game for 2 hours or 50, up to you.
Tildes won't get enshitified, add the downvote button, or anything that could potentially upend the community. Development is over, and now it lives or dies based on what kind of community it nurtures.
I like that. That’s a good way to see it.
I get that. I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be dismissive of how you feel at all. I guess we really don't know what the future holds for tildes. I'm happy for the time I've had here and any further time I get along with it :)
I don’t really see it as any different than Craigslist. When was the last time Craigslist had an update?
Is what it is. The population of users has, somehow or another, gone up, not down over the years, anyhow.
People always complain about “enshittification” and companies chasing growth. Tildes is doing nothing and that’s okay.
The site will only die when a combination of two things happen: the user base dwindles to being close to dead, and the funds dry up.
it feels like there's a small subset who didn't read or maybe comprehend the post. Tildes is so simple and perfect as it is.
Realistically, with the cost of the site, the funds shouldn't ever really dry up. We can take in pop cans to fund this thing. :)
Not to be a downer, and I’m mostly a lurker, but I didn’t get the impression at all that Tildes is anywhere near closing its doors. I don’t understand everyone else speaking about the most recent meta-conversations as foreshadowing the site shutting down. As far as I can tell, some folks are frustrated with some of the discourse recently (or maybe more than recently) and are publicly announcing their leaving because some aspects of the site are not to their liking in terms of moderation style. That’s certainly within their right. But it’s been a little more than topical, and I think Deimos just wanted to go on record and say nothing's going to change. It didn’t feel like he was announcing the end of the site. Yeah, if this place ends up going under I’ll miss it. I’m certainly not as involved as many of you, so it’s not the same for me, I acknowledge that. But I don’t personally understand these existential responses.
I think it's just been a while since there was drama that took over the site for a few days. Combine that with the end-of-summer-break vibe in God's post and it probably has some people feeling a little rattled. I'm not sure why that's the reaction, but it's nice to know that people really care about this place.
Come to think of it, I don't know if we've had this level of drama since the great influx of '23, so this might be some of y'all's first rodeo. This has happened several times before, and almost always for the same reason. Here's to hoping that people learn from it so the next big drama can be about something completely different.
I joined in 2021 and this is the first time I’ve seen a topic have such a strong presence. Where were having the same discussions over the course of several days.
tildes isnt going anywhere and these downer posts do nothing to support the community. If I could, I'd simply remove them all.
I’d consider them more noise than downer.
I understand the sentiment people have, but having multiple topics about people leaving probably does more to amplify people leaving instead of finding a solution or an alternative.
yeah, noise too. its all so silly.
The only thing I want to know is if this place does shut down does everything remain in place or is it down down. Cause I was cataloguing stuff here.
Honestly the way it reads is that it's simply just here as it is for however long is feasible. I wouldn't use this to catalog anything, just like any other website.
This isn't really related to the OP, but I'd encourage you to explore other methods of cataloguing with something you have control over. For example, I use Obsidian combined with Syncthing. It lets me combine notes across all of my devices, so I can leave a note at any time.
For a while, I've been trying to organize my notes into different folders, but it ends up just getting messy. Since... last night... I've been using my new Pebble Index to write a note under my
Daily Notesfolder, with today's date as the filename. The jury is still out on how helpful it will be, but so far it seems nice.Obsidian/Syncthing is effectively the Notes app on Apple Products right?
I would like to figure out a way to save some of the writings on movies I’ve made here but I’m not techy enough for that.
Yes, likely so. I don't have apple devices so a lot of my things aren't synced together like iPhone/MacOS. Obsidian is just a text editor with support for formatting like bold, italics, lists, tables, etc.
Would you be interested in a script to back up your profile, to open in a software like Excel? I'd be pretty easy to write - maybe other users would want something like that.
I would 100% appreciate something like this. I’d love to be able to archive all that I’ve written here.
Yes I would like something like that
Hey Delphi
I'm one of those members with the downer comments this week. I'm sorry, to you and everyone affected by the overall mood I have contributed to. I'm not trying to be negative, and I have absolutely no complaints about how Deimos has been running things, nor am I clamoring for enshittifying or radically changing how things work: I've made downer comments because I don't know how to deal with my emotions about seeing members fighting, seeing people leave, the big announcement, and then the news (to me) that code pull requests have not been accepted, and new users not getting invite codes. I don't know how else to interpret the tea leaves other than "I am taking up space/time/money/energy and maybe it's better if I leave".
I'm not ready to go either. This is my home.
One thing I hadn't considered, that Deimos said in a recent comment, is how much work answering request emails had become due to LLM and bad faith actors. Perhaps it's not that we're closing the doors, it's that it's being more closely monitored in tough times. (I would like clarification on this point but that's just me being needy )
There was also an old regular who was banned and apparently still causing problems: thing is, as a guest here having a good time, I really have no idea how much work is being done, if Deimos is tired of it all, the struggles of thankless work not just keeping the lights on but keeping the community safe , plus being blamed for everything.
Deimos has been very behind the scenes this whole time. I hope he has an alt that we interact with more often and that he gets to enjoy the community as well.
Want to stay together, Delphi? Maybe we could shift our thinking a little as well and consider each other not as users (users want the record to be correct or for others to be in agreement with on everything), but as actual friends: in real life, sometimes friendship means putting up with each other on a touchy subject , or deciding to not ruffle feathers today because we know they're going through a hard time. We won't tolerate outright hate, but maybe I can do a better job of celebrating differences. I could always be curious rather than judgemental, but I also need to remember to be more " please ignore if this is costing you energy ".
Sorry for the rambling
To go against the grain, I hope that we as a community are still able to change a little wherever it is needed. I must sound like a broken record by now. But the post of Deimos came after two other posts where people asked for features which, while in itself maybe not a good idea, had a reason for the request behind them.
Tildes as a technical platform isn't changing. But as a community, we do need to be aware of others and not just see it from our selfish personal level of "I don't things to change because I like it now" while ignoring issues others are having.
If people refuse to change it is stagnation and that is a recipe for what you fear for.
To be clear, I also would like Tildes to stick around for a long time. But at the same time there are always going to be issues and I do think that to some degree many people got all hung up on the the technical aspect while not really listening to the current problems being raised.