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Is there an estimate of when sub-tildes are going to start being added?
There was talk a while back about the different sections of tildes getting broken down further into subsections. Is this still the plan?
Does tildes even have a user base large enough for it to be worthwhile?
Right now? Certainly not.
Groups need to feel crowded and messy before sub-groups are required. I'd argue that for the most part groups are still sparse and lacking in content.
There aren't any particular plans. We don't need them yet, and the site's activity hasn't really been increasing significantly lately, so it probably won't change unless we get a big influx of users again at some point.
Ok, so I have a dumb question; can I just post a ton of crap about stuff I'm into, tag it with the generic tags (and others) and it's allowed? Like If I like The Division 2 or want to post stories from where I live, I could post 2-3 stories in a day and not get any flak for it? I just didn't want to flood everyone's Tildes page with my crap on account of the site inactivity.
Try a few out and see if anyone seems interested. It's fine to submit things about individual games or whatever you want, but there's not much purpose in posting repeatedly about a subject that nobody else is interested in.
Any thoughts on adding a ~local or something like that, perhaps as the first use case for sub-tildes?
Right now, one of the few things I still use reddit for is to be an aggregator of local news / happenings. There's 3 separate Seattle subs (loooong story), they're all cesspits to varying degrees, and yet they're the best place I've found for local-interest-only stories like this weekend's "UW graduation is happening, and also there's major highway construction, so prepare for traffic to be a nightmare".
I would love for Tildes to eventually fill that gap, and reduce my reddit usage to shitposting in the live Seahawks game threads (which obviously doesn't belong on Tildes at any point).
It's definitely possible, and I think the hierarchy will be especially good for it. In the past I remember talking about having groups like this under something like ~geo.
That sort of hyper-local group probably won't be feasible for a very long time though (or maybe even ever). Even on reddit, it took a very long time before location-based groups for anything except the very largest (and "tech-heavy") cities started to get much activity at all. Even /r/Seattle, for a large technological city, was still very dead and mostly low-quality posts in 2011, when reddit was 5 years old and had a lot of traffic overall.
It will be a difficult type of group to get started, and I don't know if Tildes will ever be "general-interest" enough for it to happen. It really only started to work on reddit once the site was full of funny pictures and other things that can appeal to everyone, because that started to reach a critical mass of users to be able to fill the local subreddits too.
The way things are headed, your local news will probably be in ~news.usa.wa.seattle. Of course, that's a long way off: first there'll be ~news.usa, then there'll be ~news.usa.wa, and then, eventually, there'll be ~news.usa.wa.seattle.
FWIW news subs are often different than casual local subs. A place for local news is great, but it can be overly specific if a community is too small to support both "local news" and "local other stuff."
~Local seems a reasonable idea for including questions, asking for recommendations, and starting more general discussions about local culture. Obv those could also happen in the ~news equivalent, but users could also be annoyed with such things as off-topic for a news space.
Well, @spit-evil-olive-tips asked about "an aggregator of local news / happenings" and "local-interest-only stories". That looks like news to me.
What you're asking for is something different. You want a localised chat group. Maybe that could fall under ~talk. There have previously been suggestions for ~world and ~geo. Maybe we could have a ~talk.world or ~talk.geo or ~talk.local sub-group.
Why aren't users allowed to create tildes?
because there's not enough activity to warrant it. What kind of subgroup are you thinking about?
Just creating them in general. People like surprising things. Not allowing people to create tildes can really limit the community.
You can see Deimos's reasoning here in the docs.
I'd recommend reading it over because it answers quite a few questions like this.
It'd be complete chaos if people were allowed to make their own groups. Tildes would be self-engulfed in completely pointless meta-commentary debating the merits & downsides of a specific hierarchy until the end of time. Have you seen the arguments people have had around group & tag structures? It's bad enough as it is currently.
The tildes hierarchy (when/if it gets one) seems to based more along the lines of the old Usenet groups rather than subreddits.