Tildes within a tildes
This is an idea I've had for awhile, I wanted to have it written down somewhere for future reference. This would likely be a substantial undertaking, but I haven't seen much discussion on the concept.
What if Tildes was able to have internal tildes? We would be able to 'start a tildes group' and have all~group.tag discussions under it. You could invite members to your ~group, and only those members could vote/comment/see on the internal group that they are part of.
This would make it so we can grow tildes, keep it small, and have personal obsessions and ideas. For example, I run a few discords that are part of nascent old/antique ideologies and philosophies, and we have been looking to move off of Discord (horrible for conversations and debates). I realize we could start our own forum or Tildes server, but the idea of tilde branches would be interesting to see play out in practice. I'm sure this has already been brought up, and will likely never happen, but I would love thoughts on the matter if you have them. This would likely be a large undertaking and I haven't really peeked at Tildes source since launch, so I'm not sure how the structure is these days.
If I understand you correctly, I think the answer to your question is probably no
This was my initial thought as well, it was more of a thought experiment or hopeful discussion on the ramifications.
Sounds like reddit. Which I think is what we're trying to get away from here, where each subreddit is a small fiefdom ruled by essentially dictators (I say this as a mod of several subs).
I do wish there were more groups or a way to petition for a new ~group. But once created, it's entirely open to anyone to view or post. No one single person or group owns it.
Unfortunately, that means no curated areas. A group like AskHistorians on reddit which is highly moderated to ensure high quality wouldn't exist here. But that's OK, since it exists over there. This doesn't have to be a reddit clone, right?
I don't know if this has changed (likely has), but I remember back when the idea of tildes was pitched that group activity (not just comments and posts, but voting activity and other "passive" actions so lurkers aren't ignored) would be eventually lead to some this "merit based" power user community in order to counter Eternal September. This idea was that a vote from a regular who's saavy to the community norms would matter more than a newcomer who would likely be less so, so a group wouldn't be "flooded" in a way that r/all would invade the culture of some poor small sub that hit the front page.
This would apparently grant privileges up to even the ability to moderate if desired. So in theory this would let other savvy users be able to keep potential dictators in check, since no one person has "total" control over a community (except for admins, obviously).
Maybe it turned out to not work that well after more thinking, but this idea of decentralized moderation was one of the concepts that made me interested in the future of this site.
not necessarily, no. But I don't hate the idea of being able to have private groups (if I'm understanding the OP correctly). Unlike reddit, Tildes is a very lightweight site with zero ads and various design choices that make it less prone to some of the vitriol we all knew too well over yonder. I think Tildes is still much too small for it to be practical as of now, but it's interesting food for thought as it grows.
The merit based user, having greater vote weight/privileges, idea is a copy of what eventually killed Digg.
I do.
If you want a members-only club, go to facebook and make one.
I wasn't around during that time, but I have heard and read extensively about it. From what I understand, the weight of a power user was too strong and lead to deals where a tiny minoirity would be able to control the front page.
This can be solved very simply by a cap on vote weight. Maybe, perhaps 3:1 given the current site, increasing as the site size grows. And any users who choose moderator level being unable to vote on groups they moderate. Tildes is in a much better place to experiment with that than throwing such a feature into production years after launching a popular public site.
with potentially online only friends, on a site where you need to share more personal information than desired for the ability to do what I'm doing right here? That seems to create more problems than it solves (not to mention facebooks' own post system isn't that great for discussion either; it's even worse laid out than classic style linear forums).
I don't quite understand the strong opposition. If there were private groups, we'd never know about them unless we happen to want to create one with the exact name. It wouldn't affect us.
It can also be solved by keeping 1 person = 1 vote. I'm not seeing the benefit of someone that is more active getting to have a greater say in things.
The point being made is that segmenting out a section of tildes to be private to only those that some mod/superuser elects to let in isn't how tildes is/was made. Facebook was just an example, you can make the same thing on Reddit with a private sub. The opposition is private groups create echo-chambers and copy things done elsewhere, specifically reddit, that aren't desired here.
in my experience, I have yet to see it solved outside of giving all control to moderators and essentially working 24/7 to ensure rulebreakers have low quality/malicious content removed. Not feasible on a public forum (and prone to the opposite problems of forming an insular filter bubble hostile to newcomer. i.e. gatekeeping).
That's the primary inspiration for my comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
It's not the most pressing issue on the internet, but I've seen the issue over decades wash over quality niche or special interests communities into the usual low quality mush the "popular internet" is known for. And one of the interesting things I heard in that pitch long ago was that they had plans to take this into account. So I was merely intrigued by the concept.
I don't want Tildes to become the same if it ever opens up, but I don't think it's sustainable to keep the site invite-only for years and years on end to prevent growth. It'll eventually need to run into this or fizzle out.
Reddit wasn't made to support comments at all, and Facebook was originally just a college message board. I don't see private communities going against the spirit of this community, since I don't personally think of Tildes as a site trying to be "open for everyone". (quite the contrary, ha) Nor a site where we see 100% of every action taking place.
These groups don't tend to be large ones (outside of private groups set up as some kind of patreon incentive). I wouldn't call a group of a dozen people who want to talk within themselves an "echo chamber" per se. No more so than a group of friends hanging out at the park.
But I guess at this point we're arguing in circles over a really frivolous problem. People who really want to do this can spin the GitHub source, buy a domain, and host their own "echo chamber" in hours if they have the right experience (or patience to learn the steps. I'm not particularly a web dev but I have hosted a few websites). I'd just rather save them the effort and be accommodating.
And in a cynical stance: I'd rather keep potential ne'er do wells under the watch of Deimos than have them spinoff a "Voat" equivalent and have them roam free. At least if they are outcasted first, there'd be less leverage to blame Tildes for any potential offshoots.
Why wouldn't it be sustainable? The very definition of sustainability is counter to constant growth and a lack of constant growth does not mean it'll fizzle out. Like many other sites, tildes is a link aggregator and discussion site. The only way for tildes to fizzle out due to lack of constant growth would be if the news stopped altogether. Unless Diemos wants to turn a profit on tildes, growth isn't a requirement.
A lot of things weren't available, ideas in the minds of anyone, or even technically possible when reddit was founded 16 years ago, so I don't see how it's comparable.
Echo-chamber groups are just as large as any other, be it fan sites/subs that decry any conversation against the band/artist/game, or political places like /r/conservative, the various subs/sites dedicated to Trump, to conspiracy, antivax, or religious/non-religious groups. A dozen people that want to talk within themselves need a discord server, not a private sub-tildes.
And we come full circle to the OP of this topic:
But if this site believes that they should just stay on a flawed platform instead of at least considering the option to see if it can accomodate, then so be it. I personally hated hearing that response over in reddit when I spent years looking for alternative (including now. Tildes still has lacks some social and technical features to make it truly release me from lurking Reddit), so it's unfortunate to hear in a site made to try and improve upon current internet discourse.
The alternative would be a place that already has it or to make your own instead of trying to change a site to suit a niche need. Facebook, reddit, google group, tildes instance, or one of a dozen other packaged forum or nested comment blog setups available after a couple of clicks.
There have been a lot of fascinating ideas thrown around about this sort of moderation but I don't think anyone has actually stepped up and attempted to implement them. It would be a lot of work.
Right. I haven't kept up too much with the changelog, so I'm not quite sure what features are currently high priority. This certainly is one of those "lots of work, but not urgent" features given the current culture of the site.
The merit thing is from one of my old rants, for context. It's an attempt to make votes into something useful rather than having them remain pointless counters that tickle ape brains. :P
There has been some work into making the site self-hostable though. For example: https://github.com/themotte/tildes. Would be cool if there were more sites based on Tildes. I wish I had some time to go over the code base to contribute towards that purpose.
Tildes is completely self-hostable right now. The Ansible scripts in the official repo are exactly the same as the ones I use to set up the production server (and the dev version inside a virtual machine). There are a few simple manual steps you need to do, and you'd need to do a search/replace inside the code to replace the site name/domain in various places, but that's about it.
It would be good to make some of this a little simpler and more configurable, but it wouldn't be hard at all for someone to set up their own site using the Tildes code.
The only thing that might be holding it back a bit is not having one simple
domain_name=x.y.zconfig line to change for the host name. File under 'sysadmin red flags' in my book as a default reaction. Everyone's wondering... what if I miss one somewhere? Do I have to check all of these files? Sounds like too much work!Compared to setting up phpBB, creating a Tildes instance is already a damn cakewalk. :P
Thanks for the update! 🤩 That's super cool!
So I guess it's just a matter of people learning about it.
I would love to add Tildes as an alternative to a discussion forum. Is it still not in the roadmap to federare Tildes with something like activity pub?.
I have no personal interest in federation, and won't ever work on that myself. Anyone else is welcome to use the Tildes code as a base to build a federated version though (as long as they open-source their work under AGPL too).
It'd be better to have a solid understanding of what a single Tildes 'node'/site is before federating it. If the trust stuff doesn't pan out, the federation won't matter. Tildes systems could change anytime Deimos gets a brainstorm, or some open source contributor drops a cool toy into the mix. Then the federation is broken by those changes, and it won't be supported.
Sometime down the line, however, we might end up with a rather interesting pile of 'what if we federated it' ideas to play with - informed by the actual development process and experiments we've yet to go through. The core Tildes code will mature and settle down into something that changes big things less often and that's the time to think about federation. The other projects adding federation on top won't be having such a bumpy ride with it.
Right now it's scope creep. Let's solve that moderation problem. We've had federated services since day one of the internet and they haven't helped us manage communities or make them healthy on long timelines or at scale. Federation is useful for resiliency or redundancy, sure, but it adds yet another layer to the trust/moderation issue - how do nodes trust each other? The problem's already hard enough.
Interesting points i agree.