EDIT: Post-locked topic

I didn't get the chance to reply or explain myself, ironically, as I posted this topic last night and then woke up this morning to 42 comments this topic being locked.

In short, I didn't want to block swearing from Tildes, I just wanted to find out if there was a NSFW filter, as I had my first one pop up in the feed yesterday. Reddit and other sites allow you to block NSFW content from the get-go. And yes, it is the minority by far on Tildes.

As for the swearing, I don't know why I assumed that the NSFW would remove that, I must have been tired when posting this topic. (And yes, I know that this is the internet and it's filled with non-friendly content, so it is naive to expect otherwise, sadly.)

I guess it would just be nice to have a place where you can have both great quality posts (such as on Tildes), as well as the comments be free of some unnecessary, low-quality words. I think Twitter and others allow you to block some words or topics.

I apologise for @Deimos that he had to step in to bring the peace, I didn't mean for this to happen. And apologies to the community for bringing any unrest. This was never my intention.

Hi everyone, only been on Tildes for a few weeks now.

First off, I love the quality of the content and the community's camraderie.

The only question is whether there is a way to filter NSFW, adult or profane comments. There is such great content on here, with amazing contributors, but sometimes you just get the people who like to use profane language like it's an adjective, and it has no place in the topic or discussion. I know we can't block people, but is there a way of filtering out such content, comments, or users?

Hello!

Some of you may know that I have been developing an iOS client for Tildes.

I’ve seen other devs like @wababa and @talklittle also working on awesome apps, and have seen some discussion there around collaborating on some of the core parts (scraping the website, etc.).

I’ve also been in touch with @efraimbart, who is working on the awesome Everything protocol project.

I’m sure there are other devs out there that I haven’t seen, and this post is a call-out for all of you.

Until an API is available, any similar project will face the same initial blocker: needing to scrape the website for data.

Is there any interest from the community on collaborating on that part? For example, developing a public library that encapsulates all of the interactions with Tildes and any client can talk to with a consistent API. Or, even better, collaborating on an official API for Tildes (which is, of course, itself an open-source project).

To that end, I’ve released some of the code I use to accomplish this in Surfboard. Maybe it can help someone build an iOS client, or inspire some of us to build a more generic solution :D. It’s far from perfect or complete, and isn’t even an actual package you can just import and use at this time, but at the very least it documents many of the endpoints and interactions.

Have a great weekend :)

The legal discussion is not exactly the same as US politics. I would imagine that we have people who would like to follow it and people who prefer strongly to avoid it.

For example, today we had these two events and I didn't even look hard.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/barricades-go-up-around-fulton-county-courthouse-as-trump-indictment-looms

Superceding indictment filed in Florida documents case
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.85.0_1.pdf

I’ve just heard of the new BBS style forum for Gemini space and wondered if the properties of Tildes could adequately translate to Gemini space. In other words; could Tildes become accessible in Gemini space?

gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/

I’m also curious if there are other Gemini users here but that might be better off as a separate post on a different section of the site.

I've noticed a significant amount of mod actions taking place over the last few days, and quite a few locked topics, so I just wanted to offer some basic advice for all the new users to help prevent that from continuing, or getting worse.

Don't bring the bad habits you learned on reddit here to Tildes, please. Consider this a chance to start fresh.

It's okay to walk away from a disagreement here before it escalates into a heated argument. And when arguments happen, please don't resort to insulting the other person, as that just escalates things even further, and pollutes the atmosphere here. Not everyone who disagrees with you, or misinterprets your meaning or intent, is acting in bad faith. So try to assume good faith before responding. And if you can't do that, then just walk away. Take a breather. It's not the end of the world if you let someone else have the last word in a disagreement.

Don't use the Exemplary label (which many of you have recently unlocked the ability to use) as a "super-agree" between two people having an argument. It's not meant for picking a side. That's not what it's for. And if you do use it that way your ability to use Exemplary labels may be revoked.

And finally, try to be nice. Please. Don't be a jerk. As Eevee said in On a technicality (which I recommend everyone read, since it inspired some of the core philosophies behind Tildes):

There are some nice people in the world. I mean nice people, the sort I couldn’t describe myself as. People who are friends with everyone, who are somehow never involved in any argument, who seem content to spend their time drawing pictures of bumblebees on flowers that make everyone happy.

Those people are great to have around. You want to hold onto them as much as you can.

But people only have so much tolerance for jerkiness, and really nice people often have less tolerance than the rest of us.

The trouble with not ejecting a jerk — whether their shenanigans are deliberate or incidental — is that you allow the average jerkiness of the community to rise slightly. The higher it goes, the more likely it is that those really nice people will come around less often, or stop coming around at all. That, in turn, makes the average jerkiness rise even more, which teaches the original jerk that their behavior is acceptable and makes your community more appealing to other jerks. Meanwhile, more people at the nice end of the scale are drifting away.

And Tildes wants to hold on to those nice people.

I really like how Tildes encourages meaningful discussions and discourages "useless" noise.
But it leads to occasionally awkward situations where for example I ask a clarification question or whatever, get a wonderful reply that answers everything I'd like, but leaves me in a situation where I have nothing meaningful left to add to the conversation, yet still wanting to personally thank the other person for their reply.
Obviously I place my vote on the reply, but it still feels like i sort of ghost the other person. I'd like them to know that I appreciate their reply.

My suggestion would be a kind of "Thank you" function or tag that would be available exclusively to replies to ones comments, signifying ones personal gratitude (man, that sounds pretentious, but I can't think of a better way to phrase it. I'll just blame the fact that English isn't my native language...), maybe coupled with an automatic vote.
The receiver of a "Thank you" could then get a small one-time notification in their inbox.
The comment in question could theoretically also display the "thank you" status to the author, maybe after the vote count at the beginning like this: "10 votes and a thank you from Landhund"

What do you think?

Other than Exemplary, it might be useful for the ability to self label a comment. While in some sense it might be desirable for anyone posting a comment that falls under such a category, and is self aware, to simply refrain from posting, some of the boundaries for labels such as joke and off-topic can be rather fuzzy.

To me, AI is kind of its own thing. It's too creative to fall under ~tech, but it's not quite ~creative either. It's something brand new, and can't be stuffed into any of the already established categories.

Getting a reply to your comment or post on Reddit was always a double-edged sword, it could be a helpful reply or just someone saying "THIS." or commenting on your punctuation. On Tildes I feel much more certain that it's a well thought out reply every time I press the red link.

Thanks for being a great community and thanks to @Deimos for keeping the place civilized.

Sorry for seeming like a total idiot but I cannot find the process to change my text color when I type a message.
I checked this site and did some online research with the Markdown system itself which is new to me.
It appears that there is some kind of code insertion but it's unclear how to format.
So many of you are advanced computer users and I am just your traditional semi-fluent poster.
Any help would be appreciated.

Hello! Tildes newbie here. I wasn't sure if this is a bug or if it's working as intended, so I wanted to ask.

I unsubscribed from https://tildes.net/~sports but noticed that I still saw a post from ~sports.hockey in my home feed. It took me a while to figure out that I also had to go to each of the ~sports subgroups and unsubscribe from all of them too. Am I doing this correctly or did I miss a button somewhere that would let me unsubscribe from a parent group + all its subgroups in one go?

Thank you!

--- EDIT ---
Thanks to everyone for the replies! Confirmed that it's working as intended. And there is now a new post by cfabbro on Gitlab suggesting that "unsubscribe from all subgroups" be added as a new function.
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/802

I thought I could get away from "what [general topic or icebreaker that 99.9% of people have an opinion on]?" questions by filtering out ask.survey, but that seems not to be the case. There are still quite a few that are being considered just "Ask" questions, and not "surveys". Are these not being categorized very strictly, or is my notion of an ask.survey question mismatching that of the moderators of Tildes? Or is the ask/ask.survey distinction up to the poster, and not moderators?

I come to Tildes for articles on specific subjects, not ocean-wide-open questions that generate maximum participation froth. I might have to start filtering out ask as well (as ask.survey), but I'd rather not have to do that. If people ask "what [specific problem or specific topic]" questions, I'd be interested to read them.

Hey Tildes, with the renewed interest in the site, it got me thinking that we should hold a fundraiser for the not-for-profit company—which currently consists of just one person—that runs Tildes. It's overdue.

Disclaimer: These are my words as a member of the community. I haven't run this message by the admin before posting. I may have gotten some details wrong.

Where to donate

• GitHub Sponsors: https://github.com/sponsors/Deimos
• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/tildes

History

A bit of history: The site admin, @Deimos ran the first three years of the site working full-time on it, paid only by donations, plus a $5000 GitHub sponsor match one year, which I'm not even sure was fully achieved, or only just barely.

For that time period 2018-2020, a lowball salary as a software engineer with his experience would have been $100,000 USD per year not including benefits.

If he received $5000 in donations per year (almost certainly an overestimate for more recent years) plus the $5000 GitHub match for the first year—for the 5 years of Tildes' life, that's about $30,000.

The remaining opportunity cost of $270,000 was essentially paid out of pocket by himself, as a donation to the community. Plus remember there are server expenses, legal incorporation expenses, etc. And, y'know, rent.

In recent years he had to take a full-time job because the situation was, of course, unsustainable.

App?

I announced in April that a mobile app is under development. Originally, I was planning to take my time and release a first alpha by the end of 2023.

How about if we struck a deal: get the donation numbers up and I will devote more time to the app, as opposed to splitting my time between it and contract work and other projects.

What's the deal?

• 150 active donors combined on GitHub Sponsors and Patreon—I'll release an alpha by November.
  GOAL REACHED
• 300 active donors—I'll release an alpha by October.
  GOAL REACHED
• 500 active donors—I'll release an alpha by September.

The dollar amounts don't matter.

As of writing, we are at 46 active donors.

What's in it for you, though?

Feeling like I did a good deed, I guess? I'm not looking for a "slice of the pie," to be clear. In some sense I'd be matching your donations with my time, aka opportunity cost.

If I donate, can I bother the admin to work more on the site?

No.

Again, I haven't run this fundraiser by the admin. He will certainly keep his full-time employment for the foreseeable future, and will not magically have more hours in the day to devote to Tildes.

With a sustainable budget, though, a lot can happen in the future. Contracting out work to others, for example.

But the point of this fundraiser is more to make a small dent in the past debt we owe the admin, not making any promises whatsoever on the future of the site and how it's run.

Let's go, my fellow Tilderinos!

• GitHub Sponsors: https://github.com/sponsors/Deimos
• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/tildes

I'm coming as a Reddit refugee from the most recent API shenanigans. I've had a few people drop Gold on my comments over there, and it's a nice little 'oh hey, look at that' but it's never been really particularly important to me.

I just made a comment on here the other day that I put a little bit of thought and effort into - nothing crazy, but really did my best to try to explain my perspective - and every single 'exemplary' that post has gotten has meant more to me than any of the awards or upvotes I would get on Reddit. Just the simple act of including a small message of appreciation with exemplaries makes it mean so much more; every one of them has made me feel more and more like I did a good job and maybe actually informed some people, did some good in the world and all that.

I think we all know how redditors can be negative nancies looking for the next user to argue with, so I'm curious to know from the peeps that were here before the redditors: has the quality of conversation and sense of community changed (either positively or negatively) since us redditors showed up?

With Tildes having a distinctive approach to content and comments I found that I was missing an option.
Without calling out anyone someone posted a submission today that was simply an image collection. I did invite them to also post a bit more about as a comment starter, which they did.

I naturally gave their comment an upvote. But I found myself wanting to reward them a bit more for their recognition. I could go for exemplary as label, in fact I did. But I can't help but feel that I am missing a meta label that is positive but doesn't weigh as heavy.

How do other people look at this?

This thread is officially retired. Please see the new version to ask any new questions.

We have a lot of new users joining the site. Welcome to Tildes!

This thread is for you to ask any question you have about the site, from “what is the moderation philosophy?”to “what does that blue line next to some comments mean?” to “what is the general vibe like here?” Tildes has a lot of documentation, history, and embedded social norms that can be daunting or opaque at first glance, so here’s your opportunity to get help with anything you need.

Questions about anything and everything are fair game. Follow-up questions are encouraged! No question is too simple.

Also, a quick note: the only person who can speak in any official capacity on Tildes is our admin @Deimos. Everyone answering who is NOT him is just a helpful community member!

EDIT: To be clear, is perfectly okay to ask any question — even if you think it’s been asked before, or even if you didn’t search for an answer beforehand. There are an overwhelming number of comments here to sift through, so don’t worry about trying to read all of them. Just ask away, and someone will answer you!

I've noticed that there are primarily text posts with some links thrown in, and I do like the "real" conversation that it brings, instead of the shitposting that ends up all over Reddit.

I was curious, though, if there were any plans to add a ~pics or something similar. I know the goal of Tildes isn't to be a true Reddit replacement of course, but I wasn't sure whether image boards were planned or were being left out to help encourage actual discussion.

The Reddit company is screwing up and upsetting a lot of their "power users" and mods. A lot of people are fed up with Reddit, and are possibly ready to move on to a new platform.

Is Tildes that platform? I've lurked here for most of Tildes' life, and from that, my impression is that Tildes does not especially want to replace Reddit. A lot of people here like the small, intimate atmosphere. I've even noticed a bit of derision toward Reddit's lowbrow appeal.

The reason I ask is because there are communities on Reddit that I don't want to see die. /r/Permaculture and /r/composting are some of my favorite places. I've gotten to know quite a few people who also frequent those places and I've come to enjoy the tone of conversations there.

But this seems like an important question for Tildes to answer not just for my sake. Reddit is full of niche communities like this. If they have to go somewhere suddenly (and I realize that this is a big "if"), where do they go? I know that they technically can't come here suddenly--slowing growth is one of Tildes' features. But if Reddit's niche communities decided to move here, would you welcome them? I'm interested in what you, personally, think, as well as how you think Tildes as a whole would handle this.

P.S. I'm also sorta asking for permission to invite /r/Permaculture and /r/composting over here. I like this website, but I'm just a lurker, and don't feel like I'm part of the Tildes community. It feels super presumptuous to invite my friends over here without asking. But I think the wider question is more important. Do you, and does Tildes, want Reddit's 'refugee' niche interest communities?

Edit: Thank you all for the excellent responses! I don't have time now to respond individually, but I really appreciate the thought so many of you have put into your replies. This will help a lot in considering how to proceed over on Reddit.

I understand there are no plans to develop an official app, which is understandable to me as that would require a lot of time and resources for a project like this.

But it's clear that there are lots of devs eager to chime in and create an app by themselves, just like they did for Reddit. There's even one iOS app already in progress, although it relies on HTML parsing to retrieve the data obviously.

So is there any official stance on this? Why not publish the API and let the community do its magic? Any thoughts?

Howdy everyone! In talklittle's fundraiser I pledged I would fix all outstanding issues of Tildes ReExtended before 2023 is over should we reach 200 donors. Well the 200 donors mark was hit pretty quickly, so after over a year of inactivity I've gotten back to it and brought Tildes ReExtended up to speed again.

Most of the work so far has been on getting the codebase up to par with my current preferences, but there is also a new feature and some bug fixes. Namely: the long-awaited Hide Topics feature with 4 different ways of selecting topics to automatically hide. The content scripts will run as soon as the HTML is available, meaning there should be less stuff popping in or out, the Hide Votes was also fixed so it now hides the correct votes again (yay edge cases Edit: I just noticed another edge case doesn't work :^) fuck). And also the extension is about 3.5 times smaller in size now (245KB -> 70KB). :D

If you don't know what Tildes ReExtended is, it's basically the Tildes equivalent of the Reddit Enhancement Suite extension. Commonly requested features that can be implemented client-side (like the Hide Votes feature) and quality of life utilities like the Jump To New Comment and Back To Top buttons.

Hope you like it!

• Mozilla Addons
• Chrome Web Store

If you're new to Tildes and like what you see, please consider donating! Tildes is a non-profit community site driven by its users' interests and any amount of support ensures it can keep going. Thank you! 💖

Unless I'm missing something, it seems if I subscribe to parent group but not its subgroups, the topics from subgroups still show anyway. Back when they were just tags at least I can use filter but that doesn't work anymore. Is it just me or isn't that the opposite effect we'd expect from subgroups?

Edit: Everyone explained that it's a bug. I'll just need to be patient then.

Install from here: Wide Tildes on UserStyles.world

Features

• Multiple columns on list pages
• Wider site on all pages

Source

@-moz-document domain("tildes.net") {
header#site-header {
    width: 97vw;
}

.topic-listing li {
    break-inside: avoid-column;    
}

.topic-listing {
    column-width: 25em;
}

.topic-text-excerpt {
    display: none;
}
}

See this image.

Which groups are unsubscribed? All of the ~sports.X groups are unsubscribed, but american_football, basketball, football, and motorsports have been visited.

The link-visited colour set by a.link-group:visited is taking precedence over the default colour otherwise set by .group-list-item-not-subscribed a.link-group, hiding the colour change associated with -not-subscribed. This is particularly troublesome when unsubscribing from a group, since one must go to the group's page – visiting the link – in order to unsubscribe.

With the introduction of the new groups, I now, for the first time, have unsubscribed from some groups here on Tildes. I've been subscribed to the fire hose feed in my feed reader, but I'd love to get a feed that is personalized with only my subscriptions. Does this exist? If not, could it?

At the suggestion of a certain heathen who shall remain unnamed. I'm tossing up a quick and dirty comment (and post text) formatting guide. There is a formatting guide in the docs/wiki with a link just above the comment box, but it can be a bit much to digest.

*italics*
**bold**
~~strikethrough~~
[Text goes here](URL goes here)
<small>small text</small> 
<sub>subscript</sub>
<sup>superscript</sup>
# headline
`code which removes the formatting and makes it look like this block`
* bulleted
* lists
1. and
1. numbered
1. lists

Spoilers is a bit more complicated, the <details> start and end </details> is required, but the <summary> start and end </summary> is not unless you want text in the summary or you want the summary to be blank.

<details>
<summary>Summary text!</summary>

Body text inside spoiler!
</details>

Three underscores (or dashes, but dashes require an extra line) in a row on their own line creates a blank line to divide a topic...
---

You also have a sub-headline text option by putting a single dash under text...
-
...or headline text by putting an equal sign under text.
=

If you like userscripts (who doesn't?) you can install extensions like ViolentMonkey that allow you to install little bits of code like the Tildes Formatting Toolbar that can change/improve the sites you use and make formatting here a breeze.

Do use the formatting responsibly, but here are examples for bold, italics, strikethrough, links, small text, sub_script, super^script,

headline text,

sub-headline text,

code,

• bulleted
• lists,

1. and
2. numbered
3. lists

Most formatting can be combined as well such as superscripts, lines, and small text to make...

...sentences with a...¹

¹...footnote

Apologies if this isn’t the right place to put bug reports.

I’ve noticed an issue where comments which are bookmarked don’t display as such in my notifications.

For example:

A bookmarked comment displaying as Unbookmarked in my notifications.

Is anyone else seeing the same ?

I'm sorry if this was already answered in the docs somewhere but similarly to the question "What happens to my Steam games when Valve goes out of business?" I was wondering what happens to Tildes if Deimos can't sustain it anymore for whatever reason (e.g. death, prison, going off the grid and starting from scratch in Ecuador...)?

Is there some kind of backup plan in place?

What do you long term users want to share about the culture?

What about growth plans? The erudite discussion with (presumably) real people is what I love most, but I miss the really niche subs. That needs more people.

I just want to make sure this isn't "eternal July".

I read some funny stuff on here and there are plenty of witty responses around, but a community for humorous content may lighten things up a bit and it can start discussions too… after all:

“Laughter without a tinge of philosophy is but a sneeze of humor. Genuine humor is replete with wisdom.” -Mark Twain

Hi all.

I was wondering if there was a way to see all the tags that have been created on Tildes and their popularity? It would help when working out what tag to use, etc.

Maybe even a popularity break down by group that the tag was posted into would help loads when selecting the correct tag.

I can see that auto-complete for tags uses the 100 most commonly-used tags, not sure if this is by group or site wide, but even that list would be great to see.

Many thanks!
RRR

Enshittification: begone!! Let us celebrate our newly found freedom from crap social media giants and sponsored goons by donating a few dollars to Tildes so they can keep the lights on and the fireworks popping 🎉

Hey gang, I’m a rather novice / hedonist tildes user and have just been posting links to uploaded images by hosting them on ibb and then sharing

https://ibb.co/PF5nFf9
https://ibb.co/10pV1wB
https://ibb.co/1GgyWCT

Is there a better place to host and better way to post images?

Thanks in advance. Sorry for any eye rolls I may have caused!

Hi, I was wondering if the current duration before voting gets locked on a post is still 30 days? I tried to find the answer in the docs but didn’t see it (apologies if I missed it) and all I turned up in a search of the site was a topic from 3 years ago mentioning the 30 days, so I wanted to see if that’s still accurate.

Thanks !

With the increase in activity, it's now more difficult to read every topic and every bit of discussion. As well, there are some topics that I wouldn't click into naturally, but I would very much click into if I knew there was a high-quality comment hidden within.

So, it would nice to have a page that specifically highlights comments that have received an Exemplary label. That way, it would be possible to jump straight to the most insightful/thoughtful/interesting discussions that Tildes has to offer, regardless of the topic.

I'm imagining that the page would be somewhat off to the side, so that it doesn't incentivize misuse of the label. Something like how Hacker News hides the pool/invited/best/bestcomments pages under the lists page in the footer of the site.

What do you think?

I just noticed that when I sent an invite to family member over SMS it never arrived. After experimenting it looks like if text contains "tildes.net" it is filered. This also happens with another family member's phone. It is weird why would those companies want to filter it.

I also checked and the message didn't show up in spam & blocked. Does anyone else observe the same thing?

Or at the very least, should there be a requirement to have users take screenshots of Twitter content if they want to link to it? It feels a little backwards to have to make an account for another website in order to consume certain content on this site.

I lurk here at work and don't watch YouTube in general. Often it's annoying to see something of potential interest and it's a YouTube video. Is there a way to filter youtube.com here or an extension enabling that functionality?

Thank you.

I never noticed this before today, but I don't seem to be able to search for comments. Is that supposed to be doable on Tildes?

It took me way too long to figure out that the links at the top of the search results page are sort options; I had been clicking "Comments" hoping to see comment search results, and I was a bit confused why only full topics were still being listed. I guess comment search doesn't currently exist?

Hi Deimos

Its been a while since a lot of redditors started to move over to tildes, yours truly included, and I wondered how is it going for you?

I know you have a full time job and tildes was relatively quiet until the last few weeks but is it becoming too noisy?

I'm guessing that you have had a lot of positive feedback but I'm also guessing you have had a lot of 'why can't we make this more like Reddit?' comments as well.

I see you responding to comments left, right and center and while good this must mean you are reading everything as well as all comments in order to evaluate things, which takes time out of your day.

I know that you have a clear vision of where you want tildes to go, so I guess my question still stands, how is it going?

Looking at the current top thread in ~talk, it seems many of us were forged in the fires of Mount Digg, and now suffer again through the great Reddit diaspora. Perhaps it is here our journey ends?

I am not from the US of A, but one thing I have always found fascinating about that country is the concept of the constitution. I believe it was so incredibly well conceived, the three legged stool, with all the thought that went into how it might be attacked and edge cases, that the founding fathers would have made excellent software testers. The fact American democracy has stood this long is some feat.

Which brings me to my question. Should Tildes create some form of constitution? A set of principles that binds and guides it? I believe something like that would make questions like this easier to answer. A founding set of ideals from which everything else should derive.

We have something akin to this at my company, where the founding principle is the customer is always our main priority. This has served our business well for decades; is everything we do in service of the customer and their needs. You would honestly be amazed at the loyalty and trust this builds over time.

Anyway just some food for thought. I think I will be calling this my new home for now - it feels very much like the Reddit of old right now, a feeling I haven't felt for a great age.

So like many others, I'm a refugee from the Rexxit, and the collaborative, positive enthusiasm here is infectious.

I've had an odd observation about my brief time here - when I think I can contribute to a thread, I find myself trying to step up my posting game - doing a bit of extra research, making sure I add links, and double checking my grammar (as best as I can!). I want my thoughts to have value or be meaningful here, moreso than anywhere I've contributed to in the past.

Do others feel the same way?