Every once in awhile I have one of these ideas, but this one I think would be incredibly fun and interesting to have: ~electronics or (~tech.electronics || ~engineering.electronics), , programming || ~tech.programming. forgot momentarily that ~comp was a thing.

Not as a community for tech news or product discussions (we have ~tech for that) but for electronics research, electronic hobbies/diy, ideas, Q&A, etc etc. With our seemingly higher than average hard tech professional community on here I think this would be great and really bring a new type of content into our fold that could be interesting and and exciting.

I've brought up ~hardware before, but I think ~electronics is more widespread, could include anything to do with electronics: PCBs, computers/desktops, sound/audio, lighting, robotics, electrical work, etc.

While I was writing this I realized, and was quite surprised that we don't have something like ~tech.programming on here either, maybe that should be one as well to consider. ~comp is a thing, I post there.

Hacker News has a nice feature where comments have links to jump to the "next" and "previous" comment in the same thread at the same level. It's useful for jumping over a long comment thread without closing it entirely. Any chance this could be added to Tildes?

Early thoughts, but we have ~society, ~news, and ~enviro, but what if we were to consider ~policy? Legal policy, governmental law, environmental rules, guidelines, terms and conditions, online/offline community policies, etc.

Example (current) tag: https://tildes.net/?tag=policy

Brought on by posting this article as I had to decide between where it would it be better to put this in: in ~tech? in ~society? in ~news?

Both Medium and Substack include the author name in the site title (next to the favicon). Bearblog hosted blogs seem to be frequently posted, especially in ~tech, and only showing that it's from bearblog doesn't give insight into authorship. (Authors are being added to tags, but this is not immediately visible on mobile clients until clicking into the comments.)

Is this something that can be updated? If it's a technical limitation of some sort, I respect that. It would just be a "nice to have" feature. :)

Edit: whoopsie, already being discussed here: https://tildes.net/%7Etildes.official/2x3

This is tangential to this post here about NSFW/controversial content. Sometimes one needs to make a confidential post detached from their own identity (say for example about a psychological problem or advice on an event where the OP wants to conceal real identities), and most places one needs a throwaway account. I think it'd be nicer if we allowed people to make posts detached from their main accounts w/o having to create new throwaway accounts. It might be possible via allowing a certain number of "personas" (i.e. a couple names one can allocate and use as nicknames), or via allowing to post anonymously (i.e. hiding the poster's account name, not w/o one), or allowing personas but temporarily and randomly generated names. What's you thoughts?

Before posting this, I checked my user settings page, the site’s documentation, and GitLab. I also did some site:tildes.net Google searches and used the on-site search for the ~tildes group.

I saw that on GitLab there is a feature request for account deletion, but not deactivation, that was marked “Accepted” about 5-6 years ago (August 2019).

I also saw some posts here in the ~tildes group, including one from about 6-7 years ago (June 2018) with a comment that said an option for both account deletion and account "dissociation" was planned. Both of these features sound great.

In addition to account deletion and account dissociation, I want to also request an option for account deactivation.

I don’t want to ask for the Moon here, but I envision account deactivation as having the option to remove all your posts and comments from the site (as well as your profile), with the option of restoring them if you reactivate your account. (I don’t know how annoying or how much effort this would be to code. I’m just imagining what I would find ideal from a user perspective.)

Another wonderful bonus would be the option to set a timer limiting your ability to reactivate your account, e.g. don’t let me reactivate my account for 6 months.

In the past, I’ve done this on another site through an elaborate system where I:

1. Set up two-factor authentication.
2. Saved the two-factor recovery code on an encrypted pastebin in a password-protected paste.
3. Saved the password for the paste in my password manager.
4. Used FutureMe.org to send an email with a link to the paste to myself X amount of time in the future.
5. Deleted the link to the paste from my browser history.
6. Deleted the entry for the site from my two-factor authentication app so the recovery code is the only way to get in.

This works, but it’s an elaborate process and if something goes wrong with FutureMe.org or the paste bin site, you could lose your ability to ever reactivate your account. You have to be willing to take that risk!

I might end up implementing this wacky system again for Tildes. For a site like Tildes, if I permanently lost access to my account (due to FutureMe.org shutting down or suffering data loss, for example) and wanted to re-join the site at some point in the future, I guess the worst consequence would be losing my username. (Also, getting an invite again might be a hassle, I don’t know.) That might be unfortunate depending how much you like your username, but it’s not as bad as a site with follows and followers where you would lose all of those.

This is a community I've missed since leaving Reddit, but I didn't expect to find or create such a /~group here given Tildes is a much smaller community (I figured, statistically, there wouldn't be enough users with overlapping interests in Right to Repair / Electronics / 3D Printing / Makerspace / etc... for such a community to be present or to naturally form here.

With the recent post asking for advice on a soldering station, and the number of users that participated in that discussion, I've been rethinking those assumptions of 'not enough users / not enough interest'. Then I further reflected on the significant number of people we have here that have fluently discussed other technical areas such as Linux, Programming, servers / Homelab topics and I realize upon reflection that a fair many of our users here are pretty high on tech literacy...

So, as a prelude to requesting a new group like /~electronics or /~makers or some group name along that philosophical theme, I wanted to ask the community at large first as to how much interest there might be in this.

Do you, dear reader, have an interest in electronics repair? In a garage workshop or other space at home where you fix or build things? Makerspace topics like 3D printing? Right to Repair law? If you want to know how to replace your cell phone screen, or ask about soldering or Raspberry Pi or Arduino, are you interested in having a place here on Tildes specifically for these things? Please, if you have such interests, let's discuss here.

Pinging those who participated in the soldering discussion:
@AugustusFerdinand @PraiseTheSoup @teaearlgraycold @Banazir @chocobean @elight @Plik @lynxy @Akir @TheD00d @pallas @ShroudedScribe @em-dash @luks @Tannhauser @kmcgurty1

The other thread about potential spam on the site got me thinking, can/should Tildes hide itself from Google and other search engines (aside from just the main page) to avoid the tentacles of SEO from infiltrating the site? I'm not sure how feasible that is, but I know reddit has the option to prevent your profile from getting indexed by search engines so perhaps that could be applied to the site as a whole.

With the inevitablre result of the US election, for the next four years all media will be totally overwhelmed by one person. It'd be nice to be able to at least on Tildes shove all of that into one corner so it can be hidden.

While Tildes is quite US focused, there is still a lot of us non-us people here.