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?

I get a lot out of browsing Tildes and all the conversations here. This is in keeping with the Tildes philosophy of high-quality content and conversation.

In the spirit of quality discussion, context is everything and reference points matter. I have found my own thoughts nudged many times here, and often the comments and points of view lend entirely new perspective to the content (and are sometimes more interesting).

While I appreciate the discussions, there are often links to an article, a video, a blog, or anything really, with no context and little description.

So in the spirit of conversation, I'm asking if there could be "conversation starter" comments for posted links. I'd like to know why this video or that blog is different from just randomly finding some link online. Why is this link on Tildes? What makes it interesting or important? What are we talking about? Where is the quality conversation?

Is that too much, or would that be reasonable? Thoughts?

safety.air, food.processed, neurons.artificial, storage.data - there are many many more examples to be found of unnecessarily hierarchical tags. These are not tags that benefit from such a scheme. All we have now are syntactically reversed phrases, reducing readability. What person wants to look up "safety" and peruse rail vs. air vs. public? Or energy vs. data vs. thermal for "storage"?

Where we have the line drawn now is far too arbitrary. Why is republican party not party.republican? decomposition.runaway?? lights.head for "headlights"??? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

I propose that heirarchical tags should only be used for things that have a clear natural hierarchy that is generally used outside of Tildes for some purpose. Geographic hierarchy makes perfect sense to me. Being able to search by country, then by state/province, then by city is very sensible. For describing a section of the tree of life - yes please. Maybe we should even go so far as to use : instead of . for tags like source.youtube. When would I ever look up just source?

I have decent internet at home.

I have great internet at work.

Despite the speeds of those though, seemingly every website out there feels laggy and heavy. You click, you wait, you get a skeleton of the page, with different elements that rapidly pop in until you're staring at the full site. You see the little loading animation on the tab for one, two, three seconds. It isn't exactly "slow" by any means, but it's far from instantaneous either.

Clicking around the web these days feels like I'm playing a game with unignorable input lag.

And I get it. The modern web is complex. It's genuinely a miracle that this is possible in the first place, so I really shouldn't be complaining that the bits traveling through the internet from dozens of servers thousands of miles away aren't getting here immediately.

I get that high resolution screens require large images, and the ubiquity of video these days adds even more weight. I get that many websites are closer to applications than they are static pages.

I'm not trying to take away from the awesome magic that is our modern miracle of connectivity in the slightest, and I'm appreciative to all the people here who spend their livelihoods working on it. Y'all are awesome.

I'm just trying to say that, well, sometimes moving around on the web can drag. And when you've been using it for a long time, the dragging can get under your skin a little bit.

However, my real point lies not in the rest of the internet, but here. I'm talking about this "heavy web" baseline as a contrast for one of the things I love about Tildes:

it. is. so. snappy.

I click, and BAM, the page is there. Immediately.

It's sharp. It's crisp. It's no-nonsense. No waiting for elements to pop in. No subconsciously watching for the loading animation to stop so that I know I can start to interact with site.

For general design reasons, I've always loved that Tildes is text-only, but more and more I appreciate that aspect simply because Tildes feels good to use because it is so quick and responsive. I don't know how much of that is due to the text-only part of things and how much of it is Deimos being a genius code wizard who made an amazing platform, but I'm happy about it regardless.

This site has got zero input lag.

And that feels great.

Timasomo is "Tildes' Make Something Month": a creative community challenge that takes place in the month of October. (We've been going for SEVEN years now y'all, can you believe it?!)

The best way to get a feel for Timasomo is to check out our previous Showcase topics, where creators share their creations with the community at the end of the event:

• 2024 Showcase
• 2023 Showcase
• 2022 Showcase
• 2021 Showcase
• 2020 Showcase
• 2019 Showcase

There are no hard and fast rules on what you can create. You can make anything!

All of the Timasomo topics will be over in ~creative.timasomo, so if you're interested in participating or following along, make sure you're subscribed there.

All people who respond to this topic will be added to a notification list that I will ping each time I put up a new Timasomo topic. If you do not wish to be added to the list, or you wish to only be notified for the final Timasomo showcase, please let me know.

The Roll Call thread will be posted in ~creative.timasomo on October 1st. That is the official beginning to the event and is where people will formally commit to their projects for Timasomo.

FAQs

This Thread: Planning!

Post your ideas.

Give feedback to others.

Set up collaborations.

Ask questions.

Everything in this thread is non-commital! Bounce around ideas and figure out what you'd like to do in our communal brainstorming session.

Also, please do NOT start work on your project yet! Stage setting, planning, and other preparations are allowed (e.g. getting supplies/materials, setting up workspaces, etc.), but save the creation initiation for the 1st.

Get excited for another GREAT Timasomo!

This topic is for the Three Cheers for Tildes mobile app.

I'll summarize the major updates at the start of each similar topic, so people can read the updates and then hit Ignore if they don't care about more frequent updates and user feedback.

Recently:

[Android] Version 1.4.3 (Apr 30, 2025): Fixed a layout bug on topics.

[Android] Version 1.4.2 (Apr 11, 2025): Reduced highlighting when formatting markdown. Fixed minor text size bugs.

[iOS] Version 1.4.1 (Apr 11, 2025): Fixed a bunch of text size bugs reported through TestFlight, especially when rendering comments. Reduced highlighting when formatting markdown.

Version 1.4.0 (Apr 6, 2025):

• Added text size setting
• Fixed markdown formatting bar bugs

The text size setting for accessibility is long overdue. I've been feeling bad that some users couldn't even use the app because the text was too small.

This has been another large change where I had to go back and re-test screens throughout the entire app, and fix many layout bugs caused by the dynamic text size. It's been very tedious!

In fact, the iOS release is delayed because I found some last-minute bugs and have had to go back to figure out solutions. iOS is up on TestFlight!

Also I am aware that there are still bugs in some places when you set the text excessively large. It's not a priority for me to fix those, unless they make the app unusable.

Have been particularly busy so far this year and that will continue for a while, so I may be less responsive here, even though I likely will see your messages. Thanks for continuing to report issues; v1.4 fixes some bugs based on those reports.

Previous topic: February 2025

Where to get it

Android version on Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.talklittle.android.tildes

Or sideloadable APK at https://www.talklittle.com/three-cheers/

iOS version on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/three-cheers-for-tildes/id6470950557

Join TestFlight for iOS beta testing: https://testflight.apple.com/join/mpVk1qIy

I was looking through some old posts this afternoon and noticed several users posted but had since been banned. I was wondering if anyone knows the approximate number of users that have been banned and what the most common reasons were.

I have a lot of stuff filtered such as tech and US politics. But I’ve noticed on several occasions that posts I see when I’m not logged in are inaccessible to me when I log in, even when I click the button to disable filters temporarily.

One example is this post about Just Buy Nothing https://tildes.net/~health.mental/1pke/just_buy_nothing_a_fake_online_store_to_combat_shopping_addiction

I can see it when I’m logged out, but the only way to access it is to copy the link while logged out and then paste in when logged in.

I’m happy for the devs to look at my account settings etc if it helps!

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?

A fancier way is here — but either is great.

—-

For those using iOS with a bookmark on their homescreen, you may have been plagued like me with Tildes opening in a private window instead of the session where you’re logged in.

I don’t know why I didn’t think about this sooner, but it’s so easy

Shortcuts > New > Create New Tab > Open URL (remove the variable and put in https://tildes.net) > context menu next to the title of the shortcut > Add to Homescreen > Photo (left image option) > select your tildes logo that i forgot to tell you to save

… done. Now Tildes will always open Safari in an authenticated session. ezpz.

Bringing this up NOT because I'm worried about it, but only because it's very odd and might interest people here:

I've been PMing people for my post in the Game Giveaway topic. For each one, I've just been making the subject of the PM the emoji they selected and nothing else.

I have successfully sent PMs with the following subject lines:

• 🦥, 🦆, 🐈, 🐸, 🦄, 🐙, 🦫, 🐌, 👻, 🐣, 🐻‍❄️, 🐖, 🐳, 🦚, 🦭, 😎

But when I use

• 🫎

I get the following error message: subject: Length must be between 1 and 200. The PM fails to send.

I was able to send the PM by appending text to it, sending it with the subject line 🫎 Marvin (because that's his name), and the PM sent with the subject line Marvin without the emoji or space.

What's so different about the moose? Is it because he's wanted? 😂

If anyone wants to test this for themselves, feel free to try it out in a PM to me.

It only now just occurred to me after reading the username thread that people actually recognize each other on Tildes by username. I certainly recognize a few of the "big" usernames but otherwise I kind of have username blindness. I was absolutely shocked to see someone tag me and more shocked to see that someone remembered even a single thing I had ever posted.

I'll start:

@cfabbro is pretty on top of things around here. Super knowledgeable about various topics and a stickler for the rules in a really positive way that demonstrates their love for the community and their desire to keep it special. One of the most important Tilderinos (or Tildos, which is my personal favorite that someone suggested a while back). Thanks for all that you do, and if you're the one who has to go though and fix my god-awful tags then a double thanks and a sincere apology.

@boxer_dogs_dance, like cfabbro has a very wide range of interests and is quick to share interesting tidbits of information that a lot of people may not know. I think I have disagreed cordially with boxerdogs a few times maybe? But I have a good impression of them overall.

@deimos is a bit like God, which I think works on multiple levels. The highest power, behind-the-scenes, hard to prove his existence. I have a conspiracy theory that he uses alt accounts to participate anonymously, which I think would be a really smart thing to do. Joking aside, I think Tildes' resiliency and ability to maintain its small town vibe while being quite large is due mostly to his political/philosophical genius. The guiding principles for this site and moderation style have made this a pretty awesome place to be. Case in point: The few times I saw people complain about Tildes' moderation on other websites, I was able to immediately see why that person wasn't a good fit here. They were people who didn't even understand that they were being antisocial or were playing coy when they knew exactly what they were doing. Keeping Tildes more or less free of that stuff is one of the greatest internet achievements I've ever seen.

Disclaimer: I don't quite know how to address the topic, so I want to state I'm trying to approach this with sensitivity; I hope this might lead to a helpful and insightful conversation on a potentially difficult issue. Apologies if I don't quite get it right!

I noticed the absence of a name I'd become familiar with on Tildes and wanted to start a discussion on how the community should handle situations where a person of community renowned abruptly departs.

The user in question is @daychilde, who is one of the users I'd seen around quite a bit. I've been on Tildes for quite a while now, and would like to think I've had a positive - if not vast - contribution. Overall, I probably read more than I respond; I bring this up because I am aware that I probably represent the voice of a significant portion of the userbase here: I'm figuring stuff out as I go and probably am not in the loop on the majority of stuff going on on Tildes. All in all, I don't recognise a lot of names on Tildes, but @daychilde is/was a character who stuck out and seemed to have a significant impact on the community.

From what I deduce, @daychilde has been banned some time in the past week, and I thought it worth discussing given there are at least a couple of things left in the lurch as a result that people might seek information on. The ones that have crossed my vision are the following:

https://tildes.net/~tech/1od9/personal_offer_do_you_have_a_website_based_project_youve_been_wanting_to_do_but_worried_about_cost
and
https://tildes.net/~life/1n7e/daychildes_walking_thread

At the risk of broaching a difficult topic - I'm not looking to cause drama or speculate - we should probably discuss the fallout of a situation like this. Hopefully at the very least this topic might be something others can find if they also become aware of the departure of a notable person and are looking for confirmation or where might be appropriate to discuss any fallout that might occur.

For @daychilde in particular, this website seemed to be a resource that helped him manage his life. I wonder if we should consider whether there is some duty of care to users to depend on Tildes in some capacity?

There are also people who might be looking to discuss the hosting that he had offered/agreed, and might now be left in the lurch.

Unfortunately I don't have solutions, but I didn't see any discussion or information on this kind of a topic, nor any precedent for this kind of a situation!

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. :)

Sorry if this is a dumb question, I've done some browsing and haven't found an obvious answer. Subscribing to the a tildes rss feed works great, except that link topics open the link itself, not the Tildes thread. I'd ideally want it to open the thread in the first instance, not the link directly. Is this something that's possible that I just haven't been able to figure out?

What's the best way to link a photo from my gallery to share here? My go to with friends and family is a Google drive link. Is there something I'm unaware of that means I shouldn't create links through my Google drive for general public sharing?

In the notification setting, I have untoggled both options but then I am wondering how can I mark a comment as read if I dont actually want to vote, label, reply or anything?

I am used to the reddit interface where iirc, you can just hit a button for toggle that state on a comment.

I tried looking through the docs but couldn't find an answer to this question: What is the nature of the link that is established to the sys-admin and devs of tildes for an account and the invite account?

as in, do they store the invite code that I used to create this account permanently and will be able to link that invite back to the issuing user? so that my account and the issuing user will always be linked in that way?

There used to be lively discussion about this topic.

For context: I find it fairly obvious that the Israeli government is deliberately attempting to wipe out the Palestinian people in a way that is slow/ambiguous enough to perhaps not officially qualify as genocide in a legal sense, but that is nevertheless effectively genocide from an emotionally aware human perspective.

I've mostly steered clear of the related conversation because many people seemed to have gotten tangled up in the legal definitions, as if Tildes were a branch of the International Court of Justice, which made me feel like the humanitarian view is getting dismissed or implied as being inferior. I wanted to see if this approach or its popularity on Tildes might have shifted with the new developments, such as Israel blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza and its recent plans to seize the area and hand aid distribution to private companies.

Am I somehow just not able to find the megathread? I believe I may have tried to filter it out earlier but it's not on my filters list and I'm unsure if there are other ways to hide content on Tildes that I may have forgotten about.

Other than using the Atom One Dark theme instead of default theme, I also:

• View at 80% zoom (in desktop)
• Use the Tildes Formatting Toolbar userscript (not sure who wrote this or where the install link is but I'm sure someone in the comments can say)

And that's it for me! Which is relatively speaking almost no personal customization for me. (I also have a universal stylus sheet that removes ligatures on the entire internet but I don't think that does anything here)

What does everyone else do? What do you recommend?

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?

I would love to self-host a Tildes instance with my domain to create a community in my native language speakers. I saw, from old posts, that it is not an easy process at all. But I really love the concept and the style of Tildes. It is better than Reddit and other Fediverse platforms.
Is there anyone who managed to host Tildes instance?

I would be so glad to have some guidance.

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.

I am genuinely sick of seeing all the US political news on Tildes, especially because of the sheer volume of it being submitted lately and how depressing it all is. The creation of ~society was a decent compromise since at least it keeps all the politics topics contained in one group, but it's still not ideal, IMO.

I don't want to totally unsubscribe from ~society since, for the most part, I do actually enjoy reading about societal level events/issues around the world. I don't want to have to click 'Ignore' on every single topic about US politics, since there are a lot of them being submitted. And I don't want to filter out absolutely all 'politics' from my front page either though, which is currently my only other option since we can't yet filter tags by multiple criteria (e.g. filtering topics that only contain 'politics' AND 'usa').

So I propose that we start using a 'politics.usa' tag, even though it's a bit redundant, so that US politics can be specifically filtered out by people like myself that want to avoid seeing such topics. Thoughts?

Hello, Tildes

Allow me to introduce myself.

I came over to Tildes fairly recently after Twitterriffic died and Apollo announced it would shut down.

As a relative youngster, I tend to mostly browse on mobile.

While I do appreciate Tildes' philosophy of having a simple website that works well on desktop and mobile, I've always preferred mobile apps. I'm a strong believer that a well-built native application will always provide a richer experience than a website.

But enough talking.. showing is way more fun - here's a lil' something I've been messing around with:

Introducing Surfboard for Tildes

The goal is simple: to be the best way to interact with Tildes on mobile.

Features

Surfboard is still extremely early, and is missing many features.

With that said, here is what it currently supports:

• Login to Tildes (supports 2FA)
• Browse topics
• Filters & sorting
• Browse comments
• Advanced rendering is still in early stages..
• Supports comment collapsing behavior from the web version
• Reply/vote/bookmark/ignore on topics, comments, & notifications (requires login)
• Search topics
• Global search
• Search within groups
• Option for in-line images
• Clean browsing interface
• In-line markdown preview when composing replies
• Share topics & comments
• Notifications
• View read & unread notifications
• Reply, vote, bookmark, mark as read...
• Customizable
• Toggle settings, set custom gesture actions, etc.
• Free, as in beer

The design draws some inspiration from Apollo for Reddit, an app that I loved & am very sad will be discontinued.

Try it yourself

I would love to get some feedback from other Tildes users on the app. If you are interested in trying it for yourself, you can get it here via TestFlight

Surfboard is built for iPhone, and requires iOS 16.0 or higher.

Inside the app is a 'roadmap' of sorts which is basically a list of things I know are missing, but if there's something you want that isn't listed there, I'm all ears.

Formatting is a little rough at the moment, although I made enormous improvements on the parsing & rendering there over the last day.

It should support just about anything you throw at it other than a <details>

(I'll get around to them, I swear..)

If you run into issues viewing a post/comment, you can easily open them in an in-app safari window from the menu.

As mentioned above, it's very early, but it's already becoming my favorite way to browse Tildes. I hope that others will enjoy it as well. Consider it my gift to the Tildes community.

Cheers !

Edit:

The best way to submit feature requests & bug reports is to add it to the issue tracker and/or leave a comment on this thread and I’ll get around to adding it myself.

Thanks !

I just used the label on a comment and to my surprise it is not visible for me, neither is it visible when I log out.
On other comments I do see the label in both situations. This makes me think there is a condition where the label is now shown or that something might be up with tildes itself.

I understand that Tildes implements rate limiting for replies to comments in order to discourage excessive back-and-forth debates or arguments. My current rate limit is one reply every 2 hours. So, if I reply to a comment on one post and then try to reply to a comment on another post, it tells me I have to wait 120 minutes (minus however many minutes since my last comment) until I can comment again.

Is this the normal rate limit? If so, don't people find this... limiting?

Update (2025-04-09 at 08:22 UTC): I was just able to comment twice within ten minutes, so it seems the rate limit has disappeared as mysteriously as it appeared.

I was going to get screenshots to backup what I am talking about but apparently they aren't kicking around in the system forever so most of the evidence is gone but I often see mycketforvirrad editing the title of a post I make to exactly what it already was while they are editing tags as they see fit.

What's up with that?

I was going to post a question regarding the topic logs but looking through my old posts, I see that much less than I remember have any topic logs on them.

I can't tell if I am imagining that alot more of them used to have topic logs or Deimos coded it to be a temporary record of the changes that the mods here make?

and if so, why temporary?

I’m new to Tildes and really hope to get into interesting conversations. I’m not really interested in looking at the content behind links and commenting on them though. Is there a way to completely filter them all out so that only text posts remain visible to me?

This topic is for the Three Cheers for Tildes mobile app.

I'll summarize the major updates at the start of each similar topic, so people can read the updates and then hit Ignore if they don't care about more frequent updates and user feedback.

Recently:

[Android] Version 1.3.6 (Feb 28, 2025): Fixed minor UI bugs.

[iOS] Version 1.3.1 (Feb 27, 2025): Fixed an annoying scroll bug when typing comments and posts.

[Android] Version 1.3.5 (Feb 19, 2025): Fixed keyboard and animation bugs.

[Android] Version 1.3.4 (Feb 12, 2025): Fixed keyboard and markdown bar bugs.

[Android] Version 1.3.3 (Feb 11, 2025): Fixed keyboard bugs. [Cancelled this release.]

[Android] Version 1.3.2 (Feb 11, 2025): Fixed bugs reported in comments.

Version 1.3.0 (Feb 9, 2025):

This is an Android-focused update. Android 15 makes apps edge-to-edge by default so it's time to move to edge-to-edge. I've enabled it on Android 11 and higher.

Edge-to-edge mostly means turning the system bars translucent, so you can see the content all the way to the edge, instead of a blank area. In practice, we still need to keep some translucent bars there, so status bar icons and the clock can still be distinguished from app content and not become a jumbled mess.

Implementing this was a gigantic pain (which is why Google received pushback from so many developers and added an opt-out). I had to redo many layouts and re-test every screen in the app multiple times, on different Android versions and different settings (portrait, landscape, single pane, dual pane). Hope it's well received by Three Cheers users! Personally it took me a day to get accustomed to it, but I've ended up liking the edge-to-edge style more. I probably won't add a setting to turn it off.

Screenshots of what it looks like on an Android 14 device as of v1.3.1:

• 3-button nav, edge-to-edge (new): https://postimg.cc/1nnc2rWG
• 3-button nav, old: https://postimg.cc/Hcq4g8Kf
• gesture nav, edge-to-edge (new): https://postimg.cc/ctf744G6
• gesture nav, edge-to-edge (v1.3.2): https://postimg.cc/TpwHPDYB
• gesture nav, old: https://postimg.cc/PNDQMKvh

Three Cheers for iOS v1.3.0 is only minor bugfixes. iPhone apps are already edge-to-edge, and this change is Google's way of copying/catching up to Apple.

Previous topic: November 2024

Where to get it

Android version on Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.talklittle.android.tildes

Or sideloadable APK at https://www.talklittle.com/three-cheers/

iOS version on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/three-cheers-for-tildes/id6470950557

Join TestFlight for iOS beta testing: https://testflight.apple.com/join/mpVk1qIy

Another post got me thinking about this community as a whole. Where in each country do people live? What is the general age range? What occupations and industries are represented here?

Have there been Tildes surveys in the past, and if so, where might I find one?

Last month we started a community-maintained fork of the Tildes codebase. A lot has happened since then.

The biggest change: @Bauke and I have been added as maintainers to the official Tildes repo! As a result, we're moving the community fork to the backburner for now, as we focus on nearer-term changes that will directly improve the main website. Later on it's possible we'll pick up the fork again, where it will likely serve the purpose of self-hosting your own Tildes spinoff sites.

Deimos still has the final say on what makes it to the website. Bauke and I can't deploy changes directly. However, this arrangement is still much more streamlined than before, because we now have a lot more code review bandwidth for accepting outside contributions. Deimos has less work to do now: mostly testing out the live code on a staging server, and scanning over the code for security/privacy issues—but not full code reviews which often involve a lot of back-and-forth communication and reading and testing code.

What work have we done this past month?

It's mostly been setting up foundational stuff like configuring the GitLab repository, fixing the development environment, and writing docs.

More recently we have started fixing actual website bugs too: a bug when escaping a user mention (making sure \@talklittle doesn't turn into a link), and hiding <details> content in collapsed comments. Starting small but we've found a good rhythm and will work on more and bigger issues soon.

Big props to @Bauke for setting up a staging server! Currently at https://testing.tildes.community/ — This server will be instrumental in getting new code in a testable state in a live environment, which makes it easier to approve new features before deploying on the real Tildes site.

So we shouldn't submit code to the community fork?

No, please don't. We'll use the official Tildes repo from now on. I'll update last month's post to reflect this.

Is Docker support coming to the official repo?

Yes, very likely. Deimos has warmed up to the idea. Bauke and I have been using the Docker development environment and ironed out a lot of bugs this past month.

The official repo looks the same as before?

Our next steps are to port the community fork changes back upstream to the official repo. In addition to the master branch, we plan to add staging and develop branches. develop will be where development happens, while master will reflect what is currently deployed on Tildes.net.

How do I contribute to Tildes development?

Check this document: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

(Information Superhighway, for you youngin's, was a term that was thrown around quite a bit in the early days of the internet. See also: "world wide web" and "cyberspace")

I'm writing this post to say thanks to the developers, admins, and moderators of Tildes. This is one of the few corners of the internet that hasn't been completely taken over by bots, trolls, shills, or astroturfers. This is a tight-knit community of folks who are good at disagreeing with each other respectfully. It's the way the world should be.

I'm thankful that I can come here and talk about things that I'm uncomfortable discussing elsewhere on the internet or even in the real world.

I came from the great Reddit exodus of 2023. For a while, when I was actively watching the Tildes User Growth chart, I started to worry when it looked like user registrations were stagnating. I even created a post asking the community if it was time to accelerate growth. Thankfully, there was pushback from Tildes veterans who understood that bigger is not necessarily better. I now agree with that sentiment.

Be human, everybody!

I came to Tildes to get away from the endless political talk of reddit. Is there any way to unsubscribe from the political threads here? Most of them seem to be posted in ~misc, but there's other content there too.

It looks like we're getting some new sign-ups! 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!

It 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. Just ask away, and someone will answer you!

At over 600 comments and over a month old, v1 of the questions thread is due for retirement. Here’s a new, fresh one for all the users we are continuing to get.

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!

It 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. Just ask away, and someone will answer you!

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

This topic is for the Three Cheers for Tildes mobile app.

I'll summarize the major updates at the start of each similar topic, so people can read the updates and then hit Ignore if they don't care about more frequent updates and user feedback.

Recently:

Version 1.2.2 (Dec 5, 2024):

• Added advanced settings to auto-vote on topics when opening them
• Added advanced setting to hide "Reply" from text long-press menu
• Fixed inserting markdown links with parentheses
• Fixed UI bugs in profiles
• Fixed crashes opening certain topics

Happy Thanksgiving! Three Cheers version 1.2 is out for Android and iOS! (Nov 27, 2024)

• Save drafts of comment replies, edits, and private message replies
• Manage drafts via Settings
• Improved some error messages

Does not yet support saving drafts of new submissions

I know some of you were hoping for topic submission drafts, but I wanted to release what I've implemented so far with comment drafts. This version took a decent amount of time to develop, and I didn't want to delay it further by adding submission drafts in this release. Thanks for your patience!

Previous topic: September 2024

Where to get it

Android version on Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.talklittle.android.tildes

Or sideloadable APK at https://www.talklittle.com/three-cheers/

iOS version on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/three-cheers-for-tildes/id6470950557

Join TestFlight for iOS beta testing: https://testflight.apple.com/join/mpVk1qIy

I would like to see if I can filter out Twitter posts (and comments) from my feed on Tildes. I personally don't want to further engage anymore with the site and I've blocked the URL using ublock so would be good if I can pre-emptively filter the site. There's not a huge traffic but I'll do what I can.