We had a fun thread last year about what came to mind when other people's usernames come up.

It ended up turning into a cool little online intro of the history of your username, if you have one. There are so many usernames I don't recognise now that I'm back with a steady internet connection after a long time away.

Mine is boring sorry - I switch usernames every 12 months or so for the illusion of control regarding anonymity. My main username used to be Iain M. Banks' Culture series related, so I do miss meeting fellow Culture fans, but this year it's just from a random number generator.

Does your username have an interesting backstory? I recently learned that @chocobean wasn't a chocolate bean, and @cfabbro wasn't a Computational Fabrication Bro, I'm sure there are plenty of others out there.

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.

Last night I posted a video that came across my YouTube feed. I had never seen this particular creator before, but I found the video entertaining and thought provoking in isolation. I hadn't seen any videos like this anywhere else on Tildes, so I decided to post a new Topic. I wasn't sure how to word the description. I knew I wanted to hear other points of view, so I hinted at wanting a discussion and didn't really get into my own thoughts.

I hit submit and went to bed, thinking that in the morning I might be able to clarify my thoughts, and add to the discussion without dominating it.

But I woke up to a mess! A mess that I made. The post had been locked and deleted. Apparently this particular YouTuber is very controversial, and posting without any context turned out to be problematic. I was hoping for discussion and boy howdy did I get discussion.

But since I never really voiced my original intent for posting, it all left me feeling like I had spilled some milk and then someone else had cleaned it up for me. The problem is that I never got to apologize for spilling the milk, and never got to thank the people who cleaned up for me while I was sleeping.

So I suppose this is sort of a meta post. Has anyone else here had something locked/deleted before being able to "make it right"? Should I have provided more context up front? Vetted the creator better by researching their other videos or other online activity? Am I doing the wrong thing by talking about it post-mortem? I definitely don't want to make things any worse, and super duper do not want to be kicked from Tildes! I really enjoy interacting with people here, and want to make sure I'm adding rather than taking away.

Also, I just want to say that I'm sorry if this reignites any problems related to the original (now deleted) Topic, and I will happily accept if this Topic also needs to be removed. Please excuse my mess. :)

Lately I have seen a few posts here and there from accounts that have been silent for a while, where I can't help but feel that these new posts are made by different people or that the initial posts they made were intended to "pad" the account. In other words, they feel a bit like spam and because of that I would like to "flag" them somehow.

The obvious question people will have is likely "Why not just comment about it under the post?"

I have done that various times, and it has the opposite effect of what I'd like:

1. Commenting boosts the post for people who sort based on comments or activity.
2. From what I have observed, when a post has one comment, it is more likely to receive more votes as well. If it has more than one comment, it will receive more votes. This, to me, bizarre voting behavior is something worthy of a meta discussion in itself. But from what I gather, people seem to think that it indicates discussion. Making them think that there must be something worthwhile about the post. This obviously doesn't apply when it's just the OP sharing a quote and me raising a concern.
3. Sometimes I am not entirely sure and would like to have someone with more insights behind the screens take a look at it. If I commented my suspicions while being wrong, that would suck for everyone involved.

Basically for the first two points I am not sure what a good solution would be. I am not advocating for a downvote ability, though something would be nice.
For the third point, I guess I am saying that I am missing the ability to report a post. With comments, I can use the malice label and write out a report, for posts there is no such thing.

I love the labels feature of Tildes and use it fairly regularly where I feel appropriate. But recently I wanted to label a post (rather than a comment) and realized that there is no option for that.

Is this something that has been discussed before? I did a cursory search but was not able to find anything specific to labels on posts. I'm not even saying that I'd be 100% for the feature, just wondering if it's been discussed before. Questions like 'would it provide a benefit?' or 'if so, should those labels be the same as the ones for comments?' were along the lines of what I was thinking.

Might be a terrible idea, or difficult to implement for some reason or another, but sometimes I feel like a post could use a label (like 'exemplary' for a well-thought-out post, or 'malice' for one where the article posted feels deceptive and/or misleading) and right now there does not appear to be a way of doing that. Wondering what others think.

To hide votes on one’s own posts and comments from oneself, that is. I’d prefer the ability to choose whether or not to view the vote count on my own interactions, though I do enjoy having the option of upvoting other people.

This isn’t a tildes specific preference, btw, just an aspect of social media I find trying overall.

This has been on my mind for a while, and I've voiced a similar concern 1.5 months ago in the recurring topic, but it went unnoticed.

Israel has been and still is actively committing genocide against people of Gaza. You can read a summary of the reasons it's being called a genocide in the Wikipedia entry (and its sources) . Wikipedia itself has recognized it as genocide, naming the entry Gaza Genocide, and it's a major feat considering the contentious nature of the topic and the heavy regulation and debates in Wikipedia culture. Even a UN human rights experts said in March that there are reasonable grounds to think a genocide is being committed, and UN is dominated by US influence, and is much slower to act and react, especially when western or US interests are concerned (which applies in this case, because Israel is an ally).

Israel's online propaganda machine has been hard at work about this issue, in order to control the narrative (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Israel also now ranks among the world’s leading jailers of journalists., another evidence of their commitment to suppress dissenting voices and control the narrative around this issue. It's also worth noting that western coverage of Israel's acts has been said to be legitimising Israel's behavior.

I think most things in the world are some shades of gray, and it's very understandable for people to have ambivalent attitudes about it, but I do not think this is one of those cases, for the following reasons.

• There is an active, ongoing genocide.
• The genocider nation-state has been spreading its propaganda to control the international narrative, especially in US (because US is its biggest ally and funder). It's doing this because it knows support from US and its allies is crucial to keep the genocide going. This involves manufacturing consent in the citizens of these nations.
• Tildes is heavily populated with citizens of US and other western nations.
• Not actively opposing this propaganda means one is helping -albeit indirectly but still significantly- the genocider nation.

I should clarify that, as of this moment, I'm not blaming the moderators, and I'm not saying they are doing this consciously and with full consideration. Instead, I'm trying to illustrate what is going on in the wider context, and what the actions in this mini-environment mean in the wider context. Simply put, genocidal propaganda is not an issue where you can follow the middle-ground, especially when you have power over a community.

For these reasons, I propose two changes in terms of moderation.

1. Both from now on and retroactively, change the names of the "Israel-Hamas war megathreads" to "Gaza Genocide megathreads".
2. Create and, both from now on and retroactively, use the tag "Gaza Genocide" when tagging.

The first point is self-explanatory. As for the second point, there comes up only 4 topics when I search for "Gaza Genocide" in the site, even though there have been numerous discussions about it. None of them have the mentioned tag, but they have the Gaza and Genocide tags separately. Furthermore, one of the topics is mine, and I had put the tag Gaza Genocide but it was later removed by moderation, and replaced with other tags mentioning this topic. Again, not throwing personal shade to anyone, but I think this is not a good way to go about this topic. A special tag would give it more visibility, which the victims of the genocide need.

These are my suggestions. If anyone can think of anything else, they are welcome to share as well.

It seems like the last real discussion about the subject was about 6 years ago

I am mostly wondering what the thoughts now are on crossposting something in different tildes groups. This was inspired by a few things. Last week I was unsure where to post something and ended up posting it in the most topical tildes group even though previous posts that took off were posted in a different group. Meaning that people that are subscribed to ~comp but not ~life might have missed the post even though they might be interested.

Then there is this post. I was about to post the same link before realizing it was already posted. The post in question is posted in ~games, I would have posted it in ~tech. I feel like the overlap between ~games and ~tech subscribers likely is a bit bigger, but also here I feel like people might potentially be missing out.

I realize this might not be the biggest issue, the majority of people on tildes seem to be subscribed to all groups. But it still, it tickled something in my brain and this is the second time in a short period that I find myself thinking about this.

Ideally, in my mind, this would be solved on a technical level where you can post something in two groups with a consolidated comment section. However, I don't see this happening in the sort term.

Tags sort of cover this, but given they can be anything and quite numerous, browsing through them is not something I personally would ever use or actually address this.

The second-best solution, and the one I'd like to discuss, is to simply cross post and in one of the posts leave a comment linking to the other post to consolidate discussion a bit.

Am I overthinking the issue? Probably. :) But overall, what are peoples thoughts on allowing cross posts between groups? Any real downsides besides double entries in the listing?

Do we have any information on how Tildes growth is going?

I only use Tildes, used to only use reddit until they pulled their bullshit last year. I don't use any social media and I feel like I am missing out on a lot of news and things. When I used reddit I had curated my subs to my interests and I feel like I was up to date on everything I wanted to be.

But now, due to Tildes being a much smaller community, the news I receive is much more generalized and I've been noticing a lot of times I miss things. For example because all video games are clumped together in one Games Tildes, only the most popular kinds of gaming news gets posted there, so more specific or niche things I miss.

Another example, I had never heard of Ozempic before the South Park episode, and a friend was shocked and told me I was so out of the loop for not knowing what it was. I'd never seen anyone talk about it on here, so how would I know?

I also notice there's just significantly less engagement overall on Tildes. I can scroll through the front page of Tildes every morning, see maybe half posts I've already seen and half new ones, and by the end of the day there will be a handful of new posts but not many. In its golden years, Reddit would have new posts every few hours with new info or news about different things. Tildes feels really small still.

Point being, I'm curious how Tildes is doing in terms of growth and whether it looks like it'll be getting larger communities which will split more subcategories into the broad categories we have now. Or if it has plateaued and this is how it'll be for good?

Hey there everyone,

I've been on here since near the start, and spend too much time finding content to post on here, but I just love this place. One thing I've noticed over the years is a severe lack of personal articles, blogs, or the similar and I think it's to do with the 'officialness' of a lot of the topics.

Would it be beneficial to just have a ~blogs section, to post links and thoughts on our personal writings? Even if that includes things like ~tech or ~cooking or whatever? Just to have a central place for our articles.

I don't mind posting my own in ~tech, but I can imagine the hesitation for everyone else as those areas feel more in-tune with "news" than personal thoughts. We have ~creative, but that feels more for artistic endeavors and projects.

Any ideas how we might be able to encourage more topics or links to personal (small-web) blogs (either your own, or someone else's) in the culture here? We seem to be becoming more and more a news aggregator, which is great because of the relevance and discussions (best on the web) but we have no real culture for small-web indie blogging.

Hello, I wrote an introductory post titled Introduction to the physical basis of global warming. I think it would be a good fit for A Layperson's Introduction to... series, but I don't see any contact info on that page, and the person who started the series doesn't seem to have been active in the last 5 years.

So, how do I apply? Also, I think it would be better if the page was updated with info on how to apply.

Before starting this topic, I thought I'd start a discussion that wasn't held before. @cfabbro and other commenters who have better memories than I pointed out that this isn't the case. They've also laid out it's been tried and was unsuccessful. I stand corrected.

I do not want to contribute any noise to the website, so I'd appreciate it if @Deimos can lock or remove the topic all together, if he deems it appropriate. I'd also appreciate it if no further comments are made so as to not put any further burden on moderation. I apologize for wasting everyone's time.

I'm used to browsing places like reddit, mastodon, kbin.social and midnight.pub. If I'm lucky I can find something lighthearted, witty or interesting. But there's a lot of outrageous posts as well as personal ramblings that make the effort feel like a slog.

I was slow to get into Tildes because I didn't find much "quick hit" posts, such as a good topical quip. I also wasn't as sure how to navigate to places I might want to post. But I did find it very easy to engage with existing posts.

It's in these existing posts that the transformative stuff happened for me. On other sites, long-form posts were often not in my interest or self-indulgent. But I found myself taking my time here, perhaps guided by the thoughtful comments that I saw already beneath the posts. Looking back, it's like a tone was set that I respected and didn't want to diminish.

The result is that I find the other sites under-stimulating, in spite of their design. Tildes has been really good for helping me reform my internet habits. I don't have that regret of excessive internet use as much now. Thanks to deimos and everyone on the site that makes it what it is.

If I miss one thing, it's using my native language. But at the same time, my gut says that things are good just as they are.

It seems like Tildes is not going to ever get a block user function.

But it would be really handy if I could get a filter to auto-ignore any topics started by certain users. Would this be something that Tildes would ever implement?

You might ask yourself “monthly mystery commenters”? Well, let me attempt to explain. I have noticed that on a semi frequent basis, someone will reply to me in a comment. The sort of comment that does invite a reply and isn't a stand-alone comment. Yet, in the case of these comments, whenever someone replies they never do reply in turn.

Of course, it is entirely possible for people to decide to not reply and still reply elsewhere on tildes. In this case, however, I noticed that there is a group of people who only ever leave single replies and never respond to any follow-ups. More often than not, I have noticed these are people who only leave a comment once per month or every few weeks. Hence, the title referring to the practice of monthly hit-and-run comments.

It is a bit of a curious pattern, isn't it? To me, this doesn't make a lot of sense. Like, I get that people sometimes don't want to continue a conversation. But to structurally leave comments to never follow up on replies is entirely alien to me. Even more so for comments that really are replies to other people, not stand-alone comments.

This whole thing has got me scratching my head just enough to make this post. Are they dropping these comments with the best of intentions to return, only to get swept up in other aspects of life? Or is it more about leaving a mark, however brief, to say, “I was here” without the commitment to a full-on conversation? Maybe it's something completely different I haven't even considered.

So, hit-and-runners, what drives you? I am genuinely curious about this and looking forward to any replies.

Edit

This already did get a lot more responses than I ever thought it would get. One observation so far is that a lot of people that replied seem to identify with the title. Yet, so far, for all people I checked they don't fit the type of commenter as I describe in the post itself. It is possible my description just sucks, maybe there is room for a future discussion about commenting based on titles alone. ;)

It's still interesting to read all the different perspectives people have about commenting!

Tiny edit: because of the subject, I almost feel obligated to respond to most people. I really shot myself in the food there :D As that is an impossible task, sorry to the folks I don't end up replying to.

I was just reminded of that again when going back and looking at some of my old posts on reddit which is openly selling online data. Prompted me to use Redact which erases and overwrites comments before deleting them. But that got me wondering if the same is true of Tildes? And how would we know?

Hello fine people. I recently patched the Nord theme into Tildes. I am requesting some feedback on potential changes to make to it. This is my first time doing something like this so please be patient if I am a bit slow. Any feedback is appreciated. Thank you in advance!

Dark theme preview
Light theme preview
Nord
Gitlab merge request

Edit: Thank you everyone for the feedback! I'll try to get the merge request out tomorrow with the fixes.

I've noticed that Tildes generally has a way more levelheaded and even friendly caliber of responses compared to many other social media sites that I've seen. I'm genuinely curious as to why this is. I regularly see the same article posted here that I also saw on say Lemmy, but over there the comments tend to be more hostile and explosive. Meanwhile, disagreements on Tildes rarely get THAT heated (at least as far as I have seen), even on posts involving very intense and personal subjects like politics or war. Even the disagreements and arguments I see on Tildes tend to be more respectful and level-headed, so much so that it's jarring to me to see the comments on some other site where someone's response to a user they disagree with is just straight name-calling.

Is it the invite-only nature of it? The lack of downvotes? The moderation? Confirmation bias? The demographics of the people here? Pure luck? Something else entirely?

Take a look at the Tildes Statistics site. Couple things:

1, and most obvious: there has been a decline in users over the past few days for the first time that I'm aware of.
2: (I was going to make this point before the user decline occurred but it's probably moot now) Due to the scaling of the Y-axis, it appears that there is healthy user growth in the site. But if you look at the numbers, we're talking about user growth of roughly 60 people over the past month.

I know we want controlled growth, and I know we don't want to open it up to the masses. But we also want this site to succeed (i.e. provide interesting discourse and keep people coming back on a regular basis). I don't believe success can happen when growth is stagnant (or, declining!)

I don't think that the conversations are necessarily stagnant per se, in fact there's an impressive amount of thoughtful discussion relative to the size of the user base. But if a given topic is too niche (e.g. MLS football or MUDs, two of my interests), the odds of finding like-minded users to discuss with is obviously lower.

Is it time to consider some sort of growth campaign (one that is not reactionary a la the Reddit API changes) in order to infuse some new life into this awesome site?

Is there a way to collapse really long comments? I find that a very small number of Tildes.net posters often write really long comments (if I were cynical I might say excessively long and I freely admit that I am sometimes among them) which makes it really hard to navigate comment threads because I can't see the child comments very easily.

Is there a setting to collapse long comments (so that one has to press a "read more" button to see them). Otherwise, I would like to suggest that this be considered for addition to Tildes at some point :)

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.

I'm looking for an article that was posted on Tildes in the last year I believe, on online communities and moderation.

I think it was a link to someones personal blog and the author was female. It talked about the challenges of moderating communities with free speech as a core value, because all it takes is a few bad actors pushing that to it's limits and it completely derails the community and puts too much strain on moderators.

The article itself was very good, but I also remember the discussion on tildes was a very good read as well. I have tried searching tildes, using google and chatGPT4 and while I can find a lot of good threads related to this topic, I can't seem to find this one with the article.

Does anyone remember this article/thread?

I realize it's maybe a long shot and it's just a vague memory, so I apologize if this is an annoying post, but it doesn't hurt to ask?

I'm new to Tildes, and searched for this question but didn't find a topic covering this. I've read the instructions, and I know comments that contribute to the topic are much more desired here, and that, in theory, you shouldn't just comment something another commenter has said. Does this apply to thanking another commenter, or even the original poster of a thread? Say someone replied to me with a useful comment. Should I rather thank them or just upvote them? Would the former increase noise.

I know I'm unlikely to get an absolute anwer, but I'd rather ask the community for pointers than assume.

This is specifically about voting on comments, and not articles. I think voting for topics is clear and intuitive.

I've noticed that, while reading users' comments on topics, I have a tendency to think "This is right, so I will vote it up," or "I agree with this, so I will vote it up." I'm not sure I should be doing this, or rather, I'm not sure that's the best use of my ability to vote on comments. I always worry that sites I frequent will morph into echo chambers, and I want to avoid that for this site. I want to encourage expressing alternate viewpoints, because exposure to alternate views helps me grow a human. The vote button is a low-effort means of accomplishing that, and I intend to use it as such.

I think the vote button should be used on comments that enhance the discussion, and help engage people, and not necessarily only on comments that make me feel happy, good or righteous. So, lately, I've been trying to explicitly vote up comments which have replies, especially ones which have several replies, but aren't voted as highly as their children or peers. If someone's comment can engage several people to reply and contribute positively to a conversation, then that comment is worthy of being seen and so I vote it up. I do this regardless of whether or not I agree with the substance of the message.

I've noticed a trend where there will be a low-voted comment with many replies. These aren't trolling comments, because if they were, then they would be removed. These are comments which are engaging people and furthering the conversation, but it seems like the community doesn't value these comments due to their low vote count. This leads me to suspect that the number of votes on a comment might be merely a tally of the number of people who agreed with it.

So, I'm curious. Do you vote on comments?

How do you decide to vote on a comment?

How should we collectively be using the vote for comments?

(As an aside, I also wonder how the psychology of reading comments would change if vote tallies on comments were hidden.)

I submit a lot of posts from mobile, and I find some of the markdown tedious to enter on a mobile keyboard. I know JavaScript is supposed to be a last resort, but I'd really like to have some assistance in the post authoring and comments fields.

I assume this could be a user script. Looking at the wiki, it looks like none of the current ones do this.

Thoughts on this? Things people are already using? Ideas for existing tools to build on? Would it be better as a user script or as a feature of the main site, perhaps with an option to disable it? I'm medium at JavaScript but would happily take a crack at it.

Here is my inital feature list:

• link button - select text, press the link button, get a prompt for the URL, replace the selected text with the markdown formatted text and URL.
• quote block- select multiple paragraphs and click the button to block quote them all
• bold, italic, strike though buttons - apply the markdown to selected text
• spoiler - insert a details block at the cursor. If text is selected wrap it in a details block and prompt for the summary.

if I were to develop it, what else would people like to see on this list?

Has anyone else noticed that sometimes the Tildes homepage will say "1 new message", but when clicking on this the message inbox is empty?

I guess this is because messages are being deleted after being sent? It's slightly annoying because I can't find a way to dismiss the "new message" notification.

This is kind of silly. I've been tild'ing a lot recently and have come to recognize some other users, and am wondering how accurate my simple reactions are, or whether they're shared by anyone else.

• deimos - Moon of Mars, and also a character in either one of the early Unreal Tournament games or Quake 3 Arena. Uh, also a figure from Greek or Roman mythology or whatever 😅
• cfabbro - "C fab bro" - Identifies as a "bro", and does something involving fabrication?
• douchebag - Expects to get hated on maybe?
• akir - For some reason makes me think of Admiral Akbar from OG Star Wars.
• algernon_asimov - Has been explained. I too love Flowers for Algernon and Isaac Asmiov.
• boxer_dogs_dance - I picture three dogs on their hind legs "holding" each other's forepaws, merrily dancing in a circle. It makes me happy 😅

Sorry if I've forgotten your username! Reply and I'll tell you what yours makes me think, I'm feeling associative.

I've been trying to set up a dev enviornment for Tildes, mainly so that I can actually test my MR (!136), and I've been running into a few issues.

However, since we also have a new influx of people who might be interested in contributing to Tildes, it seems like a good time to collect resources on setting up the dev environment, as well as helping anyone running into issues.

So, if you have issues or advice, post them here! I'll be adding my questions in a comment shortly.

Relevant wiki pages:

• Development / Initial Setup
• Development / General Development Info

Edit: A more recent post on setting up the dev environment on Apple Silicon / M1 Macs

I can't seem to get any CSS user-style to work with Tildes anymore. I'm using Stylus on Firefox. Has something changed recently on Tildes which is causing this?
Edit: I was using Stylus already, just thought it was Stylish.

Hello!

I've tried looking for it, but I can't find it. It was an essay about how a large increase of new members alienates the community feeling. How the income of stranger must be kept low so they can become "not a stranger" and how many strangers at once stop that from happening because people know each other less.

Unfortunately I can't find it at all. Does anyone still remember/have it saved?

Thank you very much!

I've really been enjoying Tildes since I joined. The community are friendly, I've posted similar to how I would post in other unnamed social sites with top/OP being serious and long form, and lower replies being more jovial or jokey. With the higher responses, I also try to keep it more formal and factual, or add a valid opinion/discussion point.

One thing I have noticed recently is that there is a constant hit of people just posting blog or news articles with little or no engagement. It's almost like they just curate news and slap it all over which has me scratching my head and stroking the old grey beard. Why? Short question but expecting long answers here. It's like looking at a RSS feed.

I come to Tildes to ask advice and post items that I believe may be of interest to others. I engage in those topics for the most part as well. Rarely does someone post an article from X blog site and I exclaim out loud and tap away a response to it. If I wanted that, I'd just comment on the blog discussion board for the article, not the linked Tildes post.

Is it just me?

Many people here have a skill for converting a url from a mishmash of sloppy looking text into something that looks like a clean line but that is clickable and works like a link. Can someone please explain?

I figure a new thread might be in order since it has been over two months since the last one and we are continuing to get a stream of new users over time.

Welcome to Tildes!

This is a place 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 on-demand, personal 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!

Previous versions:

• v1
• v2

Just wondering how to and if anyone has experience with joining the unofficial Matrix group of our namesake...

Seen a post or two about ios apps being developed. However, as far as android goes, I haven't seen any apps being developed yet for tildes. Which is definitely contributing to my lack of visits here and making it seem more like a chore. Am I just missing some options? 🤞 Or is the user base for Android just that low these days? 😢 Please someone tell me it's the prior😅

And I don’t mean that in a good way. In just a few years, Reddit has devolved from a place to find relevant and quirky information, to basically a platform pushing outrage porn, political divisiveness, and mindless memes, with occasional humor sprinkled in.

The outrage porn is the worst, just exhausting and tiresome. The voting mechanics are mostly to blame for this. Since outrage draws the most engagement, the more people who interact with the site, then the more this type of material will surface and thrive.

The political divisiveness germinates similarly, with the added impetus of state actors throwing fuel on the flames.

The memes are seemingly harmless, but are no substitutes for actual dialogue.

I would just like to see a platform that places a premium on meaningful social dialogue for the future betterment of all involved.

I am a reddit refugee and I was drawn to this network by its mission, its decisive rebuff of chasing capital at all costs, and the overall vibe.

I lurked for a while before I was invited to join, but shortly after joining I noticed something. While a good discussion from opposing viewpoints can help everyone broaden their horizons a bit, it felt like white supremacists were testing the waters. While I can't directly cite any threads, there were a couple instances where I felt one side was seeing just how close they could get without being obvious. But it felt like some of the subtler dog whistles were there.

It felt very similar to how QAnon got a lot of people with the disinformative statistic about child abductions. After all, who's going to be on the other side "child abductions are bad?"

After seeing a few threads and getting the same vibe, I stopped visiting the site for the last couple months. Life getting pretty busy also helped.

I haven't been back long enough to determine for myself whether I'm in a "Nazi bar" or not. I would be happy to admit that it was all in my head. But it is a major concern for any up-and-coming social network. And that's an opposing viewpoint no one needs to take seriously. Was it in my head? Was I reading too much into things? Did all the nazis just go to X? More generally, how has moderation been with the influx of new users? The same, but more? A couple extra reminders doing the trick? Uptick in bans? Is this information already somewhere and I'm a bad user for not having seen it?

Happy Friday everyone! I'm making a post to see if anyone wants to beta test my Tildes.net iOS app Backtick.

Background

I've been wanting to create a Reddit app for quite a while, and just when I got started, the API change chaos happened. Thankfully, I remembered signing up for Tildes.net a few years ago and decided to pivot to make an app for this site instead! The app is still a work in progress, but I believe releasing early and getting as many eyes on it during development results in a better end product (and it's more fun for me 😊).

Features

Here are the current features of Backtick:

• Light mode/dark mode
• Login to Tildes.net (suports 2FA)
• Front page feed with sorting support
• View, vote, and comment on posts
• Reply and vote on comments
• Collapse comments
• View notifications
• Full markdown rendering
• Text-to-speech for posts and comments

Here is a video demo of the app in its current state (updated for v1.8.1): https://youtube.com/shorts/iukQJyJbtw8?feature=share

I know there missing features, but as I mentioned before, I would love to get as many people in as early as possible to help shape Backtick's future.

Testing

If you're interested in testing the app as I continue to work on it during my free time you will need:

• An iOS 16 device
• TestFlight (Apple's testing app)

You can access the beta here: https://testflight.apple.com/join/gNH18NE9. If you have any issues please DM me your Apple ID email and I will send you an invite manually.

Thanks, everyone! Have a great weekend.
- Ash

Edit:
Getting some great feedback! I'll be tracking bugs and potential features here if anyone is curious: https://chatter-brick-3d3.notion.site/Backtick-Tracker-888150b641ae4c0ab39dc0345783bc50?pvs=4

Edit2:
I created the Discord server to help facilitate better collaboration with those who wish to be more involved. It will be a place for discussion around potential features, bugs, and general chat. I will still be taking in feedback via TestFlight and Tildes.net, so it's perfectly fine if you don't want to join.
Join here: https://discord.gg/aah7nkfpBY

About this one: https://tildes.net/~news/19bm/regional_news_thread

First of all I want to thank everyone who participated and gave it a shot despite the weird setup, and apologize for ghosting the meta-discussion about it. Y'all have many suggestions which convinced me that my original idea was flawed.

For one, I agree with Algernon_Asimov that splitting into a separate 'US-local news' and 'non-US global news' would have made more sense. If there's a next round, I think I'd focus on US states first, then non-US countries in another thread. But before that I want to get some feedback to make sure.

Do you think general news threads like that are necessary?

Algernon_Asimov said that news should just be posted directly to the frontpage to be more visible.

spit-evil-olive-tips made a point about the distinction between local news of general interests vs. local news of local interests, and the latter could benefit from having dedicated threads.

For me, I believe megathreads are fine as long as they're optional. In my experience, people do sometimes prefer to post in comments instead of as full topics. As long as people are free to choose either way (which is different than on Reddit where if there's a megathread then posts outside it got removed), overall we should end up with more activity not less.

Does the comment-to-comment format make sense?

In my head I imagine that to be a natural way to generate location-based grouping, but I could see the convoluted setup might be confusing and unenforceable. One the one hand, if each location only has 1 post then the extra step is unnecessary. On the other hand, if there are multiple locations, each with multiple posts then trying to find your regions of interest would be a pain.

Is the scope of the thread too broad?

This was a point made by skybrian here, which was in the context of the original thread being both US and non-US. But even if we divided them into separate US and non-US, are they still too broad?

Having one thread for each location is probably the most natural way, I fear that currently that would ended up being too niche. This was touched on by merry-cherry here as well. I could imagine that would work for a US state (which ever has the most people here) but since no one tried it yet, it's hard to know which states are most likely to succeed. And we probably shouldn't just make one each for all them (which would fill the entire frontpage with nothing but state names).

Should these threads be news-focused?

While that was my original goal, maybe megathreads could be more useful if they fills the needs of the people posting in it rather than just the one starting it. Usually that requires guesswork by the poster but since I'm already asking, might as well.

For the US-local thread, if the goal is to serve as testing grounds to see whether there's enough activity to make the case for local groups, maybe news is not necessarily the most popular when it comes to local content? If anyone support this direction, please share some examples of what types of content you'd like the most when visiting local groups. If you do, please also rank them in order of importance. That way the scope of the thread could be made to focus on the most needed activity as starter.

For the non-US global thread, do you still want dedicated global news? If so how should we set it apart from just regular posting? boxer_dogs_dance mentioned r/anime_titties being quite high quality for global news, any lessons we can adopt from them?

Digging around and I found this post asking about how to do cultural exchange on Tildes, maybe shifting the focus from global news to this might be more fruitful? (people are probably more willing to share nice things about their country than drama). Each subthread can be something like this Turkey Information Thread, or something else maybe.

Should they be recurring?

News probably make sense as recurring, others depend. Since this is still in trial whatever arrangement we agree on, I'll probably just make one and see from there.

Anything else you want to let me know (like maybe don't do this anymore haha), shoot away. Also it's not like I'm an official thread maker or anything, if any of y'all have your own take, go for it! The more people trying out stuff the better.

If I wanted to see all the topics on Tildes that link to example.com is there a way to do this as a regular Tildes user?

And, for the mods, will there be a way for them to see things like "how many people are posting articles linking to this domain" or "how many domains does this user post articles from"? Excessive self-promotion and vote rings are not a problem for Tildes yet, but they might be in future, and these tools may be useful. I don't know if they're compatible with Tildes' strong privacy stance though.

I don’t know if it’s just me but I feel like there is a lot of people posting news articles and then radio silence and it’s been rubbing me the wrong way. It feels like someone throwing a newspaper through my window and not owning up to it.
Again maybe it’s just me but I feel like you should have to contribute a bit about why you decided to share the link at least. Get the ball rolling on a conversation.
Sharing information and staying informed is important but a more human touch would go a long way to making this site feel less like bots talking to other bots.
All opinions welcome of course.