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!

As a follow up to this, I now have a blog that I intend to use for longer write-ups on things I find interesting enough to want to share, and continuing this chain of thought, it would effectively fill the purpose of what I would until now use a text post for. This very post serves as an obvious counter-example of something that would make sense as a blog article, so there would presumably be exceptions, but overall that would mean I would switch from text posts to links to my blog where the text is (and I'd probably add a collapsible copy of the article as a comment for redundancy in case something happens to the blog. I have no idea if I'm keeping this specific domain name in the long term, and in fact I do want to switch to a proper domain name I own rather than using yunohost's domains, but for right now it's not in the cards.).

To me, this reasoning makes sense and isn't in conflict with Tildes' principles, however I have a concern regarding the code of conduct's self-promotion policy, specifically the it shouldn't be the primary reason that you post on the site part. My gut tells me that I would be in the clear since the overall intent of this policy is to curb outright advertising and self-serving behavior, and I assume linking to my blog which is non-monetized and decoupled from any endeavor I might profit from wouldn't apply. While I think this is the most natural interpretation, I can't argue in good faith that, taking the text purely at face value outside of the broader context, "ceasing submitting text posts and replacing them with links to my blog" isn't pretty much making that blog the primary reason I post on the site (at least outside of the comment section).

So, as a sanity check, I'm asking if going ahead with this does fit the expected conduct on Tildes and I'm not missing something that makes it not okay. If I am missing something, what should I do instead?

No, really. Sincerely putting this out there.

Using Tildes sometimes feels like talking into the void. The UI, even in Three Cheers, is minimal. The conversations sometimes clinical, though I greatly appreciate the compassion that comes through here versus other places that shall remain nameless.

Yet I am struck. I've seen people here, more recently, cite meeting other Tildans (Tildaniens? Tilwhoseits?).

As a somewhat reclusive 51 year-old married dude with only furry children, I don't get it. But I do know that I need more friendships. It gets harder, as you get older. (As for me, not keeping toxic friendships from school and later 2 decades working remotely led to, well, this.)

So how do you connect with humans as humans here? How do you "make friends"?

Asking as someone who has a diagnosed potent ADHD and perhaps other as yet medically undetermined NDisms.

(No idea what tags to use for this. Help?)

I've made a strong effort toward intentional news exposure by trying to limit the times I run across news articles. This has "minimized" my exposure to the times when I specifically look to read news sources.

I'd be curious to know if anyone here is accomplishing something similar by filtering out Tildes tags and, if so, what does your list look like? Seems to be a hard balance between quieting the unwanted news posts and not limiting exposure to posts and articles I'd like to see.

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. :)

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have a small suggestion for a change to Tilde's mobile design and I'm apprehensive about posting a whole new thread here since it's relatively insignificant. This makes me wonder in general what the best way is for me and others to submit ideas or issues without creating the clutter of a lot of threads.

Would it be appropriate to create somewhat specific feedback threads? E.g. one for design issues and suggestions, one for feature suggestions, one for general bug reports, etc.? At the end of the day, I just want to let someone know about my suggestion without creating noise.

Hi,

I would like to run a Tildes instance on a VPS, using a custom domain.

QUESTION:

Is it possible to install and serve Tildes directly on a VPS? (eliminate Vagrant / VirtualBox entirely)

Being a solo dev, it feels like Vagrant / VB adds excess complexity for little benefit.

• note 1: I tried the Vagrant / VB install method (on an Ubuntu VPS), and hit some errors - all related to Vagrant / VB.

• note 2: I found this 3-year old comment of Deimos’ instructions, though I'm guessing it's out of date, since the code has changed a lot in 3 years (salts, minions, etc).

If it IS possible to install and serve Tildes directly on a VPS - what is the best / simplest way to do it in 2022?

I will very much appreciate any ideas.

hey tilders,

so I mostly read tildes.net content through my RSS reader, and it's 98% great. the remaining 2% is due to two things:

• HTML entities (fancy quotes, etc) don't degrade nicely; I get a lot of &#xxx; in my feed reader - Edited topics (I think) get posted twice to the RSS feed, giving me duplicate items.

I don't know how hard it might be to fix these issues, but is there anything I can do to help?

I generated markdown with a table of contents which is auto-generated on Emacs. I tested it on https://rentry.co and it works fine. On Tildes the links don't work. Is there a way to make this work? It would be nice to have that for longer posts. Thanks!

(I'm tagging as ask.advice and ask.discussion because while my motivation to make this comes from my comments I'm not the only one who this could apply to and deleting coments is very much a general topic.)

So basically, I wrote this comment, noone agrees with it and the contrary takes all are upvoted, so should I delete it? If noone agreed with what I had to say and upvoted contrary answers, then what I said wasn't valuable to anyone, and so I should delete it, right?

This also applies to quite a few comments I have written that have 0 votes like this, this this and this.

In the other hand, measuring a comment's value by how many people voted on it isn't that great and leaving clarifications and tecnical/minor details and if someone replied, even if only to point out your comment as wrong or not so unlikely, so other than the third comment, you can argue they aren't entirely bad. (And leaving someone's answer without a question is pretty bad if someone comes later since they wouldn't know why that answer was there.) So where does one draw the line?

Recently, I have blocked both reddit and facebook on my computer and devices in order to combat the utter fatigue that engagement with those sites produces. I've always really enjoyed the atmosphere here at Tildes better than either site and have hoped (though I gather this is not currently the goal) that it would supplant reddit in the future.

In order to get my news/discussion fix, I've begun submitting more content here than I have before. In the mornings, I go through my RSS feed, and pick out articles that I feel are interesting/would spark discussion here. I also try to conduct myself better here than I might on reddit, where JAQing off and bad faith argumentation are much more common.

I don't want to flood Tildes with too much content, so I'm trying to submit fewer than 10 articles per day. What are some other tips for good etiquette here, particularly insofar as it differs from reddit? I know there is an FAQ about Tildes but I'd like to hear what the community thinks, too.

Best,
-gbbb

Say I wanted to create a thread about running. Running is a sport and hobby. Sports is often seen more as the professional side of things (say, Olympic running). Then again, many runners take their hobby quite seriously and definitely exercise it as a sport. How do I know which one of those two groups is the more appropriate?

I tend to be generous with votes if I like specific posters and want to encourage them. I like to assume that's ok, but is there an official take on that?

And what about people who are likely to share an IP address with me? I'm on a small node with fewer than 200 users, and at least 2 or 3 come here (got invited by one). I don't necessarily know them but will that look like alt accts boosting votes? Is there a whitelist or something like that for verified individuals on the same address maybe?

Update! After a few hours of struggling I managed to set up Read the docs for Tildee, it should help using the library significantly.

After getting some inspiration from TAPS I thought that maybe I try to work on something vaguely similar on my own. And after… some? hours of coding today I came up with this: tildee.py (source)
It's a wrapper for the Tildes Public/Web API that is already used by the site internally to make it work. The obvious problem with that is that it will at one point break when this unstable API is changed. It can do basically all things a normal user can do with the notable exception of applying comment labels (because I haven't gotten around to that yet).

Example of usage for a DM reply bot (result):

import sys
from tildee import TildesClient
import time

# Initialize client and log in, 2FA isn't supported yet and will probably break in horrible ways
t = TildesClient("username", "password", base_url="https://localhost:4443", verify_ssl=False)

while True:
    # Retrieve the "unread messages" page and get a list of the conversations there
    unread_message_ids = t.fetch_unread_message_ids()
    for mid in unread_message_ids:
        # Access the conversation history page; this also clears the "unread" flag 
        conversation = t.fetch_conversation(mid)
        # Get the text of the last message
        text = conversation.entries[-1].content_html
        # Abort if it's from the current user (I don't think this could actually happen)
        if conversation.entries[-1].author == t.username:
            break
        print(f"Found a message by {conversation.entries[-1].author}")
        # If the message contains a reference, reply in kind
        if "hello there" in text.lower():
            print("Replying…")
            t.create_message(mid, f"General {conversation.entries[-1].author}! You are a bold one.")
        # Delay before processing next unread message
        time.sleep(3)
    # Delay before next unread check
    time.sleep(60)

This has a lot of potential. Haven't yet figured out potential for what, but I'll take what I can get.
I'd be really grateful if someone with a little more experience than me (that's not exactly a high bar :P) could give me some pointers on the project's structure and the "API design", hence the ask tag. Other creative ideas for what to use this for are appreciated, too.

Just a few minutes ago I moved this topic from ~creative to ~music, but almost immediately began second guessing my decision. I'm not exactly sure where that belongs, because it's music, but it is creative/the OP's original song. What do you think? Is ~creative more for crafts, IE woodworking and the likes, or anything creative done by the OP? Similarly, I can think of more examples for this, such as if someone wants to show off their Raspberry Pi project, do they put it in ~comp or ~creative? Where does it belong?

Hi fellow Tildes Beta users!

I primarily do my browsing on an iPad or my iPhone. Currently I'm using Chrome.

Until an app is made, what do you all find the best way to browse Tildes is? The formatting is a little wonky for me, which is perfectly understandable. It's not exactly a deal breaker, but it would be a lot easier having a more optimized experience.

I doubt I'm alone, so what're y'alls preferences?

Hello there!

I just received my invite a few minutes ago and I'm happily exploring the site right now.
As many others, I came over from Reddit looking for a better alternative.
I tried to find some information about the current guidelines but wasn't really able to find anything of substance.

Apart from being civil with each other, what's the official ruleset and how can we as testers contribute?

I'm sure occasional self promoted content is actually fine (asking for feedback on music, games, etc), but I've been a part of several subreddits that had to implement rules where you had to split 50/50 linking to your own content and participating in the community (non link comments). This was to curb people from ONLY posting links to their own youtube videos and nothing else. Content itself was fine, usually, but as you can probably tell, smaller subreddits didn't like being treated as ad spaces for youtubers that didn't contribute anything else. It's not a big deal for larger communities, but a real one for niche ones.

How does tildes expect to deal with this? Is it even an issue? Was this discussed (couldn't find any threads by skimming)?

TL:DR: I can't log in to Tildes from Links browser. Other websites are fine.

I'm not the most computer-literate person (especially when it comes to the Internet). I've been getting into Linux and Arch lately, so I'm a little bit better at it now. So I've been trying to learn text browsers (my choice is Links), and although it's been going fine, I can't log in to Tildes. Other websites like Google or Reddit I can log in, but not Tildes for some reason. I enter my username, password, but then it just takes me to the 'we're invite only' page. When I press 'register', it doesn't even lead to register page, it puts me to the 'we're invite only' page again.

I know there's some developers here, do you know what could be the problem?

I've read the docs and I personally have not seen this topic come up yet.

I've been weary/afraid to post any more of my own content since my very first post here on ~Tildes. Are there currently any unofficial rules for self-promotion? We all know Reddit once had that stupid 10:1 (or was it 5:1?) ratio rule before they chucked it. I don't want to feel like a selfish person or a spammy person if I submit content that I created and/or links to accounts that promote myself as a brand.