With the announcement of Tildes maintenance mode, it's finally official. Tildes has an expiration date. We don't know when it'll be, but we'll surely know when it's passed. I... I don't want to go. I love this place. I love the people on it.

I got here after Rexit, like many of my peers, because reddit was my home online. I participated in discussions. I spent so much time there. I met my husband. It was my little corner of the internet, because it had exactly what I wanted and nothing else.

All that's gone now. When Apollo shut down, I deleted my account out of protest. I regret that now. People pointed me here, to Tildes, and for a moment, just a moment I could smell the musty carpet of the first websites I was ever on. This was it. This was it. A tiny forum with just enough modern convenience to tolerate using it, full of people who were interesting, discussions that were respectful, little to no drama, and a minor legend of the former web at the top, generally content with ruling as a benevolent dictator.

I posted. I participated in discussions. I had such a grand time talking to people, Season One of the Minecraft server will forever be in my heart as the "golden days" of it all, if I had to look back. I check this place religiously. It's in my favourites bar. I still post. I still comment. I still like the people. It's small enough that I can go "hey, there they are!" when I see Creesch or Bauke or Tea. For the first time in a long time I could call a communal web space my... home. It's cheesy. I know.

And now I hear that it's supposed to end? That the experiment has run its course, that sooner or later, but probably sooner than I'd like, it'll all be gone? That I have to pack up all my shit again and find a new place, a new community? What a sick joke, I say, with metaphorical tears in my eyes, because getting mad is at least something. Getting mad is more than removing the stupid bookmark and forgetting about this place like I forgot about LiveJournal, about MySpace, about Blogger, about fucking Ello.

I don't want to go. And I know nobody's asking me to go. But everyone expects everyone else to go at some point. And even though none of you actually know me, truly know me, I still feel like we're familiar. We have tiny, tenuous, brittle relationships that could snap at any point, be it from hostility or apathy. I know that none of this is real, but god damn it, I liked it.

Now you'll say, oh god, Delphi, shut up, this is a forum, it's not that deep, and you're right, so damn right, I couldn't agree more, none of you should mean anything to me, I have friends, I have a life, I have people who love me out there, for real, I shouldn't care about this, but then tell me, why do I have tears in my eyes?

What's the point of this post? Catharsis? Maybe? I didn't expect to feel this way about a little corner of the internet that's sometimes a little snobbish, sometimes a little too high on its own farts, sometimes a little too elitist, but that's where I'm at.

I don't want to let this place go. But I also know that I won't be the last one here.

So if this is the last time I see some of you, I don't blame you. Just know you were part of my life, and that I quite liked that part.

—-

A little edit after crying it out: You’re all right. I hope that Tildes won’t change. I certainly won’t, I’ll stay here, and I hope we’ll have many more years together. This entire thing just dredged up memories of losing online spaces before, and… well, you can imagine the rest. Love y’all.

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.

Inspired by this post by @kfwyre.

For me, there's many; I don't want to influence responses but I will shout out the monthly mental health threads. Those really got me to (over)share feelings and find some reason. I got through dark times thanks to you all, Tildoes.

I understand we have ~life but I think something more ~personal would be more beneficial, life could pertain to a lot of different things but personal would be far more effective.

We could also have ~personal.blogs for us to submit our personal blog posts that don't really have a place anywhere else.

Would open and connect the community a lot more, allow for advice, general questions, and more.