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Frequent Deimos-Answered Questions
This is a list of commonly asked questions that already have a definitive answer from @Deimos, the creator and administrator of Tildes.
Why is the comment box at the bottom?
To promote reading all — even very new — comments before posting a new one.
As mentioned, we’ve talked about this multiple times, and it’s probably the most common request for change I’ve heard so far—I think most people think it’s a mistake that it’s at the bottom, not something I did deliberately. People have already linked you to some of the other discussions about it, so let me cover something new this time that I’ve come to realize about why I like having it at the bottom.
Of course, I think it’s a good thing that it encourages people to read the existing comments before posting their own, but there’s also a more subtle side effect to this: it encourages responding to other people over posting your own top-level comment. While you’re reading the comments on your way down, it’s more likely that you’ll consider replying to someone else. Maybe you’ll end up saying basically the same thing that your top-level comment would have, but now you’re doing it by discussing with someone else, instead of just throwing your thoughts out (and hoping that other people start discussing with you).
Also, yes, this gets more and more inconvenient as the thread gets larger, but I think that’s also a good thing in some ways. I think most of us that have a lot of reddit experience have learned that once a thread gets to a certain size, a new top-level comment has very little chance of being seen by more than a tiny group of users. If we’re coming into a large thread with hundreds of comments, we know that if we want any chance of our comment being seen at all, you pretty much have to reply to one of the chains that’s already near the top. This situation isn’t really great overall, but I think it’s even worse because the comment box being at the top encourages people to post new top-level comments, which will probably feel discouraging when they end up getting no responses or even votes.
One thing that I think is good to keep in mind too is that all threads don’t have to behave the same, and maybe we can eventually have some different thread “types”. For example, the introductions thread is one where people definitely should be encouraged to post new top-level comments (and the thread should probably also be sorted so the newest comments come first by default). So maybe in the future we could have a separate thread type that sorts by new by default and also moves the comment box to the top, since it’s more appropriate in that type of thread.
— Deimos
How do we create new groups?
Currently, not at all.
Groups are not “owned” by users, and (at least for now) can not be created by users. This may change in the future, but the lack of user-created groups initially will make it simpler to keep the hierarchy organized, as well as concentrate activity in fewer groups while the site is still small.
Yes, there aren’t many groups yet, but like you said, the site is still small and doesn’t need them yet. There are only about 30 topics posted on most days between all the groups, we don’t need to split the site into hundreds of highly-specific, inactive groups. Reddit didn’t even have subreddits for years. The hierarchical group system will allow us to expand the groups pretty easily as needed.
— Deimos
Will Tildes support languages besides English (i18n)?
Not for now.
Multiple of the site’s goals will be difficult or impossible to work towards without being able to understand what’s going on in a community, so for now they need to be primarily in English. This may change someday in the future, and if it does, the hierarchical groups could work very well for giving other languages their own set of groups.
— The FAQ
What will Tildes users be called?
There’s no official demonym, and the majority apparently doesn’t want a single one.
Despite @Kat’s insidious attempt to influence the data, “waves” as a demonym only received 5.5% of the vote. The leader for that, overwhelmingly, is “no demonym at all”, with a combined 49% of the votes and 18.5% of respondents strongly preferring the site not to have a demonym. Second place, the generic “users”, only has 15.8% in comparison. The first Tildes-specific demonym present is Tilders/~rs, with 13.4%.
Why can’t I use my “throwaway” password!?
Tildes prevents you from creating an account with weak or known-breached passwords for security reasons.
I worked at reddit for years and personally dealt with the effects of thousands upon thousands of accounts being compromised and used to spam, vote-cheat, etc. It was almost always because people use bad passwords and re-use their bad passwords. I had to repeatedly spend days or weeks dealing with the fallout from that, helping people recover access to their accounts, and so on. I’d really like to avoid needing to repeat that here.
You’re right that the value of an individual account is low, but people don’t compromise one account and stop. Allowing weak/re-used passwords enables large-scale compromises (“credential-stuffing attacks”), and that’s the real issue.
The current method of blocking all known-breached passwords is widely recommended, including by NIST:
When processing requests to establish and change memorized secrets, verifiers SHALL compare the prospective secrets against a list that contains values known to be commonly-used, expected, or compromised. For example, the list MAY include, but is not limited to:
- Passwords obtained from previous breach corpuses.
- Dictionary words.
- Repetitive or sequential characters (e.g. ‘aaaaaa’, ‘1234abcd’).
- Context-specific words, such as the name of the service, the username, and derivatives thereof.
If the chosen secret is found in the list, the CSP or verifier SHALL advise the subscriber that they need to select a different secret, SHALL provide the reason for rejection, and SHALL require the subscriber to choose a different value.
Generate a random password for every site. Store it in a password manager, text file, or just write it down on a piece of paper. Yes, it’s less convenient than using the same password everywhere. That’s exactly the point.
— Deimos
Will Tildes support anonymous posting?
Maybe at some point. There’s a daily discussion topic about it.
Does Tildes have a warrant canary?
No.
It’s an interesting question, and I honestly haven’t researched warrant canaries very heavily, but my general feeling towards them is a bit negative because I don’t think they’re very useful.
A few concerns/problems I have with warrant canaries in general:
The legal status of them is pretty questionable. A lot of the justification for them in the US seems to be based on the First Amendment, and since Canada’s laws are a little different, it might be even more questionable here. I just found this article written by Jon Penney (a Canadian lawyer and a great guy that I’ve met and talked to a few times), and he doesn’t seem very confident about the legal basis for them in Canada. I could probably contact him and talk to him about it more to see if his opinion’s changed at all in the last few years.
They’re kind of only usable once. Once you remove it, you can’t really put it back. Even the people that support warrant canaries seem to think they get even more iffy if you start trying to increase the specificity of them (such as by re-adding a new one or narrowing down the date range).
Even in the cases where they’ve been used and removed, nobody seems to care and nothing happens. Reddit had one; it was removed a couple years ago. Was it removed because something actually happened, or did they just not want to have it any more? What did removing it actually mean? Regardless of the answers to those questions, as far as I can tell, nothing significant happened in response to it being removed. So was there even a point?
— Deimos
Will Tildes support activitypub/federation?
No.
Decentralized communities are interesting and have a lot of potential, but that model also introduces its own problems and difficulties. Tildes is already attempting to do quite a few things differently to improve the quality of online communities, and I’m more interested in focusing on those goals without introducing the additional complexity of decentralization.
— The FAQ
Will Tildes have a mastodon/pleroma/fediverse instance?
Maybe at some point.
There isn’t anything currently, but I’ve vaguely thought about setting up a Tildes instance where everyone would automatically get the same username as they have on the site itself (and no separate registration).
I’m not sure if I’ll ever actually do it, but I think it’s an interesting idea and could be a good way to still have some of the “lighter” conversations and content, but keep it a little separated.
— Deimos
Does Tildes have an official chat?
No, but there are some unofficial chats.
Will keyboard-only browsing be supported on Tildes?
We don’t know. There is an issue for it, but it hasn’t been accepted or denied by Deimos yet. If it’s denied, a feature like that could be implemented in an extension.
Is there a moderation log on Tildes?
There is no global moderation log. All changes to a topic are logged in its sidebar under “Topic Log”. This log is deleted after thirty days.
Is there a list of Tildes moderators?
There are no conventional moderators on Tildes. The only person with permissions to remove/lock topics or ban users is Deimos. A handful of users can move topics and change titles, while some more can edit tags. Every account older than one week can moderate comments by applying labels.
Will Tildes have a mobile app?
Not an official one, the website is designed for usability on mobile devices as well as on desktop.
Tildes is a website. Your phone already has an app for using it—it’s your browser.
Tildes will have a full-featured API, so I definitely don’t want to discourage mobile apps overall, but the primary interface for using the site on mobile should remain as the website. That means that mobile users will get access to updates at exactly the same time as desktop ones, and full functionality should always be available on both.
Will Tildes have notifications on the site (mobile/desktop)?
There’s an issue for desktop notifications pending. You can get mobile notifications with a little tinkering — see this comment chain.
Will Tildes have rich media embeds like images/videos?
There’s an old daily discussion topic about this with an apparent consensus against it. Currently there is no open issue/request for embeds on GitLab.
Why was my topic title/URL changed?
If a user changed your topic title without consulting you, it was either to correct a spelling/grammar mistake or to correct an editorialized or misleading title. Look into the topic log and send the user a private message to find out why. Changes different from those are usually discussed with the OP before. Currently only Deimos can change URLs.
What is the policy on self-promotion?
There aren’t any strict rules at this point. Overall, it should be fine as long as you do it in moderation and it doesn’t seem to be your primary reason for interacting with the community. The guideline that I came up with long ago while moderating was something like: “it’s fine to be a Tildes user with a website, but not to be a website with a Tildes account”. [Emphasis added by wiki]
That is, if you’re already involved with the community in other ways, it’s totally fine to share your own content too, but people shouldn’t just be treating Tildes as a source of an audience.
— Deimos