Tildes – a non-profit community site
tildes.net
tildes.net
I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this and would love to get an invite!
There's quite a bit more info about my approaches from a technical perspective here: https://docs.tildes.net/philosophy/site-implementation
The main reason I actually use Reddit is because there's a community for almost anything. I had a quick browse through the issues/roadmap but; do you have a plan to allow user-created groups or subgroups? For example, ~food is too general for bread-making and so reddit has communities like https://old.reddit.com/r/breadit, which is a great place to ask for baking advice specific to baking bread.
Even reddit itself didn't support subreddit creation for over 3 years. It takes a long time to have a userbase large enough for it to work.
In the meantime, Tildes has a pretty flexible tagging system to help categorize topics, and tags can transition into formal groups quite nicely.
The best explanation of the site's goals is probably still the original announcement blog post: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes
Here's the discussion on HN at the time (note that the site was totally private at that time and you couldn't even view it without an invite yet): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093
Feel free to ask any questions, and if you're interested in an invite please just email the address in the blog post and I'll send you one soon. It's not intended to be difficult to get an invite, I just want to keep the growth controlled while a base site culture and more features get built up.
The company I work for, Coil, is specifically looking to enable sites like this have an alternative revenue model that is not based on ads[1]. If you have any questions you can reach out to me matt[at]companyurl
I would also suggest you check out https://www.grantfortheweb.org/
Here's the current month's financials (this is linked from below the donation goal meter on the home page): https://tildes.net/financials
I was wondering if federation, like with GNU Social/Mastodon, was part of the overall roadmap. I.e., having two separate Tildes instances that can interact with each other.
EDIT: Ok, I see it isn't planned according to the discussion here: https://tildes.net/~tildes/c8p/how_would_federation_work_wit...
https://docs.tildes.net/philosophy/site-implementation#use-m...
Tildes is a non-profit with no advertising or investors, so none of that pressure is there. There's no danger of donations not being enough to sustain it. The expenses are already far more than covered and it could easily stay running in its current state forever.
I'm currently building a site that I am considering attempting to make possible via donations, much like Tildes. Any advice you can share? How well have donations been working? Any gotchas? Thanks for any insights you can share!
The costs to keep it running are already covered by over 10x with the current donations, and I believe the existing servers could easily handle at least 100x the current traffic level.
In terms of advice, I'd say:
- Don't go into debt (or take any investments) to launch the site.
- Build something lightweight so the costs are low. Use dedicated server(s), avoid cloud hosting like AWS.
- Incorporate as a non-profit if you can.
That's where things get dicey. You have to pay people, and ideally yourself, for the labor you invest into the project. As Tildes is a non profit it's already clear that the developer is building it out of love and not a desire to sustain his or her lifestyle. If the developer wanted a developer salary or enough income to hire another developer, though, I agree that donations wouldn't be adequate enough. That's when you turn to selling features (i.e. Reddit coins) or selling ads.
Then, if users don't like it, they can pay for it. But with the throttling it actually has a direct affect; they can immediately see an improvement, rather than just an abstract 'vote with your wallet', 'oh if everyone thought like that [why pay, SEP] there would be no server' payment.
I have 10 invites available, send an email to stevewodil@gmail.com for an invite code. Include your Hacker News username in the message so I can verify you.
EDIT: All invites are now gone, sorry
Edit: Different padding as in tiny/small/compact/cozy/comfortable/large/huge view like in some google apps?
Tedious.
This invite only model sucks an 18-metre radius dog anus. We've seen it far too many times before. It's really boring and overdone and needs to die. Seriously, just let us in.
And I know what you're thinking, "Wow, this comment is super-obnoxious and we don't want this kind of person in here", but check my karma: it's pretty good. You've just crossed a line.
The problem here is I'm getting old and one day I'm going to die and I only have so much breath left in my body, so I don't have the time or the patience for your infuriating invite only model.
Please: stop arsing around and open it up.
check my karma: it's pretty good. You've just crossed a line.
(I'm sure that the response would be "the invite-only model merits being a jerk in response", but given the topic is community it feels like believing something that self-serving/self-perpetuating of malbehavior ought to be disqualifying.)
We're hostile to trolls, saboteurs, personal attacks, self-promotion and repeated empty or trivial junk comments.
If it's cliquish to discourage activity that makes social spaces miserable, then that's the kind of clique I'd like to belong to.
Its unfortunate that some social spaces are uncomfortable with divergent viewpoints.
If everyone keeps calling you out, it's possible the problem isn't with everyone. I'm not saying that's always the case, I'm just pointing out the odds aren't in your favour.
And when the mod locks an account without explanation, I'm sure that the community doesn't notice.
You just defined "moderation". Just because you call it culling doesn't make it so. And your bad-faith approach in this thread makes me think if you were indeed banned from Tildes (which I'm starting to doubt), it was the right call.
Question yourself.
Anyway, you haven't got an invite yet, send an email to mrbig033@protonmail.com asking for invite code. Please include your Hacker News username in the message. We'll be happy to have you!
In a recent census we realized we have very few non-tech people and women, so please help us even the scales by reaching out if you see this ;)
This is how I felt when Gmail started.
(I like both at the moment.)
And I've got a few invites. Reply and ping via email (see my HN user page) if interested.
Tildes is great, glad it’s getting exposure here. It was interesting watching the community unfold on a subreddit before eventually migrating over to a hosted third party site.
I like the approach the creator is taking with the site and is a great candidate for a Reddit-like community with more intelligent discourse.
Except the mod makes no effort to explain policies like HN mods do, and will ban accounts without explanation or recourse. Very clannish, IMHO.
I feel like that's an unfair assertion. There is a lot of intelligent discourse on Reddit. There is also a lot of utter garbage on there, sure, but byte for byte, there aren't many websites with as much quality content as Reddit.
No thanks, I'll give it a miss.
Stories about killing Hitler and saving millions of lives are a staple of science fiction, and an interesting way to reason about time travel.
I created that thread as a creative exercise for others to partake in good, light-hearted fun. Despite the subject, there were absolutely no cases of misbehavior. That's what you get when you're in a heavily moderated community that takes being nice to each other very seriously.
'a heavily moderated community that takes being nice to each other very seriously' would describe this forum, for the most part. Thus my reluctance to join another community comprised somewhat of HN invitees merely to discuss topics HN might find taboo such as time travelling assassination of historical figures.
https://tildes.net/register?code=B2M91-W6VD5-ABFG8
https://tildes.net/register?code=LGG9Q-26K5G-LU8RK
https://tildes.net/register?code=GBLXM-N3GPO-V4MN4
https://tildes.net/register?code=MWMSC-2970F-VPWYM
https://tildes.net/register?code=2LDQG-FJ1N2-SM8F0
https://tildes.net/register?code=GLF5C-JHMWP-MV4YH
If you want an invite, you can just email me as explained in the announcement post: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes