What struck me immediately was how fast this site loaded. No font popping, no cookie waivers, no newsletter nagging, no huge images, no JavaScript fade-in, no scrolljacking, no signup wall. Funny how practical it is to make a functional forum and news aggregator that Just Works.
I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this and would love to get an invite!
Thanks! Keeping the site minimal and fast is definitely one of my main goals, and I'm never going to add any third-party assets, advertising, or anything like that (for both speed and privacy reasons).
Signed up and it looks great! Looking forward to seeing it grow.
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.
Yes, that's definitely planned over the longer term, but the community is too small to support highly-specific groups for now. Various other "reddit clones" have made the mistake of allowing users to create communities immediately, and they ended up with thousands of inactive, abandoned ones.
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.
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
Wow. These links opened new doors I didn't know existed. I've been experimenting with sponsorship ads to fund my sites because I'm very against the current advertising model. However, Coil looks to be an interesting alternative to the ad model as a whole.
It really doesn't take much when your goal is "sustainable". The site's actual expenses have always been more than covered from donations, and the current servers can probably easily handle at least 100x the traffic. The goal now is just bringing in enough to be able to pay myself a somewhat respectable salary.
Here's the current month's financials (this is linked from below the donation goal meter on the home page): https://tildes.net/financials
Thank you for creating Tildes, and open sourcing it.
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.
What's to stop this from falling into the same trap as always? They grow, user donations aren't enough to sustain them anymore so they have to look into alternative ways of getting money, users hate it, they start a spinoff that promises to be better, rinse and repeat.
That trap happens because of sites basing themselves on venture capital, advertising, and chasing growth/profit.
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.
How do you know donations will keep up with usage? I felt like the OP was referring to a situation where Tildes takes off and becomes large organically.
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!
Not OP but server costs are not that expensive in the grand scheme of things. A $5 DO droplet can easily sustain 500-1000 active users. If you were doing video or audio streaming I could see concerns, but at the core of it all the server is doing is reading and writing strings and that's not a very intensive process. A $200/mo server could handle millions of daily visits, and you'd likely not grow further than that without running into the actual wall: labor.
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.
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.
You could throttle (or even drop) connections from non-donor users, calculated to just be enough keep a manageable load on the servers.
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.
Hm. This is rare (for me). Something i liked because at first glance nothing which is disturbing or annoying from a design point of view. Has usable themes even, with the exception of the solarized ones. Always wondered who the people are which would profit from that, or what displays?
Could maybe use some setting for different padding.
Edit: Different padding as in tiny/small/compact/cozy/comfortable/large/huge view like in some google apps?
This is great: fast, interesting content, comments, voting, but... I can't do anything until I get an invite.
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.
check my karma: it's pretty good. You've just crossed a line.
What does that have to do with anything? You're not wrong that your comment is super obnoxious, so if you're aware of the issue... why not just not?
(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.)
Tildes is a heavily moderated community with strict guidelines. Right now it doesn't have the advanced moderation tools required to accommodate an unlimited number of people while still enforcing quality content and civil interactions.
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!
Or maybe it is wide, and your opinions are just really out there (or you really were in fact an asshole.).
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.
I don't remember how many bans there have been on Tildes to date but it's either two or three, and they're always a big deal. So I don't know about your definition of "culling".
> Culling means the removal of something with undesirable traits.
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.
I have 10 invites available, send an email to mrbig033@protonmail.com for an invite code. Include your Hacker News username in the message so I can verify you.
there are several people asking for invites. pm me or reply here and I'll invite you (Until my ten invites run out). In roughly 7h because I'm going to sleep now.
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 ;)
Sadly I’m out of the edit window, so I’ll do it as a reply: If you don’t have any contact information in your profile, I really can’t send you an invite.
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.
> Reddit-like community with more intelligent discourse
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.
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.
Yes, I did. 'Light-hearted fun' perhaps but it strikes me as in very poor taste as someone whose parents lived through the 1940s. Okay, you went there - to its logical conclusion in which your time adventures messing around with the past inadvertently sees the Axis win the war and the 1000 year reign commences as forseen. And nobody wants that.
'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.
I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this and would love to get an invite!