I got an invite code and so spent a bit of time browsing around because I’d heard good things about it. But I was surprised at how basic and non-diverse it all is. The forums are preset and are very generic. The conversations are definitely better than Reddit, but no better or worse than the ones I’ve had with people on Fedi.
Kbin is definitely my new home but I do like checking out the other options - I’d just heard really good things about Tildes and it definitely didn’t match up with what I was playing about with today. Anyone else had a go at it? What’s your take?
I really like the quality of the conversation over there but felt a little bit uneasy at the way the structure was influencing their community’s culture.
The whole thing is owned/controlled by this one guy Deimos, everyone there is a mod but he is the only admin. He sort of gardens it, as in he deletes whole conversations if he doesn’t like the direction they are taking the community in. Understandably there was a lot of reference to “Deimos says” and “Deimos thinks” when they discussed the reddit influx.
I got into it with those guys around summer of 2020 over college kids returning to school in person. I live near a large college campus and we had a newborn so I wasn’t keen on a large number of young people coming into town and giving us covid. Deimos, told me to stop talking about it, so I asked “how do I delete my account?” and I never went back to check on what his response was.
Jokes on them because we got covid several times after our child started daycare a year later.
I feel like on average their conversation quality is higher than the other alternatives. However, as you said, it is not very diverse.
Tildes also feels very “primp & proper” so to speak. While the conversations are generally very civil and of good quality, I also feel like the place is ruled with an iron fist; step a little bit out of line, and you’re pretty much gone. This is then coupled with the fact that you’re not able to make custom communities.
In the end, its good for civil discussion within the bounds of what is already considered acceptable by the admin. I almost feel like it has the opposite problem Reddit does - whereas conversations on Reddit are largely driven by bots and the hivemind, Tildes is controlled by Deimos and whoever Deimos approves of.
i spent some time there a few years back. it seemed… sanitized… and lacked any personality. im a silly person, i like silly things. silly isnt allowed there, generally. it felt like you had to have a stick shoved waaaay up your asshole to participate.
When I learned it was impossible to create or join a smaller community I noped out of there. I’m not interested in “gaming”, I’m interested in a few smaller games only.
I browsed around it for a good 20 minutes or so. My initial knee-jerk reaction is that I would not want to join a community with no ability to create or join specific areas that could be narrowed down to more specific topics. “Gaming” for example (and as someone else already mentioned), has to be video games, of all forms (retro, console, computer, homebrew, hacks - from all years) alongside board games, card games, browser games, children’s games, educational games, physical toys, etc. It’s a mess, to me at least. There aren’t even that many categories.
It is also very sterile-feeling. I appreciate a good old-fashioned text wall, but no options for background and text colors even? (Maybe that is an option if you are able to log into the site)
There are themes, if you scroll down to the bottom I think it’s there. I’ve just stuck to love light since I started using it.
The idea here is that you have general categories and then you rely on tags to do more granular filtering. so you may be on the gaming group, but if you really hate retro gamess you would instead add games.retro (or something similar) to a filter list.
The idea of only a few groups and no custom group creation is intentional. There were other reddit alternatives that died out because everone was creating new groups willy nilly and it meant no one group could get enough traction. In contrast, Tildes only started with a dozen groups and you start out subscribed to everything.