Finally got access to Tildes today... Seems unimpressive
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 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)
Thank you for pointing that out. I just did not see it. At least two of the themes were dark/cool enough to not hurt my eyes, so I do appreciate that option.
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.