I actually joined Tildes before the API changes, back in February of this year. Before that, I had been a lurker on the site since 2020, so nearly 3 years.
Tildes is...interesting compared to any other social media. Its completely its own thing and there is a heavy focus on the philosophy of the site and the Tildes docs, which is basically the constitution of the website. Long form discussion is encouraged, posting images isn't even an option, and its very focused on providing for its users a great, streamlined experience. The interface is my favorite of all the Reddit cousins, its simple and it loads extremely fast. The software is great, no bugs at all and the interface is simple and lighting fast and the voting system is really well designed in regards to maintaining activity on threads that can be days or even weeks old. The people there are friendly and I've never even seen a bad interaction on Tildes.
However, this comes because the whole site is heavily moderated and controlled by the admins and mods. Long form discussion just isn't really my thing when it comes to online discussions, so I don't talk there much. I don't really like writing a paragraph or more in response to every question online versus having a long in-person discussion or on a real-time messenger like Discord (I'm doing it now of course, but I don't like doing it for every post). I would if every topic there interested me, but that's just not the case and that won't be the case on any site. My last post was 2 months ago, and I've just been very inactive there since making my account. I like reading on there occasionally, but not contributing much. Unfortunately, that's the nature of the site. Like another poster said, its very tightly controlled. While that prevents many trolls from appearing despite the few moderators that are actually on the site and encourages long form discussion, it also hampers the diversity of the people there. Sometimes I criticize the whole "We don't want people from Reddit or other social media" take when it comes to Kbin/Lemmy's growth, but its much worse on Tildes because the site actively wants a certain type of individual. No image support on purpose already filters out a lot of people who could bring great content to the site, and the lack of an ability for users to create topics affects it more. You can't make a topic on Tildes like you can on Kbin or Lemmy, there are strictly defined ones created for you, and they are quite general. You won't see much OC as you will just links and random conversation topics, and that kind of just makes for a lukewarm experience in my opinion. If you want to talk about a specific niche, you're out of luck. Kbin/Lemmy/the Fediverse and Reddit have that, and its a large part of the appeal for me. The lack of user diversity in interests also just makes the experience a little worse. For example, I like space and anime, and the space and anime communities on there aren't the most active, maybe a post weekly or biweekly. I'm also interested in tech, and you can imagine that community is booming 24/7. Compare the ~space community to /m/space, and you'll see the difference. This issue went away somewhat while the Reddit migration was in full effect, but now its returned as activity on the site has dwindled down a bit.
Tildes cares about the users, no doubt, but it doesn't really give them much power over the site. I wish it were less controlled.
I highly suggest you just take a look at it and lurk for a few days on there. What you see is what you get. Its not ultra politically focused like you said Raddle was (I have 0 experience with any of these sites other than Tildes, Kbin and Lemmy), its has equal activity in most of the communities. However, there are only 20 or 30 to actually choose from, and if you want something niche you'll just have to post in one of the communities and see if someone knows about it. If you don't like it, I wouldn't be expecting it to change much, the site culture isn't dynamic like the Fediverse or Reddit for instance. The conversation there is unparalleled by any other platform though. You can find some truly inspiring and deep conversations on there. Its not for me, but you may like it a lot. Its a flawed approach, but the site fulfills what it intends to do very well. For me, Lemmy and Kbin, while not perfect, are the best alternative to Reddit. Tildes is open source and anybody could make an instance of it, but it hasn't happened yet as far as I know.
Ironically, that's the longest thing I've ever typed on Kbin.
Something I do really like about this site is the ability to see the activity of posts including the reduces (down votes). So the guy that reduced the post above appears to be far right, judging by their activity. Fun!
I've already seen a few users who seem to have a habit of downvoting large chunks of a user's comment history if they disagree with them which is 1. sad and 2. makes me wonder if that was a common thing back on reddit since there wouldn't be a way to tell. I think it's overall a good thing that it's visible, it should encourage people to talk more and downvote less.
I can definitely imagine that it happened/s on Reddit, yes. The thing that feels the saddest about doing that is that it really means nothing in no meaningful sense. Its such a impotent form of rage where they aren't debating or even telling you you're wrong, they are marginally impacting others' ability to see the post.
I've got some interest in them but, tbh, only if they're federated. Which I know some are very unlikely to, but I don't really want to be bothered investing in multiple websites with heavily overlapping functions that can't talk to each other (though I know Tildes is moderately different).
"solved" in a sense of "who was he?". i've followed this case for about 15 years and there were the wildest speculations about who he was and what he might have done for a living. at this point it's - please don't read this a cynical - a case of "local man committed suicide halb a century ago" and i doubt that there will be unearthed much about why he did it since not even his own relatives missed him.
What are you reading? Here are a couple of novels that I've grown quite fond of. Common to all of them are that they are freely (and legally) available online; I am not in any way affiliated with them; and they strongly feature female lead characters.
Worm - An introverted teenage girl with an unconventional superpower, Taylor goes out in costume to find escape from a deeply unhappy and frustrated civilian life. Her first attempt at taking down a supervillain sees her mistaken for one. [...] Taylor faces the dilemma of having to do the wrong things for the right reasons. (Warning: this is longer than LotR and has a wi(l)der array of superpowers than Marvel.)
Ra - Discovered in the 1970s, magic is now a bona fide field of engineering. There's magic in heavy industry and magic in your home. It's what's next after electricity.
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow - In the aftermath of a terrorist attack on the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge and BART system, four teenagers defend themselves against the Department of Homeland Security's attacks on the Bill of Rights. (Note: This is a contemporary analogue to Orwell's 1984.)
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