_ps6d

It's not intended to be difficult to get an invite, I mostly just don't want to constantly deal with large influxes of users because of drama on other sites, persistent trolls, and things like that.

It doesn't show by default to logged-out users, but we've got a devoted group set up for Advent of Code that's reasonably active so far, if anyone's participating in that and would like to join us: https://tildes.net/~comp.advent_of_code

I had to shut that bot down, because eventually just reposting a random popular meme/image from the last 24 hours with a nonsensical title started becoming far too successful and it ended up getting 2,648,254 post karma, while often getting its own posts near the top of /r/all: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimMeta/comments/c5besk/th...

I had a quick look through Dreamwidth's "latest" page (https://www.dreamwidth.org/latest) earlier today, and a major portion of the posts on there were blatant spam for things like credit card scams, "Work from home and make $1000/day!", and so on.

You seem to be hosting a lot of spam, and those spam posts are also far more likely to be getting linked externally on sites like Facebook, since that's the reason they're being created.

Because Dreamwidth is effectively free website hosting along with a free new subdomain for each account, blocking individual subdomains is futile, and it's difficult for external sites to distinguish between spam and legitimate blogs.

I'm sure Facebook will unblock you fairly soon, but unless you get the spam on Dreamwidth under control, this will probably happen fairly often with different sites blocking it. It would be easy to end up with an impression of Dreamwidth being a spam-hosting site, and decide to block it (either manually or automatically).

Blogspot has always been in a similar situation and would get blocked from a lot of sites due to the sheer amount of spam it hosts.

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.

Here's the current month's financials (this is linked from below the donation goal meter on the home page): https://tildes.net/financials

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.

It's possible to detect the difference between the request types if you examine the actual data on them, but the common privacy extensions don't usually examine the requests on that level.

Intercooler seems more appropriate if you're looking to mostly build a standard HTML site with some Javascript/AJAX enhancements though, and (at least from a quick look) EHTML seems to be more aimed at being a templating language with HTML-like syntax that you can use instead of generating the HTML with backend templating.

It supports searching for alternatives with "or", phrases in quotes, and excluding terms with a minus sign, which is all syntax that a lot of people are already used to. For example it can handle a query like:

    blizzard or overwatch -"hong kong"

It's a great addition, and made it even easier to implement reasonable search functionality with PostgreSQL.

I get the impression that they're getting into a state now where there's probably an "expectations mismatch" between what people expect to be doing when they set up a recurring donation compared to how Liberapay actually works.

As the blog post mentions, now you can say "I want to donate $5/month" and you put in $60 to cover a year, but you have to pay that full $60 immediately, and the recipient also receives the whole $60 (minus fees) right away as well. After that point, there's not really any way for the donator to change their mind and stop donating after a few months, so it's more like a one-time donation with a reminder but still being presented as a smaller recurring one.

I think the problem is that overall it will end up encouraging people to make smaller donations for shorter time periods because they won't necessarily want to commit for many months or years' worth up-front. Then that means that they have to be sent reminders to re-donate more often, which feels more annoying and will probably result in people just letting their donations lapse more often than repeatedly renewing them.

The markdown support is extremely minimal and doesn't support a lot of basics like quotes (which causes many people to "quote" by using a code block, which has issues).

A basic private messaging system would be really helpful in a lot of cases. Right now people always have to post email addresses publicly.

It would be nice to have some built-in visibility into things like title changes, link changes, etc. that mods do, instead of needing them to comment manually about everything they do.

They could implement some scraping to automatically add the year to older stories, instead of users needing to flag it and get the mods to do it manually all the time.

And so on.

[1]: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-16340072