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What is Tildes?
Oh, you mean you didn't see the last sub-clause of the last paragraph of the third section of the announcement page linked to from the page above? /s

"a new link-aggregator-style community site that's starting its invite-only alpha today"

Seriously, site creators and submitters, you need to do a better job of explaining what you're talking about!

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Oh, reddit without all of the annoying users. Also, without all of the not-annoying users.

Hmmm.

Tildes.net says it's invite-only and leads to a blog post about the announcement of Tildes, but you have to parse the language to understand what it is. I honestly can't stand sites that assume you know what they are all about. Just a couple of sentences describing what it is and why you should care on the main page would be nice.
"a non-profit community site driven by its users' interests"

Right in the header of the page it links to. Not sure what's confusing about that.

If you're asking "is it going to look more like reddit or more like Imzy", well... it's too early for that, isn't it? Ain't wrote yet.

I read the linked blog post about what it is, and I still don't know what it is. I guess it isn't for me.
It's in large bold text at the very top of the post:

If this is the first that you've heard of Tildes, you should start by reading the announcement blog post (https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes) for general information about the project and its goals.

To be fair, even that page does a terrible job explaining what it actually is (as opposed to what problem it's solving).
That page doesn't actually say what it is either.
Had the same problem. Got wisps of information about it being like reddit, like HN, like etc

Most useful information I've seen so far is the previous discussion here on HN [1]

A quick summary: Ex-Reddit employee creates own version of Reddit. Upvotes intact but downvotes replaced with what looks similar to Slashdot's moderation (tag it Joke, Noise, Offtopic, Troll, Flame) in more of a downvote with a reason

Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/qit6zPk

[1] Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093

There is not a single screenshot to explain the product, anywhere.
This trend of people putting things on hacker news that weren't targeted at hacker news, and then hacker news readers complaining that they aren't written appropriately to target hacker news is weird to me.

If you're already following tildes' blog, the title alone is enough to know what they're announcing.

But, tl;dr: it's a reddit-alike

I'm bummed that at multiple occasions it says that tildes does not support free speech.

What would stop someone from forking tildes and creating free speech version?

I think we as a society need to evolve to a more nuanced take on free speech where we can recognize its value as a society-wide norm while still seeing the necessity for curating discourse to build thriving communities of discussion.

If someone going to attempt to gaslight the debate at every turn and invoke "the Jews" as the central cause of the world's problems, I have no problem excluding them on a permanent basis. Whether they were trolling or genuine, they are a bad actor that harms the discourse for everyone.

Nothing, that's the problem of decentralization.

I know this is the common usage of free speech, but I don't think it's good-- I would rather people call it just 'Only not illegal speech' or something. Free speech, in the original sense, is only the government's guarantee-- speech is not something that the government will write laws for.

In private society, though, it's laughable to consider that that was ever the status quo. The open free speech market is a seriously toxic thing. Who wants to be forced to have their house be a free speech zone, where someone can always shout that you're a pedophile, they screwed your mom, look here for ISIS forums-- no one in real life would tolerate that. It's just a ticking time bomb of liability, going off every other week.

In the real world, in every society, people have cultures and mores to decide what speech isn't tolerated. Some are obviously more draconian than others, but insisting that everyone regress to 'Only-not illegal speech' just seems to create such a miserable, angry world.

You mean like on Hacker News as well? Part of civil conversation is boundaries and consequences. You have Gab if you're bummed so bad.

You seem to know what open source means, so you know full well that you can fork it if you wish.

Gab is "open source Twitter". This seems like "open source reddit" which, IMO, is more needed.
There's Voat, looks like a really welcoming place with plenty of intellectual discussion.

https://voat.co/

Eh, I checked it out and it's indeed full of xenophobic trolls.

I am bummed again that there are so few "regular" people that care about free speech.

Regular people do care about free speech, but you can't have a platform that cares about free speech that doesn't also treat regular people and xenophobic trolls equally, in which case the former tends to chase the latter off and take over like a cancer.
Nothing stops it, that's part of the point. People should feel free to fork it and start their own site with different ideals, features, etc., they just have to open-source all their changes/updates to the code as AGPLv3 requires.
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Not a single screenshot, no video introduction, no Docs/Getting Started/FAQ pages, not even a well structured explanation page of what is this project and how will affect the internet in a large scale. No vision or a generic expectation with lots of "what if". C'mon guys you spend so much time coding this thing and you threw up the presentation, that's a shame.