I'm working on a mobile app for Tildes: Three Cheers for Tildes!
In honor of Tildes' 5th birthday, presenting a preview of this app I've been working on, called:
Three Cheers for Tildes
It's not ready for an alpha release yet, but have some proof it's not vaporware:
Pre-alpha app preview: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dZ5cDZFrpUw
Q: What devices will be supported?
Android 6.0 and newer. iOS 12.4 and newer (includes iPhone 5s and iPad Air).
Q: Who is this app for?
Mainly for people who are a great fit for Tildes culture, but have found it hard to keep up, without an app.
Maybe they visited once or twice, liked what they saw, but quickly bounced off because they're more accustomed to apps than websites. They could simply have forgotten about Tildes, without that dedicated icon on their homescreen.
Maybe the lack of an app signaled to some that the site was not worth taking seriously yet.
Or maybe they had been active for a while, and over the years gradually got tired of waiting 5-10 seconds to cold-start a web browser on their phone.
I know Tildes regulars don't particularly need an app. Those who've stuck around have clearly been perfectly fine using the website for the past 5 years, after all. Tildes does have an excellent mobile site already! That said, I'd be thrilled if the regulars tried and ended up enjoying the app, but at the same time, I'm not planning to put in massive effort to change minds and habits that don't need to be changed.
Q: I'm new to Tildes. Is Tildes the Next Big Thing? Is it going to replace <mainstream social network>?
Almost certainly not, and that's more than okay! It was never designed or intended to compete head-to-head with any major social networks. Tildes is its own community with its own way of doing things. We could use some new users in 2023 to keep things fresh, in my opinion. But the goal has never been growth at the expense of quality. I believe most of us want to keep the cozy, and manageable, community feel.
Please read the Tildes Docs if you're interested in the philosophy and policies of the site.
Q: What does the app do differently than the mobile site?
Currently: It follows native UI design patterns. It comes with a homescreen icon. It loads faster than a full web browser engine.
Planned: Easier to submit stories by hitting Share from other apps. Notifications. Content and user filtering features.
Q: Will your app have ads?
No. As long as Tildes itself is ad-free, Three Cheers will remain ad-free.
Q: Will you monetize the app some other way?
I might ask for donations, with options to send money to myself or Tildes or both.
I didn't build this app as a moneymaker per se. It's been a fantastic way for me to brush up on new (to me) technologies, and I wanted to support the Tildes community at the same time. Also to be really honest, my competitive side was fired up being the first person to release a native mobile app for Tildes.
Q: Why is the app closed source?
I don't want to open this can of tildo-shaped worms, but know I have to; <details>-ed for length:
- I am building the app on my own time, without outside assistance or funding. I'm proud of my work, and I make apps for a living, and am not in a position to give the code away for free.
- Client-side code has significantly fewer "natural protections" against copying, compared to open-source server applications, including Tildes itself. The server platform owns the user content which is protected by copyright, owns the domain name, user accounts, private messages, and so on. Client code, on the other hand, is all-or-nothing. If I gave away the code, that's everything—no "natural protections" against wholesale copying.
- From personal experience plus countless anecdotes from friends and fellow app and game developers, open sourcing a client-side app will guarantee dozens if not hundreds of clones. It would likely result in well-resourced Tildes competitors taking the code and using it for their own purposes, backfiring on my intended purpose of helping Tildes.
- The app does not incorporate Tildes' AGPL-licensed code, and is therefore not required to be open source. It interfaces with the output (HTML) of Tildes, just like a web browser does. See the GPL FAQ on the outputs of GPL'ed applications not being covered by GPL.
- My code is often ugly and I want to avoid the incessant questions along the lines of "why are you still using that old technology?" which are too common in app development.
On the other hand, if anybody is inspired to prove me wrong and build an open-source app, by all means, go for it! It would be exciting to see an ecosystem of apps maintained by different developers.
Q: Will you release an open-source SDK at least?
Maybe. I'd be up for collaborating on this. It would largely depend on whether the site admin is confident enough to tackle the increased spam and abuse that may result following a public SDK release.
Thanks for reading! I'll post another topic in ~tildes when an alpha version is ready.
I would definitely used tildes more if there's a dedicated app on my mobile. Thanks for this, looking forward.
Hey @talklittle, big fan of RIF, been using it for over 10 years (is that possible?) it is an incredibly well made app. Anyway, I'm a software designer and would love to help out anyway I can. Do you need QA tester or anything like that? I'm quite used to using early builds of software.
Hey just saw this post. Very cool to see a mobile app coming. I'm one of those people you mentioned - used this site when it first opened up in 2019 and then kind of forgot about it. Now with reddit shitting the bed with their API BS, I've been looking at alternatives. And I know this site isn't meant to replace reddit exactly, but it has me excited to try smaller communities around the internet. So having an app and an icon on my phone's screen will be a nice reminder to check in here more often.
Also, are you the dev for RIF is Fun? I came back here after seeing that post on the RIF subreddit today.
Looks like the same username to me...maybe we will see TIF in the future.
Yeah I saw confirmed on the other post that he's the same guy. So the fact that he's working on an app for Tildes makes me encouraged about the quality of it.
I feel tilde works so well on mobile browser that it would be quite redundant to have a dedicated app for it. The native web is clearly designed with mobile device in mind. I don’t see what an app would add to what tilde doesn’t do already massively.
However, it’s always nice to have more options so tilde is more accessible and reach out to a bigger audience :)
I agree with tilde working on the mobile browser, but personally as a creature of habit I would greatly benefit having an app to use.
Not having an app wouldn't cause me to stop coming back, but I certainly would check in more with one.
I am the same. Often I would want to browse Tildes but I'm just not used to a Web browser being the thing I use for browsing a "news aggregator" on my phone - I always use a dedicated app. However I fully agree that the UI of the site is perfectly usable on mobile (of course there is place for improvement, but there would always be), so really what I personally need is just a different icon, that's dedicated to Tildes on my phone and a PWA would be able to do that.
Thay being said I would instantly install the alpha as soon as I know it's here. I've been a RIF user since I've had a phone that can install it.
On Firefox at least, in menu there is "Add to home screen" it places a shortcut on the desktop and uses the website icon.
You know, I agree with you. There are some "old school" design decisions that got left behind and labelled "ugly" -- but are actually really solid human user interface friendly design decisions!
Example: text, not icons.
Clickable things are either links or icons or BOXED
which means that older links and expired vote boxes etc are not boxed!
It's really nice and consistent and clean.
This is good news. Looking forward to the app. Been a RIF user for years.
Same here - paid for it 12 years ago and have only used this. So excited that the dev is looking at creating a Tildes app, RIF was amazing.
I'd happily throw some dollars your way, @talklittle
Since you mentioned throwing money at him,
Have you heard the good news of our board app saviour, and his donation drive?
Thanks, I'm gonna put my money where my mouth is!
Coming over from
RedactedIs Fun, this sounds great. Any estimated timeframe for first release?Hi @orthogonius! Pasting reply from other topic:
I'll post a public alpha release of "Three Cheers for Tildes" to ~tildes when it is ready sometime this year. As "alpha" implies, it will be missing important features, but I will try to get the first alpha in a condition where the core functionality like the default feeds, comments, and submitting topics are working.
I was wondering why you've been making so many posts on ~test over the last few months. ;)
Too obvious eh? :)
I actually just started using it, and realized I'm actually still in RIF Reddit is fun.
Someone sent me the invite link, signed up, started connecting.
Looked up at the top and I'm still logged into Reddit is fun lol. So maybe they can fork?
I am new to this site and I am really hoping for its long term success, social media these days seems to be too focused on short term content like image macros and memes and seeing a project dedicated more towards text based discussions and long form content is pretty awesome :)
Sounds amazing! I’m one of those people who actually prefers a native app to using a website so…this is right up my alley.
What are you writing the app in? I assume it’s something cross-platform if there’s both an iOS and Android version?
I am 100% on board when you need iOS alpha testers!
As for it being closed source, I personally don’t mind at all. Just because this site code is open source, that doesn’t mean that anything that connects to it should be too. I use Ivory for Mastodon, which is closed source.
Thanks for the enthusiasm!
Native all the way! On Android that means the Material components library, Appcompat, Fragments. On iOS that means UIKit (programmatic, no storyboards) since UIKit is needed to support iOS 12.4, since the newer SwiftUI framework has a higher OS requirement. iOS 12.4 target is because I wanted to support iPhone 5s and iPad Air, for reasons.
Also there is some shared code I wrote in Rust, to help with parsing HTML and rendering text.
i'm sad that it's not opensource, because i contributed to RIF about 13 years ago :)
but i'm happy for you @talklittle -- you gave me a tip for my RIF contribution back in the day, so i will be more than happy to throw some money back at you!
Wanted to note there is a campaign going where the more donations to tildes is done, @talklittle will release it faster. Looks like we got one goal for November. See campaign for details.
awesome, just signed for tildes' patreon!
I've made a habit of keeping a launcher on my machine that's just a webview to Tildes, since I can't make bookmarks with my launcher unfortunately. Please let me know when you're ready for action. Also, themes, plz.
This would be great, excited to hear it’s in the works. This would definitely make using Tildes daily smoother.
This is great! Tildes and and a couple of other websites are the only reason why I launch Safari myself these days. It's not a great experience because I always use Safari in private mode, so I'm almost never signed in, which makes reading new comments harder.
I'll be on the lookout for the TestFlight version!
This is super cool!
Now that I'm thinking about it, can we make Tildes a PWA? Then we could have push notifications and whatnot. I may be interested in contributing code too. @Deimos?
Apple just added push notifications and icon badging for webpages in the latest iOS release (16.4) earlier this month.
Took them long enough, but at least everyone would be able to use them now.
Awesome! While you're definitely right in "It was never designed or intended to compete head-to-head with any major social networks" I think an app will benefit greatly to the flow and timeliness of the conversations here. I only use this site from a computer and I'm only using a computer when I'm working (for some reason I can't log in from a browser on mobile). That combined with time differences creates big gaps in my participation.
This sounds interesting. Hope there's a dark mode on your roadmap!
In the meantime you can set your display mode by selecting your theme in the footer of any page. I'm a fan of Zenburn, but there's a number of other dark modes available.
Oh, yeah, I'm on Dracula for now - I really just meant in the app (as the preview I saw was in light).
Thanks for the tip!
As a huge Free Software nerd (but no programming capabilities) I would like to see the source code available for those who want to tweak it, but I guess whatever, I'll probably still use it, right now I'm using mobile with no difficulties, but the app would be nice too, like you said, having the icon to click I may visit more
Baconreader user here. I'm ready to jump off that infamous burning ship. An app would definitely help a lot.
Looking forward to this as someone who's been using RIF for over a decade.
+1
Looking forward to this! As a user of your previous app for, whew idk even know how many years. I need this in my life :)
Super excited for this! I'll probably still use the browser version (maybe hopefully contribute to making it a PWA someday), but an app is still needed.
Disappointed to see it'll be closed-source, I would have loved an ecosystem of fully open-source apps alongside Tildes' source code, but it's alright.
What a pleasant surprise!
Been a RIF user for years.
Stoked to switch my rif app to tif!
TCfT, actually, as Three Cheers for Tildes is the name of the app.
I love it!
This is wonderful news. Been using RIF ever since I can remember. Got a Tildes account, but having a hard time using this site on my phone's browser. It's like you get me!
Is there some way I can get a notification for the first release?
Experience with alpha/beta testing various software/hardware from video games, web pages, other apps. Interested / "willing" to help out using and reporting back when the app is android ready for that stage
You have my trust that it'll be great. I've been on RIF for so long that I can't honestly remember a time I didn't use it. I will gladly test it out when a public build is ready.
Looks great! Definitely will use on my phone, but I was wondering what the layout for tablets/iPads looks like. I would prefer a layout reminiscent of the one that is used in Relay, but anything that isn't just a phone UI stretched out would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you, @talklittle! I used rif for 11 years and loved how clean it was.
What I'd love most for tildes is a similar interface, namely the "root, parent, next" options.
It can be a slog getting through comments sections here so far.
Thanks for all that you do!
Edit: Spelling.
Hey! I'm looking forward to this, considering how goof RIF was I have high hopes for this
This is exciting! I have to admit I don't visit often mostly due to the lack of a mobile app and unfortunately the user base just being too small for many of my interests. Hopefully this will encourage more new user engagement as you stated.
I’m desperate for an app, I hate using safari. Good luck mate!
Since you said Safari I’ll assume you’re on iOS. You could try Backtick or Surfboard
Ha, I just found surfboard right now and I’m replying via it! Yeehaw 😎
Thanks for making this. Pretty clean and not resource intensive.
Was wondering if you'd consider implementing a way to expand or collapse comments by clicking on them, similar to what you find in apps like RedReader, Joey, or even the official Reddit app?
Another feature I believe is important is the addition of a small arrow navigation icon that allows you to jump to the next main comment. It's a bit hard to describe precisely, but RedReader, for instance, has this feature located in the bottom right corner of its app.
I appreciate your efforts on developing this app.
Collapsing and expanding exists in the app, exactly where you think it is.
YAY looking forward to it!