Interesting in-depth article about this from the New Yorker. It’s amazing how much of an impact this seems to have had on city politics over the last 30 years or so.

I used Tildes quite a bit for about a year or so, then dropped off in favour of Lemmy. I actually went back for the first time in ages the other week, saw this post and it immediately reminded me why I left.

The reason this seems to have been posted is because of people calling for new tools to moderate or curate their experience and Demios is basically saying these requests are pointless because they’re never going to be implemented.

The people asking for these tools seem to be identifying a fundamental problem with Tildes but because of the way it’s structured I don’t think anything suggested would actually make much of a difference.

One problem is that Demios is the one and only moderator and this is apparently never going to change. This means that problematic content can be slow to be removed, and on the flip side seemingly benign posts can be locked or deleted without explanation. People on Tildes who are happy with this call it the ‘benevolent dictator’ model, and it’s incredibly frustrating unless your views align with those of the one and only mod. This inevitably means that the community self selects to be of a similar mindset.

The other major problem as I see it is the overall structure. Coming from Reddit (or Lemmy) it looks like it is broken up into smaller communities that you can select from the sidebar. But in fact these function more like tags, because everyone is subbed to and can post under any of them. This manifests with the life.women tag which was introduced when I was active on Tildes. Initially this felt like a positive thing, and a place for women to discuss issues relevant to them. However, it’s impossible to curate who or what can be posted under that tag so what you ended up with lots of men arguing in the comments about women’s life experiences and no way to block them. (Compare this to WomensStuff on Lemmy which manages to be inclusive while remaining a safe space.)

Tildes works a select group of people, but for everyone else I think it just ends up a frustrating experience.

My dad worked at Gatwick Airport as a cleaner in the 70s when he was a teenager. His first week there, a woman drops a duty free bag with a bottle of booze in it and he rushes over to clean it up. He’s just about to put the bag, full of liquid booze and broken glass, in the bin when one of the senior porters stops him and tells him to bring it in the back. Turns out they had a filtration system in the break room for this exact scenario. They’d pour the booze out of the plastic bag and through a sieve that would collect all the broken glass, it would all go into a big container at the bottom and voila, free booze! They offered my dad some, but he declined. Anyway, I guess if you were working at Gatwick in the 70s you could have had a chance to drink some airport jungle juice, you’d just need to be brave enough.

You can get bath crayons for kids that let you write directly on the wall of the shower or w/e. Searching brings up lots of options…

I wonder if it would be possible to find an option at an actual university that still aligns with her interests. Thinking more along witchy lines than medical lines, would something like anthropology interest her? There’s specialisms like ethnomedicine which would explore traditional/herbal medicine from a more academic perspective.