[cfabbro]

Tildes plans on opening up group creation at some point, deimorz just didn’t want to do that to start since it has hurt other similar startups by doing so, e.g, imzy. Open community creation to start fractures the user base too much and as a result most wind up as ghost towns.

One of the primary ideas with group hierarchy and tagging on tildes is to give us a way to judge interest level in subjects and allow new communities to form organically from that. However Deimos has also said he is not opposed to others ways for communities to form, such as a few trusted users simply saying “hey, this would be a good idea for a community to add” or even a petition from users.

The other nice thing about group hierarchy is that if a new subgroup spawns but after a few months is inactive it can simple be merged back into its parent. E.g. ~music.metal.numetal forms but is dead after a few months, it can just be merged back into ~music.metal. And if, further down the line, more users join and show an interest in Nu Metal it can be given its own community again.