I see many people signed up! Every application is manually reviewed, so, uh, give me a few days.
Regarding "good" and "bad" users; this question has been at the center of tilde.town since its inception. We're a community first and a technological project second and encouraging a sense of belonging for users is our primary goal.
Certain users sign up to abuse resources; that's easy to catch and deal with. Other users want to import the wider culture war aspects of the internet into our space, using a variety of tactics to provoke anger and discomfort.
I'm a generally conflict-avoidant person so this took getting used to. On the server, I had to learn to be willing to ban the persistent trolls. I want to provide a space where people can grow and mature as I was given on IRC and web forums back in the early 2000s instead of a place that throws people out at the first hint of having "incorrect" beliefs. Unfortunately this gave too much leeway to people that were consistently there to recreationally troll or promote genuinely hateful movements.
I became much more free with both temporary and permanent bans and made the signup intentionally cumbersome, wracked with nerves about the "good" folks who might be intimidated. I still have that anxiety, but ever since increasing the scrutiny on applications and doing more banning we've had a much more stable community environment.
I read a lot of books on digital communities; the Virtual Community by Howard Rheingold is a great starting point, but the book that helped me the most was Cyber Chiefs by Mathieu O’Neil. It helped me understand that all communities that manage to grow over time will hit an unsustainable point and either retract or dissipate.
Dissipation was a real possibility; for a long time I felt completely emotionally burned out by the town. I chose retraction though, and in retrospect, it was the right choice.
I'm still learning and thinking all the time about ways to encourage quieter or less technologically inclined people to sign up and make a home on the town and am always excited to talk about it or hear ideas.
I signed up when this post was first posted, but haven't heard anything back yet. Is there a way to check your application status? (I used the same name as here)
I run tilde.fun. It's currently defunct but I'm migrating the site to a new server today.
We have an SSH signup form with no need for any personal details but an email address, written in Python, in the making (https://code.tilde.fun/tilde/ssh-reg) I'd really like to automate account creation and have someone look over it before I actually deploy it.
Write me an email (address in my profile) if you're interested in helping run/develop this or some MB of free HTML web hosting.
We are two admins and run a few other services (https://wiki.tilde.fun/tilde/start lists some of them). We want to take back the internet from megacorps into the hands of users. I have an empty server just waiting for some people with dank HTML skills!
I've been listening to the other notes on there, and enjoying them. Where are the text posts that he's talking about though? All I see are these voice notes.
(not the narrator, but I was active when the narrator was creating these ...)
The rule for these audio clips was to do a search for any blog post on the internet which started with "No One Will Ever Read This, But ..." and where the blog had been abandoned for at least a year. If you listen to the audio and do some searching, sometimes you can find the post, if it's still up.
Sadly, the narrator of this set of audio readings has moved on from the project, to my knowledge.
That may be for the best, though. Some of the charm (in my own opinion) is that this little project was a gem to discover, a bit ephemeral, and special in its scarcity.
I can only speak for tilde.fun, but it's helpful to not have any users currently (^^) and disable outside communication apart from ~/html/ where our users can put static files into.
Most tilde sites don't have public mail servers and only federate mail between them and other tilde servers. See also https://tilde.team/.
It's currently a VPS rented from Strato.de, one of the biggest German hosting providers.
Since I'm paying out of my own pocket I currently don't want to afford a colocated server, even though I realise that'd be cooler and possibly more secure.
I'll try to have a detailed cost overview online somewhere soon-ish.
I admin a smaller pubnix/tilde, for me I tie down email, inbound connections, some strict resource limits per user, and keep a close eye on anything running. I'm sure if I start getting more users it'll become more time consuming but with a decent logging and sensible security practices you could probably negate the vast majority of bad actors.
I'm a volunteer admin for tilde.town and I also run trash.town
We mostly monitor resource usage, and built in a way to ban users from our django-based administration app. We have begun screening users more before allowing them to sign up, asking them things about what they want to use the town for.
It's a bit like a BBS, yes, and that's what drew me to the concept initially (I'm an early member of tilde.town; still reasonably active).
We do have an internal bulletin board, and an internal IRC (like the chat rooms of multi-line BBSes of the late 80s/early 90s). There are a ton of little projects by members, and the projects are pretty varied.
I'm not really sure I get the point... is there some kind of fuse mount that gives people the possibility to see live posts, user profiles, and other stuff? Are you directly logged into a game like shell when you connect? Or is this just plain old ssh to bash?
It's a community, like HN is, but accessed via ssh instead of http. So it's a community where the active participants necessarily can navigate a shell, irc client, tmux/screen, and maybe even prefer socializing in that environment vs. something like the web or mobile apps. Access is also a privilege which can be taken away. So everyone you interact with there is either new or cooperative and mature enough to not get banned from a shared resource with very few safeguards preventing abuse.
~town is by far the largest multiuser system I've logged into in the last decade, not that I've been looking. It kind of reminds me of the university UNIX systems I dialed into in the 90s, fingering users to read their plans, updating my .plan, running ytalk to chat with friends, email w/pine, and usenet w/tin.
I still don't get it... so, there's an IRC client you can access on a server, using ssh credentials to login and there's a public folder that gets served by a static web server ? How do people interact on that social network (sending messages, pictures, etc.) ?
You can find that info and more about all the member tildes of the tildeverse (including tilde.town) on the tildeverse website here: https://tildeverse.org/members/
Ah a public shell, fond memories. I used to have a nic-nac-project (now freeshell.de?) account some 15 years ago. It was my first exposure to Debian, which led me to order a free mail-in CD of Ubuntu Warty Warthog. These were different times.
Unfortunately public shells largely went the way of the dodo due to how cheaply you can get a VPS now (and not worry about resource quota, ulimits, local exploits or lack of root access...)
It's shared computer/server. You got your SSH key and log in.
It has some social features inside - BBJ (command line driven forum), IRC chat, "timeline" command (think of local twitter on command line).
However main difference is that it's up to you how can you interact it others. You can setup some scripts/games for others, or just present yourself in your public_html folder. I have created gallery of those homepages and these are very diverse - https://tilde.town/~severak/gallery/ - so much good stuff hidden there.
I signed up for a shell account on a similar service, b.armory.com, in 2008. Since that time, the website is gone and activity is very low. It was a nice way to learn about Linux thanks to someone's generosity in sharing their server.
I'm always wary of using SSH services which aren't running on systems I control. If I'm not mistaken, an SSH service is able to see all of the pubkeys you have in your ~/.ssh/, so there goes your privacy.
Even such low barriers as a small form do wonders for the quality of people on the other side, you won't be missed. (if you genuinely can't be bothered)
I'm curious, what are the "good" methods for discerning/filtering quality of people? How are "good" and "bad" quality of people categorized? (binary? spectrum/distribution?) How can you estimate/measure the quality of the filter/method with precision?
I assume no filter is perfect and mistakenly filter out "good" quality people too, so if this method isn't good that suggest there's a metric and a more efficient method out there. In your personal experience what worked better?
> I'm curious, what are the "good" methods for discerning/filtering quality of people?
Observation is probably the best method. I rarely have found form options to be effective. A good chunk of 'good' people tend to get filtered out from my observation.
Generally the approach that has worked for me having a tier system. People who meet your criteria get greater access etc over time.
> How are "good" and "bad" quality of people categorized?
Generally, "good" is anyone that helps your community prosper. "Bad" are typically people who cause unwanted conflicts, create a toxic environment etc.
What's this 'postcard' thing you speak of? I've heard a rumor people used to have slices of dead trees lugged around the world. But the latency would be enormous!!
This is a fair criticism. There is a bit of a barrier to entry here. I think pengaru is unnecessarily harsh in his response.
The server has a limited number of admins (really only a single main administrator with a handful of volunteer helpers), and the process of adding an account is mostly manual at the moment, I believe (with some helper scripts, of course). There are efforts underway to improve this.
In the end, though, this is just one person's fun little side project. We're along for the ride, and I would like the admin to keep enjoying his project so I can share in that joy. If they don't have the time to address signup process improvements, I figure that's OK ... we're not in this for money or fame or anything, right? It's just ... fun (IMO).
Creating a user is luckily very automated, but we have had to increase the amount of information we ask to hopefully screen out bad actors who just want a shell account and then run bitcoin miners (which has happened several times).
There are dozens or hundreds of other hosts in the tildeverse that you could check out. I'm a member of ctrl-c.club, which has a much shorter sign-up form.
I'm the founder and primary admin of tilde.town.
I see many people signed up! Every application is manually reviewed, so, uh, give me a few days.
Regarding "good" and "bad" users; this question has been at the center of tilde.town since its inception. We're a community first and a technological project second and encouraging a sense of belonging for users is our primary goal.
Certain users sign up to abuse resources; that's easy to catch and deal with. Other users want to import the wider culture war aspects of the internet into our space, using a variety of tactics to provoke anger and discomfort.
I'm a generally conflict-avoidant person so this took getting used to. On the server, I had to learn to be willing to ban the persistent trolls. I want to provide a space where people can grow and mature as I was given on IRC and web forums back in the early 2000s instead of a place that throws people out at the first hint of having "incorrect" beliefs. Unfortunately this gave too much leeway to people that were consistently there to recreationally troll or promote genuinely hateful movements.
I became much more free with both temporary and permanent bans and made the signup intentionally cumbersome, wracked with nerves about the "good" folks who might be intimidated. I still have that anxiety, but ever since increasing the scrutiny on applications and doing more banning we've had a much more stable community environment.
I read a lot of books on digital communities; the Virtual Community by Howard Rheingold is a great starting point, but the book that helped me the most was Cyber Chiefs by Mathieu O’Neil. It helped me understand that all communities that manage to grow over time will hit an unsustainable point and either retract or dissipate.
Dissipation was a real possibility; for a long time I felt completely emotionally burned out by the town. I chose retraction though, and in retrospect, it was the right choice.
I'm still learning and thinking all the time about ways to encourage quieter or less technologically inclined people to sign up and make a home on the town and am always excited to talk about it or hear ideas.
(edited to clarify i'm not the only admin)