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tilde.town: A social network over SSH
- hnzix 6y agoAn interesting monologue about pseudonymity hidden here: http://tilde.town/~karlen/nowertb/anonymous.mp3 http://tilde.town/~karlen/nowertb/anonymous.mp3
- ycombinete 6y agoI'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.
- Marcus316 6y ago(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.
- Etheryte 6y agoThis is uniquely precious and I wish there was RSS to subscribe to new entries.
- Marcus316 6y agoSadly, 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.
- LockAndLol 6y agoI'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?
- INTPenis 6y agoI had this anti-climax moment a couple months back when my low-tech loving friends were fawning over Tildeverse. For anyone who remembers the internet of the past 15 years, it's just public home dirs in server/~username. An old feature of web servers. And then they link to each others home dirs on some directory site. We used to call this a web ring. ;)
- pmontra 6y agoMy ~/public_html 25+ years ago :-)
- puzzlingcaptcha 6y agoAh 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...)
- m3talsmith 6y agoI learned a lot of basic Linux through the same shell provider back in the day!
- pengaru 6y agoIt'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.
- tasubotadas 6y agoI thought "Wow, cool - I gonna sign up". And then I saw their sign up form. 10 fields is a bit too much.
- pengaru 6y agoEven 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)
- INTPenis 6y agoHarsh but true, I remember telling my life story to sign up for text based message boards.
- Krisando 6y agoFrom personal experience in running similar things, they aren't a good method of discerning quality of people.
- NalNezumi 6y agoI'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?
- kristopolous 6y agoI've really liked metafilters $5 lifetime membership model. Seems to work
- Krisando 6y ago> 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.
- varbhat 6y agoThere are lot many good Tildes out there which forms Tildeverse : https://tildeverse.org https://tildeverse.org
- phre4k 6y agoI 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 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 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!
- malux85 6y agoI’ll help! I can do front end, backend and sysadmin work. I am willing to contribute funds to hosting too alainr.richardt (at) (google mail service).com (I can’t see your email in your profile)
- codetrotter 6y ago> address in my profile Note that the HN profile e-mail field is not public. That field is for password reset stuff or something. If you want people to see your e-mail you will need to write what it is in the profile description.
- phre4k 6y agoAh right, thanks. I'll edit my profile to include it in my bio.
- iuguy 6y agoIf you'd like a guided tour of the tildeverse, there's one on The Dork Web: https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/tales-from-the-dork-web-5 https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/tales-from-the-dork-web-5 Also relevant community: https://tildes.net/~tildes https://tildes.net/~tildes
- tennineeight 6y agotildes.net is an independent, nonprofit reddit replacement.
- iuguy 6y agoYup, but when I originally wrote the tildes piece it was shared there and people lamented that I didn't mention them, so I am now :)
- OldHand2018 6y agoI'm curious about the general way tilde sites are administered. How do they keep people from using them as hosts for cyberattacks or spam?
- phre4k 6y agoI 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/ https://tilde.team/.
- OldHand2018 6y agoDo you use a VPS on AWS or something like that, or an actual physical box?
- phre4k 6y agoIt'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.
- nikdoof 6y agoI 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.
- archangelic 6y agoI'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.
- s_dev 6y agoTilde Club -- https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-and-woke-up-with-1-000-nerds-a8904f0a2ebf https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-...
- bovermyer 6y agoHey, I'm a user here! I never expected a tilde site to get on Hacker News again; I thought the wave of interest in the tildeverse died out years ago. I don't really use the HTML part of it; I only interact on the command-line forum and play with some of the games/sims.
- kebman 6y agoFor good or bad, that scrolling title really reminded of the early 90's HTML galore <3
- justaj 6y agoI'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.
- a3y3 6y agoBut they were public keys, it's completely fine if the entire world sees them
- soraminazuki 6y agoPerhaps the parent commenter is worried of public keys being used as a tracking vector?
- phre4k 6y agoThen they should create one key per service and only use that one.
- alexeldeib 6y agoWhich they've done from the sound of it, and are concerned about the ability to read those other public keys and use them as a tracking vector.
- boring_twenties 6y agoAs another commenter already pointed out, the IdentitiesOnly config option removes that ability. The ssh-config man page explains this.
- myself248 6y agoOut of curiosity, are there reasons that that behavior shouldn't be the default?
- zomg 6y agopretty neat, i signed up. reminds me of the days hanging out on sdf.lonestar.org.
- jedimastert 6y agoI was just thinking about that, but I could not remember "sdf". Thank you There's also hashbang.sh, for those curious
- VLM 6y agoSo is this a BBS? I find that amazing that the BBS acronym doesn't show up although it would seem an obvious comparison.
- Marcus316 6y agoIt'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 find it a fun place to hang out, personally.
- xellisx 6y agoYou'd want to look at Enigma https://github.com/NuSkooler/enigma-bbs https://github.com/NuSkooler/enigma-bbs
- tobiasbischoff 6y agoYeah. That was my first thought. Its a BBS. Weird that you sign up via the web though.
- mspe 6y agoYou could also take a look at: * tilde.club * tilde.team * ctrl-c.club * tilde.institute * thunix.net * remotes.club * yourtilde.com * envs.net * squiggle.city * aussies.space * radiofreqs.space * rw.rs * tilde.pw * dimension.sh * breadpunk.club * cosmic.voyage * hackers.cool * rawtext.club * tilde.black * tilde.pink I'm sure many others do exist…
- dddddaviddddd 6y agoI 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.
- caycep0llard 6y agoHi 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)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- m3talsmith 6y agoHey! Miirc here! I really have to get my plant back up and running. Plant, RIP. You've done a great job with the community. Thanks for all you do!