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Tilde.town is a computer meant for sharing
- vnorilo 4y agoThe procedure for credential reset sounds a little concerning: > are you a town resident that lost their ssh key? try this: using the email address with which you registered, send an email to root@tilde.town. put "new public key" in the subject. include the new public key in the body of the email Hopefully they will at least reply to confirm the person can actually read the email instead of just replacing pubkeys from any forged from-address.
- Affric 4y agoIt does seem like they read the emails. A reminder that the web can be social.
- vnorilo 4y agoReading the emails is not enough: they would need to send some secret to the email associated with the account to link the power to exhange keys to ownership of the account. Just reading a legit-sounding email and relying on from-address is 100% suspectible to abuse.
- mccorrinall 4y agoUsually your email doesn’t even make it into the spam folder but just gets straight rejected if the DKIM signature isn’t valid. Unless the admin doesn’t know how to run an email server in 2022.
- 8organicbits 4y agoIt's also worth considering threat models. It may be worth risking account takeover if they can keep the reset flow user friendly. Not every site needs bulletproof security, this one seems lower risk.
- hnlmorg 4y agoThis is a operation for people to have little sandboxes for fun. Not only is the threat model signify lower than your average social network but the blast radius too. It’s also worth noting that there’s a multitude of ways one could take over these machines if they were determined enough. The entire principle behind this is giving people shell access for giggles. So we aren’t exactly taking about VPSs for serious business here. While security is always important for anything online, it’s also important that security is balanced against appropriateness. Here the point is a little slice of the old days even though that does invite some risk.
- lupire 4y agoIf the person can't read the email, then they can't read the key. This is exactly how credential reset works on every system with registered backup email address, include Google. The only risk is if they send the key to the wrong email address, such as From and Reply-To.
- lights0123 4y ago> If the person can't read the email, then they can't read the key. You’re sending them your public key, not receiving a private key.
- nonrandomstring 4y agoPerhaps perfect granularity of social networks can be achieved if little "towns" are aggregated on top of small Unix servers or VPS. A 1GHz 1GB compute unit can probably handle 1000 people, with IRC level chatting and light browsing a text protocol like Gemini. If each "town" has a maximum population before it becomes a grind and people want to move out there's a natural feedback mechanism. Am elected local council can take care of some (sysadmin) things and vote on new services and boundary (firewall rules). If people identify with an online location, instead of an amorphous brand maybe they'll take pride in the upkeep and so on. It's an interesting metaphor/model, and the Tilde project certainly seems to have proved it can work. I wonder what wisdom the inhabitants could give to other federated social projects?
- gonehome 4y agoThere’s some overlapping ideas with how groups on urbit operate. Though urbit goes further down the stack to replace the bits that make managing a Linux server hard (fixing the incentives that lead to everyone having to be on one centralized server in the first place).
- pm90 4y agoyou do see a version of these dynamics in mmorpgs like eve online
- Gigachad 4y agoThis is essentially what discord is. Most people find a group of under 100 people which is a more personal space to interact with.
- r3dk1ng 4y agopast discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24300907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24300907 (2020)
- hieloz 4y agoIt is very convenient. Similar tilde sites https://tilde.club/ https://tilde.club/, more details can be found in tildeverse.org https://tildeverse.org/ https://tildeverse.org/
- sherr 4y agoThe .org link seems to be a rick-roll.
- kuschku 4y agoMany sites, including that .org link, have redirects for users coming from HN (because HN has a lot of trolls, though you may not see them unless you have showdead enabled)
- 453453636 4y agoThat's hilarious. No wonder /g/ ridicules the Tildeverse whenever it's brought up.
- memorable 4y agoWhat is shodead? Cannot find any relevant info on them.
- david_allison 4y agoshowdead is a setting on your HN profile
- progval 4y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#dead https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#dead
- lupire 4y agoIt takes 3 seconds to check and prove that you are wrong about this case.
- Bessie69 4y ago[dead]
- imdsm 4y agoInteresting, the SSH join form doesn't ask for an email, so they have no way of getting back to me with their answer.
- lupire 4y agoYes it does. https://cgi.tilde.town/users/signup https://cgi.tilde.town/users/signup "e-mail: " The hardest part is deciding which answer to "are you a robot?" is correct.
- IgorPartola 4y agoThe OG version of this idea is of course the Super Dimensional Fortress: http://sdf.org/ http://sdf.org/
- tecleandor 4y agoWhat does "OG" stands for?
- sphars 4y agoOG means "original gangster", but now it's generally a quicker way of saying "original".
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y agoI thought it was "original generation"
- tedunangst 4y agohttps://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/OG https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/OG
- tinsmith 4y agoSDF is tons of fun, and good people. I wish I had more time to experiment with the systems and build my own space there, but anyone interested in preservation of the Old Ways of the Internet should certainly spin up a free account and see what's what.
- lrvick 4y agoYou might also check out #!, a similar community running for over 20 years. https://hashbang.sh https://hashbang.sh
- kuu 4y agoI wonder what kind of things are interesting to do on a server under ssh. Write files? have websites? Ascii art? It's a bit hard to me to grasp what is the "fun" in this project.
- memorable 4y agoThe fun of creating a website.
- inputvolch 4y agoThis is one of those moments where "if you have to ask, you'll never know" is appropriate.
- justusthane 4y agoAll of the above. Socialize with other members. Write CGI scripts to do interactive stuff. Ctrl-C Club keeps a list of neat things their members are doing here: https://ctrl-c.club/#frigginsweet https://ctrl-c.club/#frigginsweet
- lupire 4y agoPlay in the MUD
- bovermyer 4y agoThis is my page on Tilde.town: https://tilde.town/~sithlord/ https://tilde.town/~sithlord/ It's a hand-written, kind of ugly test bed for random things. I have a random startup generator. It's stupid. I love this community.
- canadaduane 4y agoHey sithlord! It's been a while, but fun to see your page. I'm here: https://tilde.town/~canadaduane https://tilde.town/~canadaduane I love having a simple page somewhere, hosted within a community that might take a peek every once in a while. Feels like a lot less lonely of a vast Internet.
- bovermyer 4y agoFor sure! I haven't posted in chat in ages, though. I should probably jump back in.
- the_default 4y agoi really should get off chat more, haven't even run into you two :P
- mjfisher 4y agoEvery single hot sauce your generator comes up with sounds amazing
- bovermyer 4y agoI did try to put thought into that one, haha.
- samatman 4y agoThis brings back fond memories, grex was my first shell and a large influence on everything which followed http://www.cyberspace.org/grex.xhtml http://www.cyberspace.org/grex.xhtml Thirty years old this year, my goodness. Wild that an online space I was using 'talk' on when Hackers was in theaters is still around and kicking.
- 8bitsrule 4y ago"I think web apps have their place in the world of commerce but that people should not feel ashamed if they don't want to combine megabytes of javascript and css to their framework-powered dynamic blog just to put their thoughts online. People shouldn't also be forced to use corporate-mediated, surveillance-based platforms like Twitter and Facebook just to put some ideas up for others to see." [https://brutalistwebsites.com/tilde.town/ https://brutalistwebsites.com/tilde.town/] Been a long wait.
- z3t4 4y agoYou dont need JS nor massive frameworks to build a static web site in order to publish stuff online. I reccomend learning vanillla HTML which is very simple if you compare with modern JS and CSS frameworks.
- mmastrac 4y agoI miss this small-community feel from the early internet days. Social media really blew up the togetherness you feel from being around a finite number of people.
- LanternLight83 4y agoI was just looking around the other day, and can't reccomend enougj to do so yourself-- several user's pages are gems of character, one in particular has great nostalgia links like textfiles.com, and the site really captures small-web vibes.
- 453453636 4y agohttps://tilde.town/wiki/conduct.html https://tilde.town/wiki/conduct.html The aesthetic is late 90s, but the attitude towards censorship is squarely late 2010s. Neocities is better; much less pozzed.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago> If anyone asks you to stop a particular kind of behavior, always err on the side of respecting their wishes. If you believe their request is unreasonable or unfair, ask an admin, but don't respond with hostility. That does seem rather lopsided:\
- wolverine876 4y agoIt seems like run-of-the-mill good, mature behavior to me. I'm not perfect in my behavior, but there is rarely a good moment to be hostile. Among other things, it empowers the other person to turn me into someone I don't want to be.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago> Among other things, it empowers the other person to turn me into someone I don't want to be. That's the problem, yes. Considering all input is reasonable. Giving every troll you meet power over you is not.
- betwixthewires 4y agoMeh, this is to be expected by some communities. The cool thing is the tilde communities in general, not this specific one. Anyone can start one, they're small, community oriented, simple and light little online spaces that can be a lot of fun.
- wolverine876 4y ago> pozzed ? Is this a signal of something?
- matt321 4y ago
- AlwaysRock 4y agoThese things are always seem really cool but I feel like I don't know how to use them. Anyone have a use case they can share? Like what do you do on this site? How does it provide you with some type of value/or compel you to spend time on?
- lloydatkinson 4y agoIt’s funny none of the links work except for the donate one. What’s the story there?
- whartung 4y agoI've not seen this discussed anywhere, and it's a bit of an under documented facet nowadays. But, how does one go about securing a "tilde town". That is, when you're letting random strangers have access to your machine with a fully operating shell, all of the Unix tool suite, and even programming languages, what's the threat level like? Most security today is keeping people off the server in the first place, but here we're holding the door open for them. Back in the day, I had a Netcom dial up shell account. So, I assume there's some way to secure a system where folks log in to a random machine and have their home directory NFS mounted. In the old days, there was NIS, but that's right out from what I can read. Replaced with LDAP I reckon. Anyway, I appreciate that many of these communities are "Friendly", with several "don't do that" clauses in their guidelines, but that doesn't mean there's not room for stuff to be better secured. Any write ups on this?
- xhrpost 4y agoI don't know about this site in particular but sometimes they're just writing application servers that utilize the ssh protocol. https://github.com/charmbracelet/wish https://github.com/charmbracelet/wish
- qudat 4y ago> But, how does one go about securing a "tilde town". On top of something like charm, you can also use a force command when using ssh to limit the commands a user can take within the session.
- tonguez 4y ago“On top of something like charm” my autismometer just exploded
- z3t4 4y agoIve made https://webide.se https://webide.se that gives you a Linux shell on a shared machine. I count on Linux to be secure by default. So users are free to do whatever they want except email spam, dos attacks, and crypto mining which is blocked by iptables. Im working on giving each user their own IP but for now incoming connections are proxied via http proxy and unix sockets and wildcard domain name so that foo.user.webide.se is proxied to /home/user/sock/foo Similar services use Docker containers or VPS for user isolation.
- GekkePrutser 4y agoTilde.town is pretty great. Nice community and handy as a reserve ssh host. Be careful though with stuff like port forwarding on a shared computer because forwarded ports are accessible to all users on the same machine.
- Commodore63 4y agoAh, shell accounts! Such nostalgia. I ran an Eggdrop bot on one for years. Great way to dip my toes into Linux-land.
- wlonkly 4y agoOne thing I miss from that era (or, at least, one thing I am thankful to experience) is that I got to learn how to _use_ Linux before I had to _administer_ Unix. I feel bad for "kids these days" who didn't get to find their way around on a well-administered shared university server or similar.