[HN Gopher] Tildeverse.org: A loose association of like-minded t...
___________________________________________________________________
Tildeverse.org: A loose association of like-minded tilde
communities
Author : hillcrestenigma
Score : 116 points
Date : 2021-12-05 13:49 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (tildeverse.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (tildeverse.org)
| superkuh wrote:
| It's rare to see a non-commercial walled garden. But that's what
| the tildeverse is.
| zepto wrote:
| What are you talking about? How is it 'walled'?
| passthejoe wrote:
| Most of the Tilde sites allow users to post standard web
| pages (i.e. using http/https).
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Lots of content made by Tildes folks end up in places like
| Gemini or Gopher which aren't easily accessible. It's walled,
| but not paywalled nor web signup walled.
| zepto wrote:
| I don't see how this makes any sense at all as a definition
| of 'walled'.
|
| There are freely available and free of charge Gemini and
| Gopher clients for every platform, almost all of which are
| open source. No signups to any service are required. For
| that matter, there are Gemini gateways on the web, so you
| don't even need to install anything.
|
| If your definition of a 'walled garden' is anything that
| can't be accessed directly by the web browser Google or
| Apple pre-installed on your device, I think you might want
| to reconsider.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > If your definition of a 'walled garden' is anything
| that can't be accessed directly by the web browser Google
| or Apple pre-installed on your device, I think you might
| want to reconsider.
|
| No that's not my definition but also, why would I
| reconsider? Are you angry at Google or Apple and trying
| to defend the Tildes or something?
|
| I'm using "walled" in the sense that there's a level of
| gatekeeping the community does, so builds up walls, to
| attract a certain kind of person. This kind of person
| _wants_ to hang out on a shared TUI-based *nix system.
| That's the wall. Much like a signup wall requires people
| have logins. That's all.
| ziggus wrote:
| Then say 'gatekeeping', and not 'walled'. The two mean
| different things.
| ineptech wrote:
| From context it seems like an awesome community, the sort of
| thing I'd like to be a part of, and I'm sure some other folks
| here feel similarly; but it's been redirected to a rickroll
| video, which I'm guessing means something like, "Part of what
| makes this fun is that it's small and doesn't get too much
| attention, so move along please." Okay. _wistful sigh_
| acdw wrote:
| I mean you /can/ just type in the URL.
| grouphugs wrote:
| they're literally nazis, did you see what they federate with? are
| you people fucking retarded?
| grouphugs wrote:
| why is hn always promoting white supremacist content?
| yobananaboy wrote:
| Archived version:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20211119133814/https://tildevers...
|
| Looks like it's just the homepage that's been rickrolled, the
| members page appears to be up: https://tildeverse.org/members/
| [deleted]
| rchaud wrote:
| Wow, I don't think I've been rickrolled since 2007.
|
| There really should be a built in browser feature that prompts
| the user that the link they clicked redirects somewhere else.
| xhevahir wrote:
| > tildes are pubnixes in the spirit of tilde.club, which was
| created in 2014 by paul ford.
|
| I don't know what any of that means.
| howenterprisey wrote:
| Gotcha covered: https://journal.tildeverse.org/entries/what-
| are-tildes-and-h...
| larusso wrote:
| Hehe same here. I always feel like I have been living under a
| rock when a page like this gets pushed to HN.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| It largely consists of a community of people eschewing social
| media and the big platforms. You'll see it pop up here and
| there, but a lot of the reason you aren't seeing it a lot is
| quite intentional. Much of the content isn't even published
| on the clearnet, instead only accessible over Gopher or
| Gemini.
|
| It's a hodge-podge of punk, DIY, bohemian, counter-cultural
| weirdos of every flavor. Poets and unabombers and lovers and
| shitposters.
| nomemory wrote:
| This guy summarised the community well. I wouldn't go that
| far to call them unabombers though. Some of them might have
| some radical ideas regarding the way software should be
| written. But that's it.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I did actually find a site that basically boiled down to
| "Ted Kazinski Was Right And Here Is Why".
|
| But I mean more the whole RMS vibe some people are
| rocking.
| thewakalix wrote:
| "Proprietary software and its consequences have been a
| disaster for the human race."
| handrous wrote:
| > I did actually find a site that basically boiled down
| to "Ted Kazinski Was Right And Here Is Why".
|
| That's not a terribly uncommon sentiment. Usually people
| mean the manifesto, not the part where he bombed people.
| southerntofu wrote:
| > Much of the content isn't even published on the clearnet,
| instead only accessible over Gopher or Gemini.
|
| How is gopher or gemini not "clearnet"? Gopher doesn't even
| have any encryption (gemini uses TLS). Seriously though, i
| find it weird that everything Google/Facebook doesn't link
| you to is considered "darknet" nowadays.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Clearnet as opposed to deep web, not dark web.
| southerntofu wrote:
| What difference do you make between those? From my
| perspective, they're just marketing lingo invented by
| security vendors, intelligence agencies and cheap
| journalists.
|
| EDIT: Is my mailbox darkweb or deepweb? What about LAN
| services? Torrents? Is anything not available on HTTP and
| public DNS not "clearnet"?
| socket0 wrote:
| If it's intentionally shielded from prying eyes, and
| possibly nefarious, it's the dark web. More often than
| not this would be on Tor, I2P, or similar, but that's not
| required. If it simply can't be easily indexed by search
| engines, it's the deep web. Overlap between the two is
| possible.
|
| Your mailbox would be deep web, if it's exposed to the
| Internet. If your mailbox uses an auto-responder to
| respond to coded messages with encrypted binaries of an
| illegal nature, it would be dark web.
| detaro wrote:
| if included in such definitions, your mailbox would be
| deepweb (if you access it through a standard web
| browser), since it can't be found just by following
| links.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> if included in such definitions, your mailbox would be
| deepweb (if you access it through a standard web
| browser), since it can 't be found just by following
| links._
|
| A mailing list that didn't have web-accessible archives
| would qualify. Arguably, so would a list that had
| archives that just weren't crawlable.
| detaro wrote:
| A mailing list that doesn't have web-accessible archives
| is not *web at all. If the archives are web-accessible
| but protected/hidden, deepweb.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Definition is driven by convention, but if it's not
| trying to show up on Google or the socials, it can be
| argued it's not on the clearnet.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Isn't this just saying popular things are "clearnet" and
| not popular things aren't? That doesn't sound right.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Note that I didn't say "if it's not showing up on Google
| [...]", but "if it's not _trying_ to show up on Google
| [...] ". It's not that it's not popular, it doesn't care
| about popularity or want to be popular, for one reason or
| another.
|
| This may seem strange if you come from the commercial
| web, but on independent web, it's a pretty common
| sentiment. There is very little benefit to actually
| getting visitors from the outside if you have no
| interactivity and no ads. It's not that they attempt to
| keep visitors away, they just don't do much to bring them
| in. Blocking commercial web crawlers isn't particularly
| rare, for example. Some don't support HTTPS, which means
| you won't get listed on Google.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > It's not that it's not popular, it doesn't care about
| popularity or want to be popular, for one reason or
| another.
|
| Right that's what I mean. Is http://danluu.com/ outside
| of the clearnet?
|
| > This may seem strange if you come from the commercial
| web, but on independent web, it's a pretty common
| sentiment.
|
| I've written Gemini software so I don't need the intro. I
| do get however that "smolweb" people really like talking
| about their values at the drop of a hat.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| A pubnix is a public access *nix-system.
| s_dev wrote:
| Paul Ford puts it much better himself:
|
| >Tilde.club is one cheap, unmodified Unix computer on the
| Internet.
|
| >That's it. That's all it is. It is no more than that.
|
| >If you look for more for it to be you will find nothing.
|
| The implication I'd add is that it's just a 'shared' unix
| machine.
| southerntofu wrote:
| The tildeverse is amazing! So many creative folks in there and
| many of them can be found on irc.tilde.chat which is still widely
| used.
|
| In some way, i find tilde servers to be some kind of hosting coop
| where users can tailor to their own needs and contribute more
| services to the shared infra. For example, thunix.net and
| fr.tild3.org both have public ansible recipes where users can
| submit patches.
|
| With fellow people from ~fr, we published an article a few months
| back arguing how tilde servers change the power balance on the
| network during lockdowns: https://fr.tild3.org/en/blog/2021/may-
| first/
| bullen wrote:
| My static tilde page is still there; this will be my canary for
| community vs. company persistence.
| jl6 wrote:
| Time to promote the tilde quilt:
|
| https://tilde.club/~lab6/quilt.html
|
| Instructions:
|
| https://tilde.club/wiki/quilt.html
| dugmartin wrote:
| Somewhat related question that I'm interested in knowing people's
| thoughts on...
|
| If you have a website that contains user generated content aimed
| at technical folks what looks nicer (and maybe what are some more
| options?):
|
| 1. GitHub's implicit username: https://github.com/foo
|
| 2. Medium's @username: https://medium.com/@foo
|
| 3. Old style homedir (eg tildeverse): http://tilde.club/~foo
|
| 4. Explicit user folder: https://example.com/users/foo
|
| My preference is not to use implicit usernames since you then
| would need to filter against a blocklist (something like
| https://github.com/marteinn/The-Big-Username-Blocklist). Anybody
| have any opinions?
| bullen wrote:
| I would prefer http://foo.binarytask.com but that works best if
| you have you own custom DNS software.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Your #1 is full of problems about users not being capable of
| using their names or taking over system pages. So, whatever you
| do, avoid it, it's a bad one.
|
| The `@` has a special meaning in URLs, but I think all browsers
| are smart enough to not break on it.
| layer8 wrote:
| The `@` has no special meaning in the path part of a URL.
|
| https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3986#section-3.3
| m-i-l wrote:
| Personally I'd prefer example.com/users/foo, or even
| example.com/u/foo, because (i) you don't need unusual
| characters like @ or ~, and (ii) you don't need server config
| to look for a wildcard in the root.
|
| Alternatively, if as you say it is for hosting "user generated
| content aimed at technical folks", users might want to feel
| like they own their own (sub-)domain, so how about
| foo.example.com instead?
| camgunz wrote:
| I mean, FWIW ~camgunz "expands" to /home/camgunzcamgunz (or
| /home/camgunz/camgunz), so it's a little incorrect? It's like
| "pixel graphic" games now that aim more for nostalgia than
| accuracy: Genesis games don't look like modern pixel graphic
| games, ~camgunz isn't actually how it works, etc. So I guess I
| prefer @camgunz for non-URLs, but blah://dir/camgunz for URLs?
| PureParadigm wrote:
| Actually, it is how it works. Try doing "cd ~camgunz" and it
| should take you to the home directory for camgunz.
| camgunz wrote:
| WOW I had no idea! Why does this work haha
|
| EDIT: Oh I guess yeah, for other users. Innnnnnteresting,
| and then ~ is just shorthand for you. Huh.
| detaro wrote:
| > _FWIW ~camgunz "expands" to /home/camgunzcamgunz (or
| /home/camgunz/camgunz)_
|
| It doesn't. ~user looks up the home directory of "user".
| bennyp101 wrote:
| I don't know why, but personally I always associate old school
| style ~/ as more ... trust worthy? I don't know why though!
|
| Perhaps because I remember having those kind of addresses when
| I younger, and therefore associate with an older generation?
| (Not that that guarantees trustworthiness!) Or maybe because a
| lot of academic personal sites use that as well?
|
| I guess in terms of "what looks nicer", for me:
|
| 1. I assume this is just a directory
|
| 2. '@' in URLs just feels weird now, it's not a
| usename:password type thing
|
| 3. Not particularly pretty
|
| 4. I think that signifies what it is, and who it is
| kingcharles wrote:
| Personal preference is @username
|
| I have all the content off the root and I don't want a
| collision between /articlename and a user with that same name.
|
| ~ just makes me feel too old-school. And of course @ is used
| everywhere to indicate a username now.
| ramses0 wrote:
| Many people don't know how to even type `~`. `@` is becoming
| synonymous with "person".
| tata71 wrote:
| "entity"
| nemetroid wrote:
| Tildes are painful to type on several non-English layouts (e.g.
| Swedish). I like their Unixy vibe but disdain having to type
| them.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Hmm, I use both Swedish and English layouts and I'd say
| they're about as painful to type on both. It's almost the
| exact same movement, except with the other hand.
| nemetroid wrote:
| Really? Tilde is a dead key on a typical Swedish keyboard,
| meaning that you have to type AltGr+~ followed by space.
| Technically, the space is not needed for letters that ~
| doesn't compose with, but having to think about that is
| part of the pain.
|
| I also can't agree that it's almost the same hand movement,
| you have to use your right thumb for AltGr while also
| reaching for the key with your right hand. On an English
| layout you'd use your pinky for shift, or even your other
| hand.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| You've already got your thumb by space after hitting ~.
| Pretty natural to just tap it.
|
| Swedish QWERTY has a lot of awkward symbols, but ~ isn't
| anywhere near the same class as something like {
| nemetroid wrote:
| Sure, {[]} are in their own league. But ~ is still very
| different, in a negative way, on the Swedish layout
| compared to an English layout.
| zppln wrote:
| Pretty sure I just got Rickroll'd...
| acdw wrote:
| Sameless bread-promotion: I run a bread-themed tilde server here
| (with no rickroll): https://breadpunk.club
|
| I was inspired by the tildeverse and all the friends I've made on
| IRC! It's great fun :) Highly recommend.
|
| I got started with https://tilde.town, which is v comfy.
| kingcharles wrote:
| I ran what you would now call a tilde server back in the 90s.
|
| Then the Secret Service showed up at my door.
|
| Be careful who you share with. Some of them might _actually_ be a
| unabomber.
| [deleted]
| mastazi wrote:
| You can also visit them on gopher but some users don't have an
| active gopher space so it's a bit hit & miss sometimes (still
| less boring than mainstream web and its "here's what our
| algorithm thinks you will like")
| warent wrote:
| Website creator redirected to Rick Astley, maybe they were
| getting too much traffic? Funny but weird and vaguely hostile
| without any explanation
| rgoulter wrote:
| I was wondering why "vaguely hostile", but then I saw opening
| the URL itself works fine.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| It only rickrolls you when you click from HN.
| 1_player wrote:
| Is jwz behind tildeverse.org?
|
| EDIT: it still redirects there from a new tab for me. Is it
| like this for everyone, has it set a cookie and I'll always
| be sent there? In any case, I don't care about this product
| anymore if they're going to be an asshole about it.
| acdw wrote:
| lmao @ "product"
|
| the tildeverse is radically anti-product
| 1_player wrote:
| Tomato, tomahto.
| dusted wrote:
| The "tilde" part of the name comes from the ~ character,
| traditionally used to indicate a users public HTML directory.
|
| For instance, if you were a user "dannyboy" on example.com you
| might host a website in /home/dannyboy/public_html and it'd be
| exposed via example.com/~dannoyboy
| joshu wrote:
| and unix shell expansion before that
| thewakalix wrote:
| As they say, $HOME is where the tilde is.
| dusted wrote:
| oh yes, of course, I used to type cd ~ instead of just cd.
| Totally forgot that
| JoBrad wrote:
| My top 2 aliases (after ll): alias ~="cd
| ~" alias ..="cd .."
| ksherlock wrote:
| As of bash 4, `shopt -s autocd` will automatically do
| that (and more).
| notinty wrote:
| cd ~dusted
|
| is the lesser-known expansion
| bitwize wrote:
| And it came to Unix because "HOME" was printed on the tilde
| key of the ADM3A terminal.
| s_dev wrote:
| Origins of Tilde Club: https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-
| had-a-couple-drinks-...
| scrollaway wrote:
| Similarly used by https://tildes.net (invites available if
| you email me).
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-12-07 23:03 UTC)