Tilde.town is a computer meant for sharing
tilde.town
tilde.town
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?
I for one refuse to touch Discord.
It's terrible considering there's so many good alternatives available that work great and offer the same user experience while respecting your privacy.
Discord even use this fact for advertising now :( https://discord.com/open-source
Hometown is a fork of Mastodon that adds a "local only" post feature, posts that deliberately do not federate. I think it's an interesting experiment. https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown
In theory.
In practice, this is the norm:
https://mastodon.social/about/more
https://wiki.todon.eu/todon/domainblocks
https://toot.cafe/about/more#blocked-instances
The latter doesn't even bother labeling the instances they don't like as "Hate Speech", apparently free speech is enough.
People flock to places they identity with. Buy parcels. Build their own space and communities within communities.
As far as 'voting' and governance goes, I think there's room for development with blockchain login/identity/ownership and Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) which support that.
Immediately turning it into a community of crypto bros where the only subject is cryptocurrencies and derivations. A figurative and literal waste.
Been a long wait.
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.
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.
jfred@lambdacrypt ~$ curl -IL https://tildeverse.org
HTTP/2 200
server: nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu)
date: Sat, 14 May 2022 14:05:51 GMT
content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
vary: Accept-Encoding
strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000
jfred@lambdacrypt ~$ curl -IL https://tildeverse.org -H "Referer: https://news.ycombinator.com"
HTTP/2 301
server: nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu)
date: Sat, 14 May 2022 14:06:18 GMT
content-type: text/html
content-length: 178
location: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000If you copy the link into a new window instead of coming from HN, you get a different result.
> 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.
Unless the admin doesn’t know how to run an email server in 2022.
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.
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.
You’re sending them your public key, not receiving a private key.
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?
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.
my autismometer just exploded
Similar services use Docker containers or VPS for user isolation.
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.
"e-mail: "
The hardest part is deciding which answer to "are you a robot?" is correct.
Be careful though with stuff like port forwarding on a shared computer because forwarded ports are accessible to all users on the same machine.
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.
The aesthetic is late 90s, but the attitude towards censorship is squarely late 2010s. Neocities is better; much less pozzed.
That does seem rather lopsided:\
That's the problem, yes. Considering all input is reasonable. Giving every troll you meet power over you is not.
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.
? Is this a signal of something?