Tilde.town is a computer meant for sharing

by memorable • 4 years ago

265 83 4 years ago

vnorilo2• 4 years ago

The 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• 4 years ago

It does seem like they read the emails. A reminder that the web can be social.

vnorilo2• 4 years ago

Reading 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.

lupire4• 4 years ago

If 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Perhaps 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?

pm90• 4 years ago

you do see a version of these dynamics in mmorpgs like eve online

Gigachad2• 4 years ago

This is essentially what discord is. Most people find a group of under 100 people which is a more personal space to interact with.

kuschku2• 4 years ago

Except that discord isn’t anything like that, having centralized control of all these groups on one platform with global rules enforced upon all of them (see the recent iOS NSFW ban)

lrvick2• 4 years ago

If you do not care about censorship, lock-in, and their anti-privacy policy.

I for one refuse to touch Discord.

rsolva• 4 years ago

This is what is happening with the Fediverse (sans the minimalism), only there is interoperability between all the small communities. I think it's the future, as long as it doesn't grow to fast.

NelsonMinar2• 4 years ago

One particular choice of Mastodon is that pretty much everything federates all the time. Some local instances try to create a sense of local community, but other than the local timeline page you might as well be anywhere.

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

ourcat• 4 years ago

That's not a million miles away from how Second Life operated (and still does). Where the 'Land' & 'Estates' (and parcels within them) were servers. Each has their own limitations to how many user avatars they can support at one time.

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.

latexr• 4 years ago

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.

remram• 4 years ago

You can vote without Blockchain, somehow everyone forgot about that. In fact Blockchain and other "trustless" mechanisms are completely useless in a community where people know each other, since Sybil attacks require anonymity.

HidyBush• 4 years ago

I guess the server should enable instant messages between its users and only offer email communication with people outside

gonehome• 4 years ago

There’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).

r3dk1ng• 4 years ago

past discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24300907 (2020)

hieloz• 4 years ago

It is very convenient. Similar tilde sites https://tilde.club/, more details can be found in tildeverse.org https://tildeverse.org/

sherr• 4 years ago

The .org link seems to be a rick-roll.

kuschku2• 4 years ago

Many 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)

sva_• 4 years ago

This is crazy. What an absolute gem to discover all this.

imdsm• 4 years ago

Interesting, the SSH join form doesn't ask for an email, so they have no way of getting back to me with their answer.

lupire4• 4 years ago

Yes it does. https://cgi.tilde.town/users/signup

"e-mail: "

The hardest part is deciding which answer to "are you a robot?" is correct.

IgorPartola• 4 years ago

The OG version of this idea is of course the Super Dimensional Fortress: http://sdf.org/

tecleandor• 4 years ago

What does "OG" stands for?

sphars• 4 years ago

OG means "original gangster", but now it's generally a quicker way of saying "original".

tinsmith• 4 years ago

SDF 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.

lrvick2• 4 years ago

You might also check out #!, a similar community running for over 20 years.

https://hashbang.sh

kuu• 4 years ago

I 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.

memorable2• 4 years ago

The fun of creating a website.

inputvolch• 4 years ago

This is one of those moments where "if you have to ask, you'll never know" is appropriate.

justusthane• 4 years ago

All 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

lupire4• 4 years ago

Play in the MUD

bovermyer3• 4 years ago

This is my page on Tilde.town: 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• 4 years ago

Hey sithlord! It's been a while, but fun to see your page. I'm here: 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.

bovermyer3• 4 years ago

For sure! I haven't posted in chat in ages, though. I should probably jump back in.

mjfisher• 4 years ago

Every single hot sauce your generator comes up with sounds amazing

bovermyer3• 4 years ago

I did try to put thought into that one, haha.

samatman• 4 years ago

This brings back fond memories, grex was my first shell and a large influence on everything which followed 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• 4 years 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/]

Been a long wait.

z3t42• 4 years ago

You 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• 4 years ago

I 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• 4 years ago

I 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.

4534536362• 4 years ago

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-h4• 4 years 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:\

wolverine8762• 4 years ago

It 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.

betwixthewires• 4 years ago

Meh, 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.

wolverine8762• 4 years ago

pozzed

? Is this a signal of something?

matt321• 4 years ago

I don't understand the problem with "don't be an ass" as a major rule

AlwaysRock• 4 years ago

These 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• 4 years ago

It’s funny none of the links work except for the donate one. What’s the story there?

whartung• 4 years ago

I'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• 4 years ago

I 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

qudat• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

“On top of something like charm”

my autismometer just exploded

z3t42• 4 years ago

Ive made 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.

GekkePrutser2• 4 years ago

Tilde.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• 4 years ago

Ah, shell accounts! Such nostalgia. I ran an Eggdrop bot on one for years. Great way to dip my toes into Linux-land.

wlonkly• 4 years ago

One 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.

Tilde.town is a computer meant for sharing

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