
Tilde.club is giving accounts to waitlist - big_chungus
https://tilde.club/
======
Ace_Archer
Here's a tweet explaining a bit more context:
[https://twitter.com/ftrain/status/1172545886968324098](https://twitter.com/ftrain/status/1172545886968324098)

Transcript for those who can't access twitter for some reason:

Paul Ford ‏ @ftrain

A tildeverse-builder named Mike Buchholz (info@retrodigital.net) offered to
take over [http://tilde.club](http://tilde.club) AND the backlog of 10,000+
people who asked for accounts. I said, that would be a blessing!

If you had an account, it still works. If you asked, they'll be in touch. 9:21
AM - 13 Sep 2019

Paul Ford ‏ @ftrain Sep 13

I've had the strange experience, since Mike asked to take on this
responsibility, of learning that [http://tilde.club](http://tilde.club) kicked
off a scene called the tildeverse, with many sites, servers, and its own
github. [https://tildeverse.org](https://tildeverse.org)

Paul Ford ‏ @ftrain Sep 13

I wasn't aware that it had self-organized to this degree. Mostly I've felt
guilty about [http://tilde.club](http://tilde.club) , which grew so fast and
with so much interest that it needed a lot of time and love that I could not
provide. It's great to see it was a spark for so many new things.

Michael Buchholz ‏ @MichaelBuchho13 Sep 13 Replying to @ftrain

Hopefully have backlog taken care of this week and other new sign ups
available within the next week or so.

Paul Ford ‏ @ftrain Sep 13

I mean some have waited four years another week is no big deal.

~~~
big_chungus
Waitlisted people (like me) got accounts today. Yay!

------
NelsonMinar
I have one of the original tilde.club accounts. It was a fun moment, when a
bunch of folks re-experienced (or experienced) the first time the pleasure of
a shared Unix system. Just like the Old Ones had in college. When finger was
social media, and "who" worked, and if you were really cool your .plan was a
named pipe. It worked because it was nostalgic and because its sysop Paul Ford
is a first class human being. Never occurred to me it'd be an idea with
longevity.

~~~
bravura
Can you explain what a named pipe .plan would do?

In college, if you would finger me, you would see an ASCII-art animation of
the iconic motorcycle jump shot from Terminator 2 for 10 seconds.

~~~
burke
Finger basically just reads that file so if it’s a named pipe you can have a
process generate content on the fly.

~~~
brianpgordon
How does the process know that you're reading the pipe? Does it just, like,
write a hundred copies of the desired output with EOFs in between so that it
can be read multiple times?

~~~
alt219
The process writing to the pipe just blocks until another process starts
reading from said pipe.

~~~
brianpgordon
Ah, right, I was misremembering how FIFOs work. You can't even write to it
until a reader opens it. I was thinking that you could just dump data on it
and the operating system would buffer it until someone came along to read it.

------
mistersquid
Love this story and the inspiration behind it to create a simple server to
deliver raw signal to those nostalgic for the web of yore.

Love it even more because I recognize Paul Ford's name from his article "What
is Code?" [0], which is how I first became aware of him.

"What is Code?" blew me away when I read it, bringing together both software
development and the humanities (writing) and I sent links to just about every
academic I called "friend" to, well, not much response.

So glad to find out Ford's tilde.club experiment blew up in a good way!

[0] [https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-
co...](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-code/)

EDIT: add comma and missing direct object.

------
rememberlenny
When I got an account for tilde.club, I used it to host the first website I
ever made. Now you can see the oldest Dreamweaver based html page I made from
when I was 15:
[https://tilde.club/~rememberlenny/](https://tilde.club/~rememberlenny/)

~~~
mbuchholz
Good ol' Dreamweaver. Used that for awhile.. worked great for the time :)

~~~
chrisweekly
Yes! Switching from M$ FrontPage to Dreamweaver was a game-changer! WYSIWYG
editor capabilities and generated markup that (for its time) was reasonably
clean...

~~~
mbuchholz
I was pretty lazy back then.. so frontpage was my easy way to manage links on
multiple pages. But then I moved to dreamweaver after that and never looked
back :)

------
mhd
> \- There is NO GUILT here. NOR SHAME. Not knowing things is fine. Not

> finishing them is fine too. Be a disaster! Make a disaster!

I like this attitude.

~~~
ohithereyou
Punk's not dead

------
ianmobbs
[Here's a link to the
waitlist]([http://goo.gl/forms/gRMRT1YBU4](http://goo.gl/forms/gRMRT1YBU4))

~~~
mbuchholz
As much as we appreciate the support, Users that have added themselves to that
wait list after the 15th will not automatically get an account. We stopped
using the wait list after we started emailing users on the wait list. To get
an account we will be opening sign ups on tilde.club's website on the 20th.

~~~
ianmobbs
Ah, gotcha. Thanks for the timeline!

------
russellbeattie
I love it. So old school! Back in the early 90s in the university computer
lab, you could jump on a machine and see who else was logged in (either in the
room, or remotely) and use all the old Unix multi-user commands like who, w,
last, finger, msg, wall, write, talk...

Isn't there a theory that most web services today are just versions of
standard Unix tools?

------
technofiend
What a sweet reminder of a simpler and more open time on the net. Makes me
miss MUDs which were the right combination of social interaction without
leaving embarrassing footprints for future employers to find twenty years on.

~~~
Jaruzel
There's enough MUDs that are still active, that you should still be able to
find a community you like.

Live listings of active MUDs: [http://mudstats.com/](http://mudstats.com/)

The Reddit MUD community:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/MUD/](https://www.reddit.com/r/MUD/)

------
appstorelottery
Wow. Brings back memories. We used to spoof mail to the Sysadmin and think it
was funny as hell. We were such little nerds :-)

~~~
CobrastanJorji
Oh man, I remember doing this in high school more than once.

$> telnet ourserver.com 25

helo

MAIL FROM president@whitehouse.gov

RCPT TO jim@ourserver.com

SUBJECT: Hi its me President Clinton

DATA fart

.

QUIT

Such a simpler time. Today I haven't the foggiest idea what it would take to
invoke an email server correctly in a way that would definitely deliver the
message. Probably a lot.

~~~
dredmorbius
swaks can more or less do much of that, though it should fail any competent
dkim/spf requirements.

------
a-wu
Is this similar to sdf.org?

~~~
jamestomasino
A bit, yes. The tildeverse (and tilde.club) are public access UNIX systems
just like SDF. The offerings are different and they're run by volunteers.
Check out [https://tildeverse.org](https://tildeverse.org) to learn more about
the various servers and what is offered by the collective.

~~~
mbuchholz
the collective.. Tildeverse is now the BoRg :P Almost works too. lol

------
thom
This has always been a breath of fresh air for me, but perhaps I'm the only
person whose main memory of shared Unix systems at university was entire
classes of people trying to launch KDE 3 simultaneously via Exceed and
everything grinding to a halt...

~~~
dredmorbius
Shell accounts tend to be far lighter, barring compilations.

------
magashna
This makes me think of this game released earlier in the year, Hypnospace
Outlaw

~~~
markstos
This makes me think of twenty years ago, except now we have SSH instead of
telnet.

~~~
dfc
The craziest thing is that the first stable release of portable openssh is
almost twenty years old:
[https://www.openssh.com/txt/release-1.2.2p1](https://www.openssh.com/txt/release-1.2.2p1)

------
iliketocomplain
Why do you write, multiple times, that you can't wait to meet me? You don't
know me, I might be a total prick. This lying is just such a turnoff.

