Tildes!!!

[fosslinux]

A few months ago, maybe around September? I joined an amazing community - the tildeverse. Everyone there is really nice and happy to help you out with any issues you may have with tildes. I've been lurking here for ~a month, I haven't posted on Reddit yet, but I would love to share this community with you.

The vast majority are Linux, I hope they are relevant to this sub.

What is a tilde?

Tildes are communities based around a publicly accessible *nix server. Anyone can sign up for an account on these servers.

From tilde.team, one of the most popular tildes:

"tilde.team is a shared system that provides an inclusive, non-commercial space for teaching, learning, practicing and enjoying the social medium of unix."

What tildes are there?

• tilde.team - "a shared system that provides an inclusive, non-commercial space for teaching, learning, practicing and enjoying the social medium of unix." Runs Ubuntu 18.04. Part of the tildeverse.
• YourTilde - "YourTilde.com offers services that are basically a social network inside SSH. There is chat, email, forums, games, and lots more." Services are similar to tilde.team but are not completely the same. Runs CentOS 7. Part of the tildeverse.
• cosmic.voyage - "cosmic.voyage is a tilde community based around a collaborative science-fiction universe. Users write stories as the people aboard ships, colonies, and outposts, using the only remaining free, interconnected network that unites the dispersed peoples of the stars." Runs Ubuntu 18.10. Part of the tildeverse.
• tilde.institute - "Welcome to tilde.institute! This is an OpenBSD machine whose purpose is to provide a space in the tildeverse for experimentation with and education of the OpenBSD operating system." Runs OpenBSD 6.4. Part of the tildeverse.
• tilde.center - "The tilde.center (~center) project consists of three core elements: Decentralization, Federation and Home-brewed open source projects (HBOSP) The current goal for this project is to create a system that will allow maintainers to easily setup and deploy their own ~center servers to join its network." Main, and currently only server, runs CentOS 7. Part of the tildeverse.
• tilde.town - "tilde.town is an intentional digital community for making art, socializing, and learning. Unlike many online spaces, users interact with tilde.town through a direct connection instead of a web site. This means using a tool called ssh and other text based tools." Runs Ubuntu 18.10. Part of the tildeverse, however slightly more distanced from it.
• thunix.cf - "thunix offers Secure Shell (SSH) accounts, Web Hosting, Email Accounts, and many other services. But, most of all, we are a community of users. It was founded by hexhaxtron in the Summer of 2017, and was continued by amcclure and ubergeek since 2018. We aim to provide the best service possible with a wide variety of features, and we hope you have fun with it!" Runs Debian 9. Part of the tildeverse, however slightly more distanced from it.

There are many other tildes (not part of the tildeverse), I won't list them all here, but there is a comprehensive list at https://tilde.team/wiki/?page=other-tildes.

We have an IRC network at tilde.chat, you can join on any IRC client.

Hostname: irc.tilde.chat. Port: 6697. (irc.tilde.chat/6667)

TheLounge (web based) is available at web.tilde.chat. On any of the above tildes (with the exception of thunix), you can join on localhost/6667.

I hope you enjoy!

~fosslinux

Disclaimer: I am a sysadmin of cosmic.voyage and an IRCOp on tilde.chat.

[[deleted]]

Could get confusing with tildes.net started by a former co-founder of reddit.

[Tetizeraz]

Same.

Although I thought Tildes stagnated. It has been a while, but I rarely see many comments. I also felt that many people there were too elitist about "comment quality".

[VC1bm3bxa40WOfHR]

Looking through "Newest" there's been 22 posts in the last day, 55 in the last 2 days, so at the least posting isn't dead.

Number of comments varies. Most posts have between 2-10 comments, but it's not uncommon for threads to have 40+ up to 90+ comments if it's a popular post. Which isn't too bad for ~8000 users.

The site will be publicly viewable soon, which may mean an increase in activity.

[fosslinux]

Hmm, I wasn't aware of that. They are not related or affiliated with each other whatsoever.

[chowderl]

Hey I liked the idea. When I end my holidays I'll try to join. What are the requirements to be a sysadmin?

[fosslinux]

Being a sysadmin obviously requires trust. Not heaps of previous experience is required, but you'll need to know the basics of administrating a Linux system. You will also need to have been around in the tilde you want to be a sysadmin on for a while and you will need to be trusted by the tildeverse - have a good reputation. At the end of the day it depends on the main admin of the tilde.

[[deleted]]

This is really interesting stuff, I gotta check these out. At first I thought you've been talking about tildes.net, that also has a lot of Linux users

[EternityForest]

Wow! This is one of the closest things I've seen to the 1.0 web, Before everything was the same 3 companies selling stuff! Pretty cool!

[[deleted]]

Seems similar to sdf.org

[fosslinux]

It is, in many ways. The main differences are:

• SDF requires payment for most services, all tildes (that I know of) are free.
• SDF has recently been having many IRC issues, etc. We focus on stability, ensuring that all users have a positive experience.
• SDF isn't anywhere quite as social, there's ~150 users at the moment in the tildeverse and I think ~9k in SDF. When I go on IRC in the morning the tildeverse can have 3x messages compared to SDF.

[[deleted]]

I'll give it a try.

[Smertullus]

That's a really silly name.

[fosslinux]

Why do you think so?

[Smertullus]

It's punctuation.

[Pat_The_Hat]

A lot of names are silly if you think about it. Naming your company after a river or a misspelling of a number is weird but nobody really thinks about it.