61–70 of 86 posts
I'm always wary of using SSH services which aren't running on systems I control. If I'm not mistaken, an SSH service is able to see all of the pubkeys you have in your ~/.ssh/, so there goes your privacy.
If you'd like a guided tour of the tildeverse, there's one on The Dork Web: https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/tales-from-the-dork-web-5 Also relevant community: https://tildes.net/~tildes
tildes.net is an independent, nonprofit reddit replacement.
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It's a community, like HN is, but accessed via ssh instead of http. So it's a community where the active participants necessarily can navigate a shell, irc client, tmux/screen, and maybe even prefer socializing in that environment vs. something like the web or mobile apps. Access is also a privilege which can be taken away. So everyone you interact with there is either new or cooperative and mature enough to not get…
What OS are they running? Strangely enough, it's not mentioned in the FAQ and I couldn't find it with a cursory look at their wiki.
I'm curious about the general way tilde sites are administered. How do they keep people from using them as hosts for cyberattacks or spam?
We mostly monitor resource usage, and built in a way to ban users from our django-based administration app. We have begun screening users more before allowing them to sign up, asking them things about what they want to use the town for.
I thought "Wow, cool - I gonna sign up". And then I saw their sign up form. 10 fields is a bit too much.
(Long time tilde.town member here) This is a fair criticism. There is a bit of a barrier to entry here. I think pengaru is unnecessarily harsh in his response. The server has a limited number of admins (really only a single main administrator with a handful of volunteer helpers), and the process of adding an account is mostly manual at the moment, I believe (with some helper scripts, of course). There are efforts und…
I thought "Wow, cool - I gonna sign up". And then I saw their sign up form. 10 fields is a bit too much.
Bah, back in my day you had to send the sysadmin a postcard ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareware#Postcardware ) to get your account approved ;) The picture database of all the postcards is still around [ https://freeshell.de/postcards/ ] .
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Bah, back in my day you had to send the sysadmin a postcard ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareware#Postcardware ) to get your account approved ;) The picture database of all the postcards is still around [ https://freeshell.de/postcards/ ] .
What's this 'postcard' thing you speak of? I've heard a rumor people used to have slices of dead trees lugged around the world. But the latency would be enormous!!
An interesting monologue about pseudonymity hidden here: http://tilde.town/~karlen/nowertb/anonymous.mp3
I've been listening to the other notes on there, and enjoying them. Where are the text posts that he's talking about though? All I see are these voice notes.
The rule for these audio clips was to do a search for any blog post on the internet which started with "No One Will Ever Read This, But ..." and where the blog had been abandoned for at least a year. If you listen to the audio and do some searching, sometimes you can find the post, if it's still up.
I'm the founder and primary admin of tilde.town.
I see many people signed up! Every application is manually reviewed, so, uh, give me a few days.
Regarding "good" and "bad" users; this question has been at the center of tilde.town since its inception. We're a community first and a technological project second and encouraging a sense of belonging for users is our primary goal.
Certain users sign up to abuse resources; that's easy to catch and deal with. Other users want to import the wider culture war aspects of the internet into our space, using a variety of tactics to provoke anger and discomfort.
I'm a generally conflict-avoidant person so this took getting used to. On the server, I had to learn to be willing to ban the persistent trolls. I want to provide a space where people can grow and mature as I was given on IRC and web forums back in the early 2000s instead of a place that throws people out at the first hint of having "incorrect" beliefs. Unfortunately this gave too much leeway to people that were consistently there to recreationally troll or promote genuinely hateful movements.
I became much more free with both temporary and permanent bans and made the signup intentionally cumbersome, wracked with nerves about the "good" folks who might be intimidated. I still have that anxiety, but ever since increasing the scrutiny on applications and doing more banning we've had a much more stable community environment.
I read a lot of books on digital communities; the Virtual Community by Howard Rheingold is a great starting point, but the book that helped me the most was Cyber Chiefs by Mathieu O’Neil. It helped me understand that all communities that manage to grow over time will hit an unsustainable point and either retract or dissipate.
Dissipation was a real possibility; for a long time I felt completely emotionally burned out by the town. I chose retraction though, and in retrospect, it was the right choice.
I'm still learning and thinking all the time about ways to encourage quieter or less technologically inclined people to sign up and make a home on the town and am always excited to talk about it or hear ideas.
(edited to clarify i'm not the only admin)
Hi I'm the founder and primary admin of tilde.town. I see many people signed up! Every application is manually reviewed, so, uh, give me a few days. Regarding "good" and "bad" users; this question has been at the center of tilde.town since its inception. We're a community first and a technological project second and encouraging a sense of belonging for users is our primary goal. Certain users sign up to abuse resourc…