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tilde.town: A social network over SSH

tilde.town

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Re: tilde.town: A social network over SSH

#72

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…

Tilde.fun has a somewhat working ssh signup with an admin interface: https://code.tilde.fun/tilde/ssh-reg

Maybe we can work together and create a lightweight admin framework.

Re: tilde.town: A social network over SSH

#73
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then they should create one key per service and only use that one.

Which they've done from the sound of it, and are concerned about the ability to read those other public keys and use them as a tracking vector.

As another commenter already pointed out, the IdentitiesOnly config option removes that ability. The ssh-config man page explains this.

Re: tilde.town: A social network over SSH

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

Creating a user is luckily very automated, but we have had to increase the amount of information we ask to hopefully screen out bad actors who just want a shell account and then run bitcoin miners (which has happened several times).

Can't you block bitcoin miners via limiting CPU time per user?

As soon as a user hits x amount of minutes CPU per minute, you kill all his programs.

Not nice but effective.

Re: tilde.town: A social network over SSH

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which they've done from the sound of it, and are concerned about the ability to read those other public keys and use them as a tracking vector.

As another commenter already pointed out, the IdentitiesOnly config option removes that ability. The ssh-config man page explains this.

Out of curiosity, are there reasons that that behavior shouldn't be the default?

Re: tilde.town: A social network over SSH

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As another commenter already pointed out, the IdentitiesOnly config option removes that ability. The ssh-config man page explains this.

Out of curiosity, are there reasons that that behavior shouldn't be the default?

I'm not sure it makes much sense unless you also override the default IdentifyFile.

Re: tilde.town: A social network over SSH

#77
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> ~town is by far the largest multiuser system I've logged into in the last decade You may wish to look at sdf.org then.

I just discovered sdf.org through your post.

Can you please validate my account? because I can't send them 1 USD in the mail as I don't live in the US (and thus have no access to its currency).

Thanks!

Re: tilde.town: A social network over SSH

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As another commenter already pointed out, the IdentitiesOnly config option removes that ability. The ssh-config man page explains this.

Out of curiosity, are there reasons that that behavior shouldn't be the default?

I can think of three reasons:

1. It would stop SSH agent forwarding from working if the remote has it enabled.

2. It would stop alternative SSH agent implementations from working.

3. It would only make sense if you actually have multiple identities.

Re: tilde.town: A social network over SSH

#80

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…

Hey! Miirc here! I really have to get my plant back up and running. Plant, RIP.

You've done a great job with the community. Thanks for all you do!

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