Who am I? I am the system administrator, Paul Ford. Like any system administrator, I will be slow to respond, will get everything wrong, and will act imperiously while never acknowledging wrongdoing. Consider this part of your authentic tilde.club experience!
It's been a wonderful weird little thing so far, with folks having a mix of nostalgia for and first exposure to shell account stuff, playing around with oldschool webbery, hacking little things together across user accounts, and just generally being great people in a nice place.
I got inspired yesterday and wrote us up our own custom low-rent version of Flappy Bird:
Though I did spend about fifteen minutes working on a pure command-line turn-based version called Roguey Bird a few months ago before realizing I didn't actually feel like spending more than fifteen minutes on it at the time.
In the interest of truly returning to the days of Nintendo Power hijinks, I have added a high score table that is powered by people sending me screenshots of their high scores.
It's a little bit of the spirit of The Well, and some USENET/BBS to boot. I think this is really missing from the modern web, so I cheer you on! It is a toast-worthy activity, your little blip on the horizon ..
If tilde club someday dies, either by crushing-traffic, hackers, negligence, commercialization, or acquihire, I'm hoping we get a post-mortem that was as fun to read as this origin story. I would love to even just see more machine configuration details for the "one cheap, unmodified Unix computer on the Internet" that is hosting it.
Reading this post about someone building a community just out of a whim, and then seeing how quickly and quirkily a community can arise from such minimal environment, reminded me of what's still probably my favorite submission I've ever read on HN: http://burakkanber.com/blog/sitechat-a-postmortem-or-the-ris...
Thanks for this link; it's a really great read. I immediately thought, "I've had that idea!" (but then realized that I first had the idea to make per-website chat rooms after this guy had already done it). Fascinating.
The best part, better than all the other really good parts, is the "no cops" legalese at the bottom. I remember seeing that everywhere in the pre-Napster days (i.e. downloading loose MP3s from sites that looked just like yours)
That managed to completely lock up Firefox for me. Nicely done! Think it was a combination of the scrolling page title and right-click handler that did it. Or it was fighting Pentadactyl.
I love both pages. They brings back nostalgia. I remember those times fondly, I just started to learn HTML then. The Web those days was different, it felt like a social network itself. I miss it.
Also, your girlfriend seems to be winning now :). Those ASCII-art birds are beautiful.
I haven't dealt with framesets for almost 20 years (I'm still scarred), but I seem to recall that you can target nested frames just by providing them with a unique "name" attribute. I may be wrong though.
You may also want to change the doctype header to use the HTML 4 "frameset.dtd" instead of the "strict.dtd". Just change the first line of your frame-enabled pages to:
But what I'm after is recursion. Rather than make 20 individual frameset pages each with different target="name"s, it would be way cooler simply to populate each frame area with itself.
"Infinite recursion is prevented. Any frame that attempts to assign as its SRC a URL used by any of its ancestors is treated as if it has no SRC URL at all (basically a blank frame). This doesn't prevent all malicious documents, but it eliminates a troublesome class of them."
Ah well, probably for the best really... It seems to have a recursion limit of 10 on Firefox, and 12 on Chrome.
I cheated by creating your original frameset pattern and then just recursing index.html in the middle frame. It improves the recursion effect a bit, but still isn't infinite.
that is incredible. I wish I still had my old "pixelclique" ns4+ codebase. Or if I could recall my geocities name maybe I could find earlier work on wayback.
This project hits that sweet spot where "old timers" who remember the lo-fi social web have a place to call their own while also being appealing to the "young guns" who have only ever known the social web in the age of Facebook/Twitter and are looking for an alternative where not everything is easy and beautiful.
I was born in 1990, but I was also introduced to computers at a very young age.
I've been using the internet before the Facebook/Myspace boom, but I never had the chance to really experience the "old-web" or usenet. This "project" gives me a chance to see a part of internet history that I missed or was too young to remember delivered from people who were there.
It's a really unique project for people like myself, and I find it comforting to see culture of the internet that I saw a glimpse of in my childhood.
I was born in 1989 and my experience is very similar.
As I came of age on the internet in the early 2000s, there were enough vestiges of stuff like Usenet that I was familiar with it but it was clear it was in terminal decline. And I always felt bummed that I missed that era.
Another thing that I really like about this project is how it combines new and old technologies. Like how it's a "standard UNIX computer on the internet" but runs on Amazon's cloud. Collaboration is done via Github. You sign-up via a Google Form. We have these amazing infrastructure tools now which didn't exist 10 years ago. It's really something to see.
/me also misses IRC from the times where you could type --<--{@ and you could be sure it looked just the same on the other end. Monospace was the norm, not the exception and all the IRC clients displayed all lines aligned (to the left, however unbelievable that sounds) regardless of the length of the users name.
Today I have to pay attention not to write (b) or (c) because it might turn into a beer or coffee. We often forget to appreciate the simplicity of things.
Last year you could crash lync by dragging a link from the conversation box into the text input box. Instead of fixing the problem they disallowed that behavior.
That behaviour sounds great, although I’m curious which old IRC clients you are referring to. I actually make use of an old Power Mac G3 (B&W) running Mac OS 9 for connecting to some IRC servers (using ircle) and in its case, at least, nicks are assumed to be 10 characters or less. This is quite annoying since there are active users on the channels who have nicks longer than that, so the client simply displays their messages with the extra characters of their nick cut off (to keep the messages left aligned). While I suppose ircle could dynamically resize the area for nicks based on the length of the longest nick that has posted a message, that could be pretty inefficient… not to mention if the channel messages are being logged in a text file with messages left-aligned in there as well (which is what ircle does); the whole file would have to be recreated.
> While I suppose ircle could dynamically resize the area for nicks based on the length of the longest nick that has posted a message, that could be pretty inefficient
XChat does exactly this. So do a few other clients still.
This is probably the most endearingly fascinating project I've ever read about on the internet. Just a guy saying, "Hey, let's do something simple and fun, maybe people will like it." I can't pinpoint why it seems like so much fun, but I'm glad it's around.
Upvoted with a thousand clicks!! Probably the most gleeful project I've come across in years. On to the waiting list.
I'm of the generation where Windows 3.0 was just coming up and there was DOS and as fresh highschool kids we just didn't know what we were tinkering with. A prof used to came and blabber about internal commands and external commands without really explaining the difference because most likely she herself was a n00b. And we used to get excited if we ever got a 30-min lab session to poke around with Lotus-123, Wordpro, Foxbase or Turbo Pascal. Then in grad college we got Novell Netware and some of us figured out how to crack into classmate's home directories and play pranks. I'm missing a few pieces but there was a kind of a LAN manager and it was possible to 'poke' other users. Like a Unixish Yoapp of that time. That was my first experience of cross-computer realtime chat.
Anyway longstory short this project brings back all the nostalgia of pre y2k and early college days for me. Can't wait to get in. So so happy.
“That’s a west coast thing,” said Mo, who grew up in California. “You use tildes instead of colons or dashes, it’s more like handwriting.”
Interesting. I also grew up in California but never saw the tilde used as a colon or dash. I thought it was more used as a replacement for periods when the author wanted to come off as light/flirty/caring/sing-song.
In Japan a ー is used to extend a sound. Characters like ne or yo are used to casually finish sentences and it gives them a hightened sense of friendliness to extend them with 〜 instead of ー. It also can be used to make effeminate or suggestive sounds like あーん would be ahhn like sticking out your tongue to check your throat but あ〜ん is ahnn but in a seductive/sexy way
Please correct me if I’m wrong (still learning Japanese), but isn’t「ー」only used to extend sounds written in katakana? In the case of the「あーん」that you wrote, I would think that it would be written as「ああん」instead since that’s the way sounds are extended in hiragana. I agree with your usage of「あ〜ん」though.
To be precise, 「ー」 is mostly only used to extend vowels when it wouldn't change what Japanese/Chinese word it's referring to. For instance, 「お」 can mean "honorable", but 「おう」 means "king" and 「おお」 means "large". If you wanted to convey that you're saying "honorable" but dragging it out, you'd write it like 「おー」 such as in 「おーにいーさん」 ("Brooooother"), so it wouldn't be confused with 「おう」 or 「おお」 even though it'd be pronounced the same way.
You could think of it this way: if you wanted to convey that you were saying the word "god" but stretching it out, the Japanese solution would be to write it as "go–d" (since "good" would have it be confused with a different word).
(This isn't the only way to convey that a long vowel in hiragana isn't semantic, though. It's also common to write the vowel in small font, such as 「あぁぁ」 or 「ねぇ」)
You can also write things that are usually written in katakana in hiragana instead. This makes it look softer, and is similar to the idea of writing English without capitalizing words (such as at the beginning of sentences). In these cases, you'd still use ー as if you were using katakana, such as in the song title 「とらぶるめーかー」 ("Troublemaker", the opening theme song from the anime Himegoto).
It depends - was it a foreigner who was having their throat checked?
Although, yes, formally the ー mostly appears in katakana and after a vowel, there's a lot of informal ways to use it. eg. んー？ - the sound of someone thinking or っー an extended pause (perhaps in surprise - something happened mid sentence to cut someone off suddenly and make their jaw drop).
eg. just coincidentally, my friend posted this on instagram as I was typing this response.
Ahh, now I remember why these kinds of websites died out.
It's exciting a lot like Minecraft, in that we can make our own little worlds. We exercised both sides of the brain by learning how to write HTML and maybe some Perl, all while writing actual content.
But just like Minecraft, that world is isolated and lonely. Nobody visited our sites, that's why we stopped updating them. They were inherently isolated from the beginning.
So we built social networks to replace them. We have new places to go to share our random thoughts. Places where it's slightly more likely they'll be seen by someone.
I have to say that this time around the ramp is pointed way higher. Like ~mathowie is doing wheelies right out the gate, content-wise. So I'll be heading back there and I just created a category for Tilde Club stuff in my bookmark database.
What if you linked pages together in a sort of map.
In Minecraft, the world is segmented into 16x16 block "chunks". In this analogy, a chunk would be a web page.
Create a front-end application like Google Maps that allows you to navigate the map of web pages. You can submit a request for a web page at a specific location, e.g. I want the page located at (13, 37). Hyperlinks could be used to teleport users around the map.
I'm not sure. Some of the most informative pages were available under Tripod, written by people into obscure subjects. They were typically ugly (the pages, not the people), but were informative. They were a source of more interesting information than today's social network's "here's a picture of me eating something". You could actually learn something from reading the pages instead of just observing someone else's behaviour / possessions.
The home education community in the UK had a huge amount of information up on Tripod and similar sites, pointing to all sorts of useful resources for those who wanted to teach their kids at home. I'm not sure where they post information these days. Probably in Facebook groups.
These seem to be still around. Sometimes I'm looking for specialized info on non-technical software and there is usually a really ugly but highly informative page from an enthusiast around (who only got into basic html). (See bonsai care for example)
Actually, I meant that Minecraft is more interesting that the current crop of social networks. These types of pages are interesting, social network pages are not.
So, there's a lot of good reasons why nobody runs shell servers anymore. One reason is that the FBI may one day knock on your door with a letter that says they're going to need access to all your user's accounts, and that you can't tell them or anyone else, and if you do you're going to jail for a felony. If you're lucky you'll be able to tell your users about 6 months later. Other things that happen is you become a spam, DDoS and CnC host, and you end up spending the great majority of your time preventing 1% of your users from ruining the internet. And of course the inevitable takedown notices for pirated or illegal material.
Almost everyone running a 'real' web service puts in place limits to prevent this kind of abuse or isolate their customers from it. Gone are the days of running eggdrops from $1/month php hosters and hosting warez on Geocities. And most of the time these providers have an abuse reporting system with forms that allows for efficient review and process of complaints.
The combination of 'unlimited' access of a shell along with the shared nature of the host causes shells to be targets of more nefarious activity. Due to the personal nature of the account, people often host more personal information on a shell. So when it comes time to fork over account access, people are at more risk than just a web site host.
I understand the nostalgia of having a place for shared accounts. I have friends who host shells for their friends; a throwback to the days where it cost real money to colo a dual pentium machine with a SCSI RAID array on a 10mbit connection. But the world isn't a safe place anymore, and the feds don't just ignore cybercrime like they used to. They could probably trump up a charge of 'accomplice' just for having an account on a box that had some crime associated with it. I feel much better paying a few bucks a year for my own VPS.
No, if you ask it: finger jethro_tell it will work locally, if you ask it: finger jethro_tell@example.com, it will check to see if example.com is running a finger server on tcp/79 and will return the reply if example.com answers. Otherwise it will just time out.
Oh man, this reminds me of my first shell account, and SDF, and the actual reason I got into computers. So excited. Maybe I could write a little communication API-type thing that these kinds of shell servers could implement, so communities could be linked together in some way? Hmm. That would be cool. I think I just found a good reason to mess around with Rust.
I highly recommend that if you support experimentation you join and donate -- I have a MetaARPA account that I don't think I've logged into in 3 years, but I just send them a $36 check every year because I think it's important people be able to have a safe, free place to tinker.
(Also, if you want to sign up, I can validate your account. Email me a link to your HN profile and if you have enough contributions to convince me you're an okay person, I'll take care of it.)
Yeah, I used lonestar back in the day, and had a great time.
I wonder how much he is ready for when people get malicious though, getting a shell often meant something like presenting personal identifying information so they could come find you if you messed it up.
Yes to SDF.org, I ended up going Arpa and then Meta. And COM is still going! Super Dimension Fortress is a bit like a VPS with a community. More about learning than hosting a huge site.
I remember being 14 and creating ANSI art was my favorite pastime other than gaming and browsing ACiD and other creator groups art over 14.4. This taps so into that nostalgia, hope I can get a folder.
What if we made an image of the server and anyone could download and operate a box and somehow they would be like, distributed and talk to one another? I don't know what else would happen, but it would be cool.
At uni I used to keep a text file with huge ascii art one word messages (redundant but large) and I'd "write myfriend lunch.txt" or whatever and they'd get a huge "lunch?" on their terminal. It was even more disruptive than texting is today ;-)
"There is no need to get in on the ground floor, because the ground floor has been there for decades."
I (still)edit the smaller pages on my personal site from an ssh session using nano. The big productions get done in markdown with a couple of bash scripts on the laptop.
All good fun, and nice to see how little bandwidth/processor resources a bunch of static pages can live in. I don't think I'll go on the wait list as I have a perfectly good slice of web server already but I hope this gets popular.
My concern for this project is that it is so dependent on the culture of its users that is has to be strictly controlled. It cannot scale up, because a strong culture like this does not scale. There might be more Tilde Clubs over time, but such a machine is too easily disrupted by even a single bad actor, like peterwwillis says. Even if that did not happen, cultural erosion would happen, like a mini Eternal September or take your pick of communities: Reddit, Slashdot, HN, etc.
Tao begot one.
One begot two.
Two begot three.
And three begot the Ten Thousand Things.
Poking holes at ways it can fail is analytic thinking. First you must accept the premise, and work to design ways it could work, will work, is working. Take a thing far before cutting it down.
It's possible this project creates the culture that satisfies your existability concerns. It's possible that culture might grow and spread.
So the only usefulness of this product is that it provides a feeling of nostalgia, and smug belonging? (Like you're cool now if you have a tilde.club page?) Thus we cannot invite lots of people to the tilde.club because... we're just too cool for them. I predict #Fail.
I think that it is useful for nostalgia, yes, and also as a small community. But its structure makes it inherently fragile and dependent upon a strong culture. As a result, as long as it is successful, I could see members taking pride in being members of a special, unusually great community.
This reminds me I need to make work of starting the quest for my very first homepage (with ~). It's still online, I just have no idea where it physically located and I've lost access to it in late 1996. The page is under the domain of an ISP that no longer exists, having been bought by another ISP... that no longer exists either.
This reminded me MIT still uses ~<email> for public www space. Must be an artifact of this UNIX paradigm. Brian Chan as an example: http://www.mit.edu/~chosetec/.
It's Apache's default UserDir module that does that. It's only the request-controller model of dynamic web application development that has made it look unusual compared to something like /user?id=moemaya or /users/moemaya or whatever.
I had exactly the same thought. The fact that you aren't running Rails and you can't clone a bunch of open-source libraries from Github, but rather must start from scratch with your own handmade HTML, is absolutely Burning Man's "radical self-reliance."
> A merged request triggers a web hook that pings a heroku app that performs a git pull on tilde.club using Fabric
Can I ask you to explain this in a little more detail? I've tried to host pages with Git and run into weird errors cropping into my HTML and webdev people telling me "GIT IS NOT A DEPLOYMENT TOOL".
I got into web design around when it first became a thing. Browsers allowed images, tables permitted layout, etc.
I can remember when you'd be working for a client who had a tilde account (ISPname.com/~client), but then get particularly enthused when working on a job that had its own domain! Those looked so much better in a portfolio!
All pretty tragic to consider now when it's so cheap and fast to set up any old domain and a lot of the charm and wonder is gone.
I would agree that a lot of the charm and wonder is gone, as the Internet is commonplace and many of the technical marvels are taken for granted, sadly.
Shell accounts are like short wave radios, wrist watches, cameras and landline telephones. Not many people have them anymore but they are oh so useful.
com aplicação dos dons intelectuais e sociais
duma companhia grande do internet eu seria chefão
entre a mulherada eu teria muitos fãs
e eu as levava pelo mundo inteiro num roteiro no meu avião
mais a compulsão de estudar computação
so resultou em eu ser cidadão do Nerdistão
But ~ doesn't mean person. It means 'home'. Hence, 'ls ~' lists the contents of your home directory and 'cd ~root' takes you to home directory of root.
In web context ~user translated to 'home of user' which was fitting in most cases.
I might be too young. But I like writing webpages on my own isolated vps :)
I can move around my own domain and even install packages! While still having the shell experience. And these days you can go as low as $10 per YEAR on a vps.
Massively off-topic – but in American English is "a couple drinks" correct? British English would be "a couple of drinks". Just curious – I notice this a lot of US tech blogs.
As an American, it's conversationally idiomatic, but not generally considered "correct." You'd expect to hear someone speak it, but you would not typically expect to read it in an essay.
I never thought of that as being strange. I think it's used this way because it fits with "a few," you know? "I had a few drinks," "I had a couple drinks." But fwiw, "I had a couple of drinks" doesn't sound wrong to me.
Someone should mention telehack.com here - not quite shell, but a brilliant simulation and set of emulations. It attempts to replicate life as we knew it in 1986 or so.
To prevent it ever being spammy, which is my first concern with any anonymous group of people. Just a place where you know everyone is a hacker (in the coding sense) and you know who they are in real-life.
Here is a weird quirky thing that I have been noticing a lot recently: People taking screenshots that have a tooltip window visible.
Is this accidental? An attempt to make the screenshot seem more spontaneous? Did Windows or OSX recently change something in such a way that this is now easy to accidentally do? Are people simply not proofreading their screenshots anymore? Is it a "west coast thing"?
I'm being serious. I was writing it off as user-error but I'm starting to doubt that now with how frequently I see it.
I've done this in documentation in order to show a visual indicator of what the user should be clicking on, or filling in next. This is especially important in programs with confusing or ambiguous UIs (Find the "Settings" option in a Lotus Notes email database? <shiver>).
Ideally, it wouldn't be necessary, but it can help as an extra guide in docs.
That is just perfect.