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:
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.
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.
/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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
"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.
[+] [-] pja|11 years ago|reply
That is just perfect.
[+] [-] joshmillard|11 years ago|reply
I got inspired yesterday and wrote us up our own custom low-rent version of Flappy Bird:
http://www.tilde.club/~cortex/js/tildebird/
[+] [-] joshmillard|11 years ago|reply
http://www.tilde.club/~cortex/games.html
[+] [-] gohrt|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pja|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshmillard|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ErikRogneby|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m_myers|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ibisum|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SeanDav|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] motdiem|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|11 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] beaugunderson|11 years ago|reply
https://github.com/tildeclub/tilde.club
[+] [-] bespoke_engnr|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mizza|11 years ago|reply
edit: Please also go to my girlfriend's page! She's jealous of my hit counter: http://tilde.club/~arch
[+] [-] function_seven|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobwcarlson|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neilellis|11 years ago|reply
Speaking of which has anyone done a local BBS (i.e. non web) on tilde.club? :-)
[+] [-] scald|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|11 years ago|reply
Also, your girlfriend seems to be winning now :). Those ASCII-art birds are beautiful.
[+] [-] 72deluxe|11 years ago|reply
Your page, however, reminded me of the dreadful Lycos pages I used to see in the late 90s. I don't miss them, but it was true nostalgia - thanks!
[+] [-] syntheticnature|11 years ago|reply
The frames link, though, reawakened fear I'd not felt in years.
Haven't been to yours, so that her hit counter has a chance to catch up. ;-)
[+] [-] llimllib|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] th0ma5|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cunninghamd|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ErikRogneby|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelhoffman|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomjen3|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edibleEnergy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grimmfang|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shaunxcode|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billmalarky|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edavis|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mr_brown|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rev_bird|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kamikazi|11 years ago|reply
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.
ps: Anyone from India in yet?
[+] [-] jonathanyc|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] linguafranca|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] snsr|11 years ago|reply
Try joining a web ring?
[+] [-] peterjmag|11 years ago|reply
Via http://tilde.club/~jeffbonhag/index.shtml
[+] [-] peterwwillis|11 years ago|reply
Good luck...
[+] [-] ErikRogneby|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 72deluxe|11 years ago|reply
http://tilde.club/~cat/
[+] [-] bespoke_engnr|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cyanbane|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codva|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d23|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cosarara97|11 years ago|reply
"wall" command? (I've never used a Unix system at the same time as another person, I think)
[+] [-] keithpeter|11 years ago|reply
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.