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 banned from a shared resource with very few safeguards preventing abuse.

~town is by far the largest multiuser system I've logged into in the last decade, not that I've been looking. It kind of reminds me of the university UNIX systems I dialed into in the 90s, fingering users to read their plans, updating my .plan, running ytalk to chat with friends, email w/pine, and usenet w/tin.

I still don't get it... so, there's an IRC client you can access on a server, using ssh credentials to login and there's a public folder that gets served by a static web server ? How do people interact on that social network (sending messages, pictures, etc.) ?

> ~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'm aware of sdf.org, and I haven't logged into it in over a decade :)

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!

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.

Currently: Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS (Focal Fossa)

You can find that info and more about all the member tildes of the tildeverse (including tilde.town) on the tildeverse website here: https://tildeverse.org/members/

I had this anti-climax moment a couple months back when my low-tech loving friends were fawning over Tildeverse.

For anyone who remembers the internet of the past 15 years, it's just public home dirs in server/~username. An old feature of web servers.

And then they link to each others home dirs on some directory site. We used to call this a web ring. ;)

Ah a public shell, fond memories. I used to have a nic-nac-project (now freeshell.de?) account some 15 years ago. It was my first exposure to Debian, which led me to order a free mail-in CD of Ubuntu Warty Warthog. These were different times.

Unfortunately public shells largely went the way of the dodo due to how cheaply you can get a VPS now (and not worry about resource quota, ulimits, local exploits or lack of root access...)

I learned a lot of basic Linux through the same shell provider back in the day!

My ~/public_html 25+ years ago :-)

It's shared computer/server. You got your SSH key and log in.

It has some social features inside - BBJ (command line driven forum), IRC chat, "timeline" command (think of local twitter on command line).

However main difference is that it's up to you how can you interact it others. You can setup some scripts/games for others, or just present yourself in your public_html folder. I have created gallery of those homepages and these are very diverse - https://tilde.town/~severak/gallery/ - so much good stuff hidden there.

For example - I have created cronjob, that builds youtube playlist out of songs added by !sotd command on IRC - https://tilde.town/~severak/town_radio.html (for technical description see https://tilde.town/~severak/sotds.html)

We have cli based games, an internal irc, federated mail, etc. It's a fun community.