Here's a tweet explaining a bit more context: https://twitter.com/ftrain/status/1172545886968324098

Transcript for those who can't access twitter for some reason:

Paul Ford ‏ @ftrain

A tildeverse-builder named Mike Buchholz (info@retrodigital.net) offered to take over http://tilde.club AND the backlog of 10,000+ people who asked for accounts. I said, that would be a blessing!

If you had an account, it still works. If you asked, they'll be in touch. 9:21 AM - 13 Sep 2019

Paul Ford ‏ @ftrain Sep 13

I've had the strange experience, since Mike asked to take on this responsibility, of learning that http://tilde.club kicked off a scene called the tildeverse, with many sites, servers, and its own github. https://tildeverse.org

Paul Ford ‏ @ftrain Sep 13

I wasn't aware that it had self-organized to this degree. Mostly I've felt guilty about http://tilde.club , which grew so fast and with so much interest that it needed a lot of time and love that I could not provide. It's great to see it was a spark for so many new things.

Michael Buchholz ‏ @MichaelBuchho13 Sep 13 Replying to @ftrain

Hopefully have backlog taken care of this week and other new sign ups available within the next week or so.

Paul Ford ‏ @ftrain Sep 13

I mean some have waited four years another week is no big deal.

Waitlisted people (like me) got accounts today. Yay!

I have one of the original tilde.club accounts. It was a fun moment, when a bunch of folks re-experienced (or experienced) the first time the pleasure of a shared Unix system. Just like the Old Ones had in college. When finger was social media, and "who" worked, and if you were really cool your .plan was a named pipe. It worked because it was nostalgic and because its sysop Paul Ford is a first class human being. Never occurred to me it'd be an idea with longevity.

Can you explain what a named pipe .plan would do?

In college, if you would finger me, you would see an ASCII-art animation of the iconic motorcycle jump shot from Terminator 2 for 10 seconds.

Finger basically just reads that file so if it’s a named pipe you can have a process generate content on the fly.

How does the process know that you're reading the pipe? Does it just, like, write a hundred copies of the desired output with EOFs in between so that it can be read multiple times?

The process writing to the pipe just blocks until another process starts reading from said pipe.

Ah, right, I was misremembering how FIFOs work. You can't even write to it until a reader opens it. I was thinking that you could just dump data on it and the operating system would buffer it until someone came along to read it.

Love this story and the inspiration behind it to create a simple server to deliver raw signal to those nostalgic for the web of yore.

Love it even more because I recognize Paul Ford's name from his article "What is Code?" [0], which is how I first became aware of him.

"What is Code?" blew me away when I read it, bringing together both software development and the humanities (writing) and I sent links to just about every academic I called "friend" to, well, not much response.

So glad to find out Ford's tilde.club experiment blew up in a good way!

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-co...

EDIT: add comma and missing direct object.

When I got an account for tilde.club, I used it to host the first website I ever made. Now you can see the oldest Dreamweaver based html page I made from when I was 15: https://tilde.club/~rememberlenny/

Good ol' Dreamweaver. Used that for awhile.. worked great for the time :)

Yes! Switching from M$ FrontPage to Dreamweaver was a game-changer! WYSIWYG editor capabilities and generated markup that (for its time) was reasonably clean...

I was pretty lazy back then.. so frontpage was my easy way to manage links on multiple pages. But then I moved to dreamweaver after that and never looked back :)

> - There is NO GUILT here. NOR SHAME. Not knowing things is fine. Not

> finishing them is fine too. Be a disaster! Make a disaster!

I like this attitude.

Punk's not dead

[Here's a link to the waitlist](http://goo.gl/forms/gRMRT1YBU4)

As much as we appreciate the support, Users that have added themselves to that wait list after the 15th will not automatically get an account. We stopped using the wait list after we started emailing users on the wait list. To get an account we will be opening sign ups on tilde.club's website on the 20th.

Ah, gotcha. Thanks for the timeline!

I love it. So old school! Back in the early 90s in the university computer lab, you could jump on a machine and see who else was logged in (either in the room, or remotely) and use all the old Unix multi-user commands like who, w, last, finger, msg, wall, write, talk...

Isn't there a theory that most web services today are just versions of standard Unix tools?

What a sweet reminder of a simpler and more open time on the net. Makes me miss MUDs which were the right combination of social interaction without leaving embarrassing footprints for future employers to find twenty years on.

There's enough MUDs that are still active, that you should still be able to find a community you like.

Live listings of active MUDs: http://mudstats.com/

The Reddit MUD community: https://www.reddit.com/r/MUD/

There's plenty of MUDs still around. Not as active as 20 years ago, but still active.

Wow. Brings back memories. We used to spoof mail to the Sysadmin and think it was funny as hell. We were such little nerds :-)

Oh man, I remember doing this in high school more than once.

$> telnet ourserver.com 25

helo

MAIL FROM president@whitehouse.gov

RCPT TO jim@ourserver.com

SUBJECT: Hi its me President Clinton

DATA fart

.

QUIT

Such a simpler time. Today I haven't the foggiest idea what it would take to invoke an email server correctly in a way that would definitely deliver the message. Probably a lot.

swaks can more or less do much of that, though it should fail any competent dkim/spf requirements.

Is this similar to sdf.org?

A bit, yes. The tildeverse (and tilde.club) are public access UNIX systems just like SDF. The offerings are different and they're run by volunteers. Check out https://tildeverse.org to learn more about the various servers and what is offered by the collective.

the collective.. Tildeverse is now the BoRg :P Almost works too. lol

This has always been a breath of fresh air for me, but perhaps I'm the only person whose main memory of shared Unix systems at university was entire classes of people trying to launch KDE 3 simultaneously via Exceed and everything grinding to a halt...

Shell accounts tend to be far lighter, barring compilations.

This makes me think of this game released earlier in the year, Hypnospace Outlaw

This makes me think of twenty years ago, except now we have SSH instead of telnet.

The craziest thing is that the first stable release of portable openssh is almost twenty years old: https://www.openssh.com/txt/release-1.2.2p1