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====== The Tildeverse ======

The tildeverse is the network of tilde communities: public-access Unix systems (pubnixes) where anyone can get a shell account, a home directory, and a web presence on a shared machine. [[https://tildeverse.org|tildeverse.org]] maintains the member list. The name comes from the Unix convention of ''~'' for a user's home directory.

Adapted from [[https://brennan.day/here-is-a-person-enter-the-tildeverse/|Here Is a Person: Enter the Tildeverse]] on brennan.day.

===== Origins =====

The model is older than the web. Dennis Ritchie's [[https://cs.nyu.edu/~mwalfish/classes/15sp/ref/ritchie79evolution.html|The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System]] describes Unix as designed for fellowship: remote time-shared machines that encouraged close communication, not just batch jobs. Community pubnixes carried that forward: [[https://grex.org/history.xhtml|Grex]] (1991) was founded by a dozen users who met weekly for six months over potlucks to design a member-owned system with slow group decision-making. [[https://tilde.town/~cmccabe/online-communities.html|cmccabe's pubnix history]] and the [[https://github.com/cwmccabe/pubnixhist|Pubnix History Project]] document the full lineage, and the [[http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended.html|Jargon File's Eternal September]] marks the moment the social fabric broke at scale.

===== The Revival =====

In October 2014, [[https://ftrain.com/tweet-516778930515476480|Paul Ford tweeted]] an offer of shell accounts on a fresh server, and thousands applied before he finished the thought. The result was tilde.club: "one cheap, unmodified Unix computer on the Internet," with rules like "no drama" and "total disaster is ALWAYS a possible outcome." See [[https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-and-woke-up-with-1-000-nerds-a8904f0a2ebf|Ford's essay on what happened next]].

For his birthday in 2015, vilmibm founded [[https://tilde.town|tilde.town]] on the same model with a different mandate: as welcoming as possible to everyone, a bastion against the shit of the networked world. See [[https://tilde.town/~vilmibm/thoughts/year3.html|the third-birthday retrospective]]. Dozens of sibling tildes followed, including [[tilde:pink|tilde.pink]].

===== What Tildes Provide =====

* A shell account and ''~/public_html'' web page at ''tilde.example/~user''
  * Gopher holes and Gemini capsules alongside the web site (see [[protocols:gopher:start|Gopher]], [[protocols:gemini:start|Gemini]])
  * Shared social tools: internal IRC, bulletin boards, ''finger'' and ''.plan'' files, local mail
  * A culture of small-scale, self-governed, genAI-free community. See [[tilde:tools|tilde.town Tools]].

The lesson tilde.club taught: you can, at any time, for very little money and effort, stand up a tiny digital community that basically belongs to itself. See [[https://hackaday.com/2024/09/14/taking-back-the-internet-with-the-tildeverse/|Hackaday's 2024 coverage]] and the [[https://media.ccc.de/v/mch2022-83-rocking-the-web-bloat-modern-gopher-gemini-and-the-small-internet|MCH2022 small-internet talk]].

===== See Also =====

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