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. tildeverse.org maintains the member list. The name comes from the Unix convention of ~ for a user's home directory.

Adapted from Here Is a Person: Enter the Tildeverse on brennan.day.

The model is older than the web. Dennis Ritchie's 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: 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. cmccabe's pubnix history and the Pubnix History Project document the full lineage, and the Jargon File's Eternal September marks the moment the social fabric broke at scale.

In October 2014, 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 Ford's essay on what happened next.

For his birthday in 2015, vilmibm founded 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 the third-birthday retrospective. Dozens of sibling tildes followed, including tilde.pink.

• A shell account and ~/public_html web page at tilde.example/~user
• Gopher holes and Gemini capsules alongside the web site (see Gopher, 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.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 Hackaday's 2024 coverage and the MCH2022 small-internet talk.

• tilde.town
• SDF
• tilde.pink
• tilde.town Tools
• Gopher
• Gemini
• SSH: tilde.town
• The Internet as a Place
• Return to wiki home