The town square is tilde.town's communal directory: /town/square, world-writable so any townie can drop in a file or start a shared project. It exists so users can collaborate on things that do not belong to any one home directory. Before it existed, making a shared space needed an admin's help.

/town/square/public_html is served at tilde.town/square. The index links a handful of clubs and projects, all world-writable:

• Clubs: web badge club, running club, website club, toki pona club, wrist watchers, CASIO CLUB
• garden/: the community garden page, generated from townies' botany plants
• bulletin/, #fridaypostcard, 夢の物語 (yumono), ~Wi-Fi connection

To publish there, create a directory or file under /town/square/public_html.

Around seventy entries as of October 2026, including:

• i_was_here_*.txt: a running chain of named files
• Club directories: friendship-club, .hidden-club, catgirl-1.9, shitty-lisp-club, Free~Tilde~Society, gitchat
• Shared tools: a compiled neofetch, a ytalk build, town_botany_autowaterer.py, generate_garden.py
• guestbooks.txt, chat.txt, bulletin_board/, darkalley/ (a write-only directory), square_maintenance (admin notes)
• zine, a symlink to ~zines home

ssh you@tilde.town
touch /town/square/i_was_here_13.txt        # leave a marker
mkdir /town/square/my-thing                 # start a shared project

Files keep their creator as owner, so make them writable by others if they are meant to be communal: chmod 664 for files, chmod 775 for directories. Deleting or vandalizing other people's files breaks the town's social contract (and the acceptable use policy).

• /town/our: a communal bin of hundreds of one-off user scripts. town my <name> runs one; town mkour scaffolds a new one
• town graffiti: edits the communal page at tilde.town/graffiti
• town wiki: reads and modifies the town wiki (pages in /srv/www/wiki/, edited through the wiki command)
• town planet: the town blog aggregator; join by listing your feed URL in ~/.planetfeeds
• town bulletin / town linkulator: shared link boards

Some town services only listen on localhost, reachable from a shell but not the internet:

• The local IRC server on ports 6667 and 6697 (what town chat connects to, channel #tildetown)
• PostgreSQL on 5432, which prosaic uses for its poem database
• The MOO's data at /town/moo
• Various user-run services on high localhost ports

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