meta webring

[pfhawkins]

I've started curating a list of alternative tilde boxes that I've come across in the last couple of days:

http://tilde.club/~pfhawkins/othertildes.html

While making it, I had an idea for a sort of meta.tilde.club webring, that links to the main pages of each unix box on the web. However, this (and even my list above) opens a whole can of worms regarding

• is this an "official" tilde.club unix box? who sanctions it?
• what happens if one of the listed boxes turns into a 4chan-esque cesspool?

and others along those lines I'm sure I'm missing right now.

I suppose this is just an aspect of the larger discussion of how we want tilde.club to relate to other boxes/bring other boxes into our network. Since much of this discussion seems to be happening on github I thought I'd open an issue here.

[vimes1984]

what constitues a tilde box is it just the software or maybe a mind set?

[pfhawkins]

We have been talking about this for a couple of weeks now and have no hard and fast conclusions, apart from people making things on the web in personal ~user directories.

[vimes1984]

any other conclusions, what was discussed? do you have a what is a tilde.club doc?

[ftrain]

I think we need more tilde.clubs in order to find out. It is all improvised. On Oct 12, 2014 12:32 PM, "christopher james churchill" < notifications@github.com> wrote:

any other conclusions, what was discussed? do you have a what is a tilde.club doc?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/tildeclub/tilde.club/issues/46#issuecomment-58808246.

[vimes1984]

having it non defined maintains a aura of mystic around the whole thing... Plus after reading the medium post this morn "just a unix box" is great!

[globz]

I started gathering thoughts/vision/mindset from other tilde owners, so far I have talked with ~vilmibm from tilde.town and he sent me an email describing what his box is all about...

"Hi there,

here's the info for tilde.town.

Vision: tilde.town is modeled as closely as possible on tilde.club. It aims to be an open, affirming, welcoming and pleasant community where users can experiment with art projects and forms of digital governance without fear of judgement or harassment.

Description: tilde.town runs on a free tier EC2 instance. It uses Ubuntu 14.04 and is configured using the puppet-tilde module. It is managed by ~vilmibm (on both .club and .town)"

We might see the start of different tilde.clubs culture who still comply with the initial ruleset of "just being a unix box"

This is great.

[michaelcoyote]

This is great.

:+1:

[pfhawkins]

The latest one I just added to the list is running Gentoo :scream:

[vielmetti]

it would be useful to have a list of old school public access unix sites that are still up and kicking, like Software Tool and Die, The Well, Grex, Panix etc. I'm thinking basically the list of systems that were in vogue when Ed Krol's book came out.

[vimes1984]

is there a list of tasks that need completing that I can help with?

[globz]

There is a lot of work but I am not aware of any tasks list, except here on github. I have to get in touch with Paul to clarify my "dispatch" role and how the process should work. Right now I am looking for informations about the other clubs out there who wants to be connected with us. I need a brief description of their box, just like my post above. This way I will be able to map the different clubs and share their missions/goals to our waiting list and dispatch them properly to any clubs they may like.

Sent from my iPhone

On 2014-10-13, at 08:35, christopher james churchill notifications@github.com wrote:

is there a list of tasks that need completing that I can help with?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[vimes1984]

cool if there's anything i can do to help let me know :D

[globz]

Well for now I will go through this list : http://tilde.club/~pfhawkins/othertildes.html and contact each operators. If you come across new clubs or if you have any information about the new clubs, just send me an email on tilde.club. Thanks Vimes!

[vimes1984]

I don't have an account :(

[globz]

Report back here or send it to me @ globz at kittybomber dot com

[pfhawkins]

@globz I'll make sure to email you on the box anytime I add a node to that list.

[kigerpunk]

I put a comment on #18 before I knew this issue existed. I’ll quote/paraphrase it below.

---

I don’t like the idea of any sort of “official” tilde servers, as that would (partially) invalidate the others and also just make tilde.club seem horrible and elitist. A lot of the beauty of this system is that it’s decentralised and unofficial. From what I can tell, @ftrain agrees.

@vimes1984 and @pfhawkins: I think the ~faq account is a good way of keeping information on the site itself, but what if there were a convention that servers reserved ~meta or ~root (or a similar name) for admins, keeping inter-server data (IRC stuff, statistics on number of users and open spots, etc.) and general information for users in that account? Alternatively, this information could be kept in /usr/share or something like that.

@globz: if you’re to be a dispatcher, such an account/information could be to your advantage. I’ll try to send a link to this discussion to all the admins of tilde servers (That’s the best generic name I’ve come up with yet.) if I can find the right email addresses.

---

Hopefully that’s useful to the conversation.

[globz]

@pfhawkins Thanks a lot, when I get all the information needed, I will send you what I've gathered and maybe we can add it up to your page and briefly describe the dispatch role. I still have to figure out the best approach to guide people on the waiting list based on their interest. I am guessing an information page with all the available clubs would be a great start.

@ke7ofi I appreciate it, I am already in the process of contacting the admins from "Other tildes" page.

[ftrain]

I think a nice software/services baseline is fine. But there won't/can't be an "official" tilde.club any more than there's an official UNIX(TM) any more. (And yes I know the software-epistemological can of worms I open saying that, but people know what I mean.) We're documenting what we learned and there is a puppet manifest coming along over here: https://github.com/nathanielksmith/puppet-tilde totally disconnected from tilde.club., so there will probably be a baseline understanding of "what works pretty well" in time.

So, @globz, @pfhawkins, what would be minimum viable user-routing?

I have five or six thousand names and email addresses. We could take the @pfhawkins list of clubs, make a tinyletter list, and send everyone on that list to the page of clubs. From there, they can contact club owners on their own.

But that (trust me) makes this project a lot less fun, getting tons of unstructured emails from random people.

I don't know the right path. I think given the amount of people who are interested it's more important to come with something easy and simple and self-organizing than it is to just get a bunch of people on servers with accounts ASAP.

We probably also need some mechanism for club managers to work together, but I don't even know.

[vimes1984]

I agree with @ftrain and as a member of that list I'd agree that a self organizing system that takes longer to get together seems like the best option. I think if we palm of people to other clubs they will feel betrayed to some degree if that makes sense. They singed up for a tilde.club not a nuclear club, what would be nice would be a nice package ala wordpress where you can either self host or sign up for hosted account, but for that we would need the software to be packaged and kind of finished....

[vimes1984]

could we not package the tilde.club box in a vagrant type setup: https://www.vagrantup.com/

[ftrain]

c.f. https://github.com/nathanielksmith/puppet-tilde

Paul Ford // (646) 369-7128 // @ftrain

On Mon, Oct 13, 2014 at 3:32 PM, christopher james churchill < notifications@github.com> wrote:

could we not package the tilde.club box in a vagrant type setup: https://www.vagrantup.com/

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/tildeclub/tilde.club/issues/46#issuecomment-58942709.

[vimes1984]

yeah I just noticed that from tilde.town... god things are coming together fast Mr Ford!

[ftrain]

It's fun to see everyone go "I want this too!" And then just...do it.

[vimes1984]

It's nice to see people be pro-active, it's also nice to be part of something and work with other people I for one am used to working on my own, and colaborating on something like this is nice...

[globz]

@ftrain Lets get in touch via email with @pfhawkins and figure out the best way to do this, so far what I would like to do is gather all the informations from each tilde.clubs and put that on a page so new users can get a better understanding of what's current available.

I guess the dispatch role could someone who guides/refer new users based on their interest and get all tildes owners who agree to receive users from our waiting list to get a similar registration form, so we can easily bounce users without the headache.

We could add an interest field in the signup page and route users based on their personal interest and match it to a box with similar interest

[vimes1984]

would that make tilde.club the center of a network of tilde clubs? would that not be pigeon holing clubs and people based on a form?

[ftrain]

christopher: Kind of, just because right now tilde.club is the central place where people are doing work on tilde.club. I think eventually servers could just self-describe and spider each other.

This might be one place where centralized supervision is smart because if a tilde.club server goes rogue you want to be able to communicate that/shut it out of the network.

I.e. if I had wanted to generate an email list of 6,000 unix nerds to sell to recruiters, tilde.club would have been a great scam.

[vimes1984]

ok then don't you need to define what makes a tilde server? What would constitute a "rogue" tilde club? I'm playing the devils advocate I suppose but it's born out of curiosity...

[ftrain]

or maybe just, if they suck and have griefers, don't peer with them on IRC or accept their email

[vimes1984]

hehehehehehehehehe yup that would do it :D no need to get metaphysical I suppose

[michaelcoyote]

could we not package the tilde.club box in a vagrant type setup

@vimes1984 I was thinking Docker as it seems pretty simple.

[globz]

who's in charge of http://totallynuclear.club/?

[vielmetti]

I dunno, but it looks like it's off to an awesome start!

I suppose a next wish list is "send email from tilde.club to totallynuclear.club". not the whole friction internet, but just one other site. (in time, in time.)

[vielmetti]

thank you autocorrect

[kigerpunk]

@globz: @erikcore runs totallynuclear.club.

[kigerpunk]

@ftrain Regarding your joke about spam. You do have the emails of 6000 nerds. Why not make sure they get a link to http://tilde.club/~pfhawkins/othertildes.html?

[kigerpunk]

@vimes1984 Someone get tilde.meta!

[globz]

@ke7ofi Thanks, I will get in touch with him.

Okay so far I sent an email to tilde.farm, tilde.town, tilde.camp and drawbridge.club. I asked them to tell me more information about their box and share their vision so we can add a brief description for each clubs on http://tilde.club/~pfhawkins/othertildes.html

[ftrain]

Flynn: Yes, once we have buy-in and some sense of how people will self-route to the right servers. the one thing we DON'T want to reproduce is my sense of exhaustion as I added hundreds of accounts by hand while thousands more piled up in the google spreadsheet.

Paul Ford // (646) 369-7128 // @ftrain

On Mon, Oct 13, 2014 at 5:31 PM, Flynn Milligan notifications@github.com wrote:

@ftrain https://github.com/ftrain Regarding your joke about spam. You do have the emails of 6000 nerds. Why not make sure they get a link to http://tilde.club/~pfhawkins/othertildes.html?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/tildeclub/tilde.club/issues/46#issuecomment-58957961.

[vimes1984]

I'm up for joining a tilde.meta!

[vimes1984]

@ftrain can't we automate the signup service somehow? maybe a simple db where user accounts are approved or deined?

[kigerpunk]

@vimes1984 I think Erik did that.

[kigerpunk]

I’m creating @metatilde; let me know if you want an invitation.

[vimes1984]

I'd love one :D my first tilde account. I actually created a issue addressing this very issue! https://github.com/tildeclub/tilde.club/issues/42

[globz]

Yeah I think the best solution would be automated signup + a list of the current tilde.clubs available with a brief description and display the current capacity of the box. A user could signup even if a box is full but it means that waiting is inevitable. Then we could simply apply this waiting process for tilde.club from @ienjoy:

"Hello! I'm jonbell on the system and I've been chatting with @joshmillard and others about this topic.

Agree that a grim reaper isn't necessary, it's more about avoiding the "Peter Principle" of communities, where things get bigger until they suck.

Several of us have mentioned this private but I'd like to formalize the proposal here:

No accounts get deleted A weekly audit shows how much activity we have If activity is low, we add some new members For example, let's say on Friday we run a script that shows 140 people have been active in the last week, and our magic number is 150. So we add the next 10 people on the waiting list.

Maybe the next week, 210 people are active. Great! No one's added from the waiting list that week.

I also like the idea that this happens at the same time each week, because that can lead to a neat cultural thing. Let's say each Sunday afternoon new people show up. Wouldn't be long until someone makes a "new users this week" script, a welcoming committee forms, etc :)"

[kigerpunk]

@globz I really like the idea of a scheduled introduction of new users. If anyone implements this, let’s make sure that user applications require some sort of ~50-word introduction which could be put into the introduction email (perhaps 10-25 users per week? (Throttling makes sense, but we’d also be dealing with introduction readability.)); that would be a significant improvement over “Here are 50 usernames. Learn them.”.

Alternatively, the descriptions could be shortened and the flow increased.

[jonbell-lot23]

Furthering the algorithm, I like the idea that new people are let in Friday at noon. This leads to a weekend of fun stuff. I can't write this code, but I think it'd be cool:

• Figure out the number of activity we consider good (# of updated webpages?)
• Write a script that determines activity the last 7 days
• Friday at noon (EST) we see how many to add to get to our number
• Whoosh auto generated email goes to everyone
• Page shows the latest people - and it'd be so cool if it wasn't just a list, there was some cultural expectation like "welcome the new folks!" and a little chart that shows how active they are, etc.

But like I said, I don't know how to write any of this code. Anyone? :)

[kigerpunk]

@ienjoy

Friday at noon (EST) we see how many to add to get to our number

The US east coast is not the center of the world, nor is Greenwich, but UTC is still better.

As for the script, I might be able to write it in Python if we have some standardised way of storing applications.

[jonbell-lot23]

True, there is no center of the world. I picked that time because people are still awake in western europe all the way through to the west coast. So that seems like a lot of potential people.