a world wide web log for tilde town!

Two Things

1. ISSUE 7 OF THE TILDE TOWN ZINE IS OUT
2. plz welcome our new volunteer admin, ~dzwdz!

Happy 9th birthday, town

I'm a day late in wishing the town a happy birthday but at least I'm not a dollar short. I share a birthday with the town and trying to simultaneously celebrate my parents' corporeal creation with my own digital creation on the same day can be hard.

The town is now officially older than Google Plus was when it was killed off.

I've just finished a run through of the signup queue. It had reached 124 applications. If you were hoping for an email about acceptance and didn't get one there are a few possibilities: your email may have bounced or not been input correctly (that first question is for an email we can use to reach you). Your application may have been mostly empty, or for some other reason suggested that the town might not be a great fit for your needs. If this truly bums you out you can apply again (but please do take care with that email input! some very thorough applications just can't be accepted because I have no idea how to contact you).

I started the town for selfish reasons: I was lonely and I wanted some friends. It worked! As the years advanced, though, my meatworld social circumstances changed. I was spending less time online and was focusing less on the town. It's no longer my friendship honeypot. I see new users show up, though, and meet each other; in many of them I see my younger self stumbling out of the vicious nightmare of social media and groping for community in a post-facebook internet.

At this moment, we have over 3,000 registered user accounts (and about 100 pending invitations that haven't been redeemed yet). I still keep "population around 1,000" on the homepage because I don't think there is value in trying to have an "accurate" number there. The town sees pretty low activity day to day. It's never silent and there is always someone around but it's certainly not hundreds of people all buzzing about each day. But people come at vastly different periods like out of phase sine waves.

Last night in the final minutes of the town's birthday (pacific time), one of my oldest and favoritest friends appeared. Xe's not around town very much these days (though we do talk outside of town and get together in fleshspace as able).

pho4cexa | ahaha i caught a screenshot of my terminal when i connected, i've got
         | happy 4th, 5th, and 9th birthday wishes within 21 lines of text T_T
vilmibm  | pho4cexa: oh wow. i mean. there is something very lovely about that.
vilmibm  | that a community can be around that long
pho4cexa | i do take comfort in that too. it's really saying something!
pho4cexa | it's fascinating that i can just go into cryosleep for 4 solid years
         | and when i rejoin the community is full of different names yet the
         | atmosphere is just as welcoming and pleasant

~pho4cexa crystallized what the town is to me these days. It's like an old community center full of the scraps from art projects and parties. It's quiet some days; but with patience and curiousity you'll find a big party in the rec room sometimes. You might see the doddering groundskeeper (that's me) emerge from a back office complaining about AI and spilling cold coffee onto the musty floor. Also, the community center is floating in space and time.

If you've just accepted an invitation, welcome! My suggestion for new users is: wander around. Use `town explore` or run `cd /home/$(ls /home | shuf | head -1)` to visit a random user. See what they've left behind and see if it inspires you. Ask around on bbj or chat about what's come before.

We're all in this for the long haul. There's no VC exit, no runway. An algorithm is not going to shuffle any of this stuff out of view. There is no database that can go down. It's just a computer. Take your time. It's okay to not log in for a few years.

The world will be Tlön. We pay no attention to all this and go on chatting, in the still days at the Tilde Town IRC, about feels.

SIGN UPS ARE BACK

the new signup system for tilde.town is officially launched! TL;DR:

1. to apply for town membership, see this cool new page
2. if you signed up for town before the old signup system broke, your application will be reviewed next week (bc i'm about to take a short vacation).
3. i've totally ignored the help desk during all this. i'll get to that next week too.

this new system is entirely SSH based and CLI based. admins now have a cute little TUI tool for going over applications. applications are now two-phased; your initial application is pretty short, and when you get approved you'll receive an email with an invite code. redeeming that invite code lets you submit a username and a pub key.

this took uhhhh over a month to do. there are a few reasons for that. one is because I really didn't want to half ass this; this is the signup system for the next decade of tilde.town. I wanted a solid foundation I and the other admins were actually excited to work on. i also spent a lot of time on ssh join@tilde.town. turns out i can't name another community/service/whatever that makes you play a text adventure to apply, so there was no prior art to go on here. i tried a lot of different things and rewrote it over and over. a lot of the time spent on this new system was just trying something, thinking about it for days, then rewriting it. i don't think what we have is perfect (i am worried about it being intelligible for screen readers, for example), but i'm pretty happy with it. the other reason for the delay is just life.

if you are interested in the code that's powering all of this, you can see it on our gitea. The application command is cmd/signup, the review tool is cmd/review and the invite redemption program is cmd/welcome.

MAJOR SHOUTOUTS to various townfolk for helping me with this effort with feedback, beta testing, and vibes. i am definitely not going to remember everyone who helped out but off the top of my head some superstars were:

• ~equa
• ~archangelic
• ~elly
• ~dzwdz
• ~bx
• ~m455
• ~codesquirrel
• ~acdw

ok well bye let us know if things are broken or super confusing.

post-upgrade news and user signups

Last night your administrative trio (~vilmibm, ~equa, and ~archangelic) completed an upgrade to Ubuntu 22.04.

As usual, let an admin know if anything seems broken, awry, or missing. The easiest way to reach us is to send us a message with !admins in town chat, but you can locally email one of us.

Unfortunately this upgrade broken the old Django app that powered our signup form. It's possible to fix it but not really worth the effort considering that we've long known we don't want to keep running it. This wasn't how we planned to sunset the admin app but now isn't a bad time to work on a replacement.

This means that user signups are now on hold while we're in between systems. There was also a backlog of about 30 days' worth of user signups that hadn't been processed yet prior to the upgrade; we'll get to those once the new system is in place.

We'll post about the new signup system when it's ready~

ok have a good one

upgrade soon!

we'll be commencing a long-awaited upgrade to ubuntu LTS 22.04 this sunday at around 18:00 pacific time.

angband monday is now ANGBAND TUESDAY

two things: "town contrib" and ANGBAND MONDAY

THING ONE is that there is a thing to beta test! please do so I know it works. It's a tool for submitting your own custom commands for addition to the town launcher. To use it, run:

town contrib ~/bin/cool-cmd

the tool will ask you some questions and then send a message to an admin to approve and add the command.

the point of this is to make your own programs discoverable by other town users. once it's added you'll be able to see it in the list output by just running `town`. in the example above, you'd be able to run `town cool-cmd` once it's added.

THING TWO is that mondays are now ANGBAND MONDAY.

what's angband, you say? it's a text-based dungeon exploration roguelike game. in other words, you are an intrepid little @ symbol wandering downward into a randomly generated dungeon in the hopes of defeating an evil god. death is permanent, but that's part of the fun.

you can play right here on the town by running:

angband -mgcu

ANGBAND MONDAY is a time for townies to hang out and play angband at the same time as well as a great opportunity to learn how to play the game. ANGBAND MONDAY starts roughly at 19:00 pacific time (@167). ANGBAND MONDAY takes place in #angband in the town chat (run `town chat` then `/join #angband`).

ANGBAND MONDAY is a new thing we're trying out so by attending you can help shape the direction of the thing. people with zero angband experience are more than welcome!

OK so

OK so wow! you are missing out! if you haven't run town explore which is by the indefatigably wonderful ~archenoth!

┃             /^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^\
┃             < |~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| >
┃             < |      (  )        . '      t i l d e . t o w n | >
┃             < |                 .           -E x p l o r e r- | >
┃             < |  __            :                              | >
┃             < | / /\ __    ___!__    _,__       ___,_         | >
┃             < |/ / o\/ \  /      /\ /__/ \     /__\__\  . .  .| >
┃             < | /   \\  \/_____ /_*\  |  |[^][^|  |  |[^]())[^| >
┃             < |/  /\    |      |    |_|__|  .: |__|__|  ()(/) | >
┃             < |   ||    |  {^} |    |                  ( ~)()o| >
┃             < | []  []  |   |  |    |. .   A  ._  .  .( O((/~)| >
┃             < |  _  _   |___|__|__D_|    . H  / \  {^} ()||)  | >
┃             < | | |[@]  |   |    .  .  .  | |/   \  |   \|| __| >  +--------
┃             < |_|_|_____|         .  .    |^|     \ | v  ||/vv| >  |  Art by
┃             < |      . .   v   v  .       | |      \|.  v /vvv| >  | ~sanqui
┃
┃ ? What would you like to do? (Choose with ↑ ↓ ⏎, filter with 'f')
┃ > 1. What's new?
┃   2. Set my own stuff!
┃   3. Explore!
┃   4. Town deets
┃   5. Exit

it will literally tell you what files people have been updating on the town! it's like a finger, made of binary, gently pressed on the pulsating pulse of this tilde town. cool!

┃ ? What would you like to look at..? (Choose with ↑ ↓ ⏎, filter with 'f')
┃ > 1. Next page >
┃   2. 2022-10-30: mox's plan file
┃   3. 2022-10-30: mischk's gemlog
┃   4. 2022-10-30: xaphania's pronouns file (it/she/they)
┃   5. 2022-10-29: lunacb's guestbook
┃   6. 2022-10-29: gengarmatey's README
┃   7. 2022-10-29: gengarmatey's guestbook
┃   8. Go back

I'm crying because it's so beautiful. I wanted to do something like this with bustle but that really never got beyond the prototype phase. and i like this more anyway! so check it out!

but of course there is more

first of all, we turned 8 on the 11th. I didn't post about it because i was Sick As Fuck. I didn't have covid thankfully but lmty bronchitis is a Fuck, too.

second of all, townies have been up to more wonderful things beyond town explore. why not check out:

• ASS, by ~dzwdz, or Actually Simply Syndication is a neat new format for syndicating content. Like RSS but more simple. I'll be honest it's hard to separate my enthusiasm for this as a technical project from my enthusiasm for it as a project called ASS.
• town chess by ~lunacb is multiplayer chess! whoa
• a new thing i'm working on for submitting executables for inclusion in the town launcher. it's done mostly, i'm porting the old command entries to a new format and then making a tool for admins to review submissions. follow along on our gitea
• speaking of gitea, their recent blog post made me sad! and mad. so maybe i'll rage quit it. what do you think?

anyway have a good one

chess

thanks to ~lunacb you can now play chess on the town with another user. try town chess ^_^

rss

ANOTHER gracious offering from tildean ~acdw! the tilde.town blog, yes, the very same blog you are currently reading, updated infrequently though it is, now has an RSS feed. enjoy!

potato

hi

we got excited about the potato game and now we have not one (1) but 2 (two) versions of it on town~

• run town potato to play a solo game (thanks ~acdw!)
• run our/potato in chat to play an ongoing shared game (thanks ~dozens!)

signup queue is empty

as of right now, the user signup queue is EMPTY. if you were hoping to get an account and do not have an email from us (check spam!) then your account was not approved; you can file another application if you want to. Usually, applications are rejected for not being very filled in (a human reads all of them) or for just being about needing a free shell (there are other services for that, this is an intentional community).

it's may

hi there it's may. a few things to mention! first, we do intend to upgrade to Ubuntu 22.04, but will delay a few months to let the inevitable emergency patches settle. Expect an upgrade during the summer. Second, there is an exciting new project coming together called the TILDE TOWN FREE JAZZ BAND. It's a collaborative, improvisational music thing kind of like a musical exquisite corpse. To learn more, check out ~malvarma's web zone.

email

Our external facing email has been broken for...like a week? If you've been trying to get in touch, try again.

VERNAL

There are some fun things happening around town, so in no particular order:

• ~dzwdz wrote an awesome new irc bot that runs scripts in a sandbox. Any town user can drop an executable into /town/our and then invoke it in any channel with the our like so: our/help
• this blog got an update! the code to generate it is a little nicer and there is a little thing to the right now...
• ~vilmibm has a lot more free time now and has been oozing around the town much more.
• a rewrite of bbj has started but is still in the early stages. If you want to talk about it, see the development thread on bbj.
• the tilde whirl podcast is still going strong and also going awesome
• the ever lovely ~benharri is working on an update to botany
• the town zine has a new home!!!

hi

what's up. how are you?

the town is humming along.

~dozens has a cool podcast going! check it out on their web zone.

~extratone did a really cool guide on using the town from an iphone.

see u

zine issue 4!

the 4th issue of the tilde.town zine is out! check it out~ <3

happy birthday!!!!!!

On October 11th, 2020 tilde.town turned six! I totally forgot to post about it. Anyway. Happy birthday, town~

dormant account cleanup

tilde.town will be 6 in a short time! in internet years we are supposed to be on our deathbed, but inside the server the town is still active and bringing in new members. We're well over 2,000 accounts at this point.

A big part of the town is creating a sense of community, belonging, and high trust. Part of that is knowing who your neighbors are; or, at least, knowing which neighbors are around and happy to respond to email.

We're not really 2,000 users strong; between 500 and 1000 users have never logged in. ~vilmibm is working on a dormant account cleanup project that will free up never-used accounts and make it more clear who has broken ground in our town.

A lot of these accounts are from the first year of the town where signups were at first just done manually and then tracked in an extremely gnarly spreadsheet. ~vilmibm was manually mailing people back and forth about usernames and accounts and there just isn't a good record of how to actually get in touch with a lot of our old users. Ideally we'd reach out and try and see if folks want their account, but that's just not feasible.

If your account ends up removed and that bums you out, please feel free to sign up for a new account.

new town command

Do you ever wonder what commands make tilde.town different from a regular linux server? Now, you can run town and see an index of all the town's commands. Running town help chat, for example, will give you information about the town's chat command.

If you want a command included, please send vilmibm a mail on the server :)

upgraded to 20.04

we are on ubuntu 20.04! plz alert an admin via email or irc if something seems bad. don't forget to rebuild any python venvs as we're on 3.8 now.

upgrading to 20.04

This weekend we are working on an upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04. Expect service disruptions and multiple restarts.

welcome back, tilde.club

the original server that inspired tilde.town has active management again. check out tilde.club!

Ubuntu upgraded

We are now on the newest version of Ubuntu. Please let the admins know if anything seems broken. IMPORTANT! if you maintain python code in a virtual environment, that venv will HAVE to be rebuilt.

The only current known issue is that the tildeverse irc bridge is down. it will be fixed at some point.

Downtime 7/5 for system upgrade

We're upgrading our server's OS on Friday. Expect some downtime.

signups paused

hi,

tilde.town is big. we have over 2,000 registered users and receive numerous signups every week. despite existing for over four years, our administrative infrastructure is not that much more evolved than when ~vilmibm manually created every user account with a google form, a big spreadsheet, and a lot of coffee. we have automation, but it's primitive and not easily to delegate.

there are a number of administrative improvements coming that will allow town moderation and administration to be spread over a team of volunteers. the ultimate goal is for each individual volunteer to do far less work than in a system with a single admin while, all the while, maintaining a healthy community.

what is a healthy community? it is one that can weather change, growth, technical glitches, account problems, and conflict without ripping itself apart or transforming into something ugly. tilde.town has been coming down with a community cold: we have not had the right tools for maintaining a healthy community and we're suffering as a result. admins are overworked and burning out, which leaves no energy for actually contributing to and modeling the kind of community we wanted tilde.town to be.

in order to accomodate the improvements coming, we're pausing user sign ups. the first improvement is around our email systems, and it's easiest to not be processing new user signups while that's going on.

if you were hoping to sign up and don't want to wait for this maintenance window, i recommend checking out this list of similar servers: https://tildeverse.org/members/

best,
~vilmibm

how to fix ssh after the migration

You will get a scary warning when you reconnect to the town because we both changed what computer we run on and our IP address. SSH will say stuff about how the host key has changed or the IP has changed (or both).

To fix this, run: ssh-keygen -R tilde.town. Alternatively, you can edit the file ~/.ssh/known_hosts and delete the line for tilde.town or delete the whole known_hosts if you're comfortable with that.

migration paused again but access restored

SSH is re-enabled. Mosh is currently unavailable and several commands are missing; we're also missing a lot of packages. ~vilmibm is very tired and will resume restoring commands, packages and services tomorrow.

known outages

• gopherd
• various programming languages
• bbj
• mosh
• tildeverse link
• various games/scripts

migration progress

downtime update

Downtime is confirmed for tonight; signups are also offline. The town will be fully unreachable for a bit.

Downtime was scheduled for this past weekend for a migration from AWS to Digital Ocean; unfortunately, we weren't able to complete the migration in that timeframe. Downtime is possible tonight if ~vilmibm is able to finish the migration.

system restart

tilde.town was accidentally restarted today because of user error in the AWS console. If anything seems messed up after the restart, let the admins know in chat.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TILDE TOWN

                      /^\
            /         (/^\)     /
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            | |        | |      | |    | |
            | |    ****| |******| |    | |
     *******| |****    | |      | |****| |
    *       | |                 | |    | |*****
  *    H  A  P  P  Y                   | |      *
 *                                               *
 | *      B  I  R  T  H  D  A  Y    T I L D E  * |
 |  *****                                 *****  |
 |@      **********  T O W N !  **********      @|
 | @   @           *************           @   @ |
 |  @@@ @    @                       @    @ @@@  |
 |       @@@@ @      @       @      @ @@@@       |
  *            @@@@@@ @     @ @@@@@@            *
   *                   @@@@@                   *
    *****                                 *****
         **********             **********
                   *************

new local irc server

We've moved to a different IRC server (called Oragono). It's much easier to configure and allows both nickname and channel registration. For more information, check out the wiki.

important note for botmothers! your children may not be handling ping requests from the new server properly. If your irc bot is ill, check on its pings.

tilde.chat irc network!

We've officially bridged a local IRC server to the nascent tilde.chat IRC network.

What does this mean?

• You now have the option to chat with people from other servers similar to tilde.town users
• This does not affect our local chat server, which will remain isolated from the network
• The new, shared server is opt-in and not visible via the chat command by default

You can opt-in to the tilde.chat network from within Weechat, our default chat client (what runs when you run chat). From Weechat, press alt+1 and run:

/server add tildechat 127.0.0.1/7766
/connect tildechat
/join #meta

There is also a page about this on the wiki.

irc outage

~vilmibm messed up the irc config and somehow irc restarted, picking up the broken config. the outage was prolonged because ~vilmibm was on a plane for a very very long time. irc service is restored, now, but let ~vil know if your client isn't reconnecting.

restart

Another runaway user script pegged the CPU, degrading SSH to the point where a restart was needed. ~vilmibm has finally actually made an /etc/security/limits.conf file with priority limits.

Automated key management and u

The SSH keys that you've provided to the town live in your ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2 file. There's a scary warning at the top that says to probably not modify it.

Until today, that message was toothless. Now, all key update requests will be handled through our Django admin tool and authorized_keys2 WILL be overwritten as your keys change.

As usual, you are free to manually add any keys you want to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys.

Finally, if this post makes no sense to you, that's 100% ok. You don't have to worry about it, things will just keep working as normal :)

Maintenance

~vilmibm is consolidating some of our programs. you might experience some weirdness with, for e.g., feels/ttbp. this is normal for now; let them know if it persists beyond today.

surprise restart and important admin notice

sadly in the night tilde.town restarted. it's back and services have been restored. if anything is still down please let ~vilmibm know via mastodon.

as some townies might know, ~vilmibm is moving far away! this of course doesn't affect our lovely virtual home, but it does mean 48ish hours of very restricted connectivity for them. you can still ping them with issues but be aware that there isn't much they can do while driving for hours.

another restart :(

A non-malicious user accidentally set off a fork bomb, taking out the server. we're restored. let vil know if anything didn't come back up.

attn all shadowrunners

we all know and love bbj, our awesome command line forums. now, we have shadowland, a special customized bbj instance that exists in the Shadowrun universe.

it's designed for posting in charcter, so dream one up and get shadowrunnin.

signups are back

admin app is fixed and user signups are back.

temporary signup outage

while deploying some updates to our admin tool i ran into some small issues; user signups are broken for a bit. fixing now.

server reboot

We had a reboot last night. Sorry! You'll need to remake any screen/tmux sessions and also restart any processes that aren't run through cron.

help vilmibm beta test the new wiki

There's a new wiki system! But it probably has bugs. ~vilmibm is looking for volunteers to beta test the new system and post in `bbj` about any bugs or feedback.

If you are interested, check out the instructions at the new wiki!

new exciting things!

A bunch of new stuff is going on!

• ~selfsame launched writo, a multiplayer persistent ascii drawing world with infinite bounds. check it out!
• ~archangelic added a toot command for us all to share. It acts like the tweet command and it posts to the tilde.town mastodon instance.
• ~minerobber is working on a system for tracking RFCs.
• ~demophoon blessed us with pairing, a tool for sharing a tmux session. run it like so:

  vilmibm@tilde.town $: pairing "funtimes"
  # now anyone else can run 'pairing "funtimes"' and join my tmux session
  # when everyone quits, it goes away
  

• ~selfsame set us up with Inform 7 (i7) and glulxe.
• ~vilmibm is developing an overhauled wiki system. check out the design document.

americans: net neutrality is important

this post is largely relevant to american users

tilde.town harkens back to a time when the internet was for everyone -- not just corporations. Culturally, the internet has moved away from personalized sites or even personalized social media profiles and towards a completely commercial internet where we are products whose attention is bought and sold.

Today, nothing stands in the way of setting up something like tilde.town. That's thanks to net neutrality. Without it, traffic to anything but services owned by companies like Comcast would be severely slowed.

Please take a minute to go check out this page for more information and a link to tell the FCC how much net neutrality means to you.

new birthday command

there's a new command available: birthday. it will list any users whose birthday is today (UTC time). To see whose birthday is on an arbitrary date, you can pass a month/day string like so: birthday 10/11.

In order to make your birthday discoverable, add ~/.birthday with a single line of month/day, e.g.

$ cat ~/.birthday
10/11

welcome pycon folx

~vilmibm gave a lightning talk about the town at pycon. there is a subsequent influx of new virtual faces. say hi!

newsletter! also, swag pile!

The second issue of the Tilde Town Times is hot'n'fresh in your local inbox! It's assembled by the ever wonderful ~jumblesale and features a lot of great content, including an interview with ~troido.

If you haven't used town-local email yet, run alpine and open your INBOX.

Also, because ~vilmibm wanted a convenient way to get tilde.town swag, there is now a zazzle shop with a few items. It's not intended as a way to make money as tilde.town upkeep is provided by patreon, it's just in case people wanna rep tilde.town.

If you want a free pile of stickers, just let ~vilmibm know via irc or local mail and they'll send em to you for free <3

outage

an errant user script swamped RAM, causing network slowdown and ssh unreachability. the script has been disabled and services restored. important note bbj is down until further notice.

updates!

Two new things to report on!

• from ~curiouser, maintainer of botany:

  Botany has been updated to include generations!
  If you raise your plant all the way to the final stage (seed-bearing) and
  choose to harvest it, your next plant will grow 20% faster. You'll get a
  20% bonus for each plant brought to its final stage.
  Good luck!
  

• The starbound server has been resized and now has twice as much RAM. hopefully it will crash less!

check your local email!

The first issue of the Tilde Town Times is hot'n'fresh in your local inbox!

If you haven't used town-local email yet, run alpine and open your INBOX.

Check it out!

new bbj client

Running bbj will now load up a new, easier to use client. thanks, ~desvox!

it's tootin time

Have you heard of ostatus, gnusocial, or the deservedly hyped mastodon.social? If not, they're three aspects of an alternative to Twi**er that is decentralized and non-commercial.

Our own ~insom has made a little tilde-flavored home on this new network called tiny.tilde.website and we're all invted to join :)

Sign up and say hi!

cool new commands

there are some fun new things to do on the server:

• the botany command starts up our communal garden simulator. water a procedurally generated ascii plant and peruse the town's garden. thanks, ~curiouser!
• the bbj command starts up a client for our new local forums! You pick a screen name and then can post in some threads. Check the second thread for documentation on the interface. thanks, ~desvox!.

starbound!

aw shit! we have a shared Starbound universe now! isn't that cool? Ask in IRC for connection details!

We also have procured some gift copies of the game to give out! To get a free copy, add a space-themed piece of art to your ~ page and then let ~vilmibm know!

help test new user signup tool

~vilmibm has been working on a new tool for administrative tasks and it features a user signup tool. it would mean the world to them if you could beta-test it a bit!

check out the tool and either file an issue or tweet about anything messed up.

<3

tweet command busted

until further notice the tweet command is messed up.

python note

if you are having an issue with python libraries seemingly disappearing, try rebuilding your virtual environment. if you are relying on system libraries (and not using a virtual environment), let ~vilmibm know so they can make sure things are installed properly at the system level post-upgrade. sorry for any hassle.

server UPGRAYYED!

All rejoice! After two years in operation, tilde.town now runs Ubuntu 16.04, the current LTS. In addition to a hot'n'fresh OS, we've grown into a medium EC2! We have two CPUs now and 4gb of RAM (plus some recently added swap).

This wouldn't be possible without the help yr sysadmin gets from patreon as well as the support of this awesome community. Thank you!!

That's all for this update, but there are some more rad things in the works:

• New SSH primer, featuring better directions for Windows
• New user sign up form powered by Django
• New social features

<3

recent outage

There was recently an issue with AWS that blocked off HTTP, UDP, and outbound traffic from the town. The outage lasted about 24 hours and is now resolved.

tilde.town in washington post

brutalist websites was mentioned on a Washington Post blog. Apparently, tilde.town is both ugly and hard to use ^_^ Let ~vilmibm know if this is the case...

https support

Thanks to the gracious help of user ~demophoon the town is now accessible over https! just hit up https://tilde.town in ye olde browsere to check it out.

irc client fixed for all users

the irc and chat commands are now fixed for all users. in the course of this fix i accidentally deleted everyone's weechat config. if you had a bunch of stuff in your weechat config that you really want back let me know and i can check the backups.

irc client outage

because of Reasons, the irc and chat scripts are broken. you can still use irc, you just have to run the following:

irc
/set irc.look.temporary_servers on
/quit
irc

Restart today

Thanks to this glibc vulnerability the town needs to restart to install security updates.

remember your tilde.town apocalypse training:

• ssh (or mosh) back in to restore your tmux (or screen) session / rejoin irc
• restart any bots / MUDs / services you don't have set up via cron
• stare not over long into the abyss lest it stares back into you
• observe all posted signage for proper apocalypse evacuation strats
• hug a tree, out your crushes

Systems status

~vilmibm released a rewrite to the server's infrastructure yesterday. Nothing should be different, but it'll be much easier to work on new features and consume fewer resources.

Currently, the guestbook is down. Usenet has also been disabled for now since no one was using it and it has a nontrivial impact on the system. If you want to talk about bringing usenet back, bring it up in irc <3.

BIRTHDAY! The Town Turns 1

Exactly a year ago, ~vilmibm gave himself a birthday present in the form of a small unix server meant for commnunity and sharing. Now, tilde.town is a thriving community of feels, peer education and beautiful digital art.

If you are not yet a towner, check out our code of conduct, look at some user pages, and sign up!. Everyone is welcome here regardless of skill level and if making SSH keys is a little scary, that's okay. Reach out to for help.

Here's to another year of html and feels.

new stuff!

today was a day of things happening!

• the first ever tilde.town volunteer admin meeting happened today. ~insom, ~krowbar, and ~vilmibm all met to talk about the future tilde.town and how to ease the burden of things like user signups. Marks the first ever international face-to-face meeting of townies. exciting!
• guestbook went live! (lol)
• you can now click on the pretty ascii tilde.town over to the left to visit a random page.

new homepage design

~vilmibm made a cleaned up homepage. it's linking to two under construction feature--a new help desk for admin requests and a random page linker. there is also a new FAQ.

we've also hit a cool donation milestone of $60. thank you everyone who has donated! our monthly costs are now covered and if we hit $65 we can do some more server enhancements.

donations! also, new disk

An exciting day for tilde.town. We now have way to donate via patreon. Thanks to all the folx who have already become patrons! y'all make the heart of this sysadmin warm and fuzz. A big part of the push for donations was a need for more server space which we have as of tonight's server upgrade/reboot. The main tilde.town server now has a 40gb disk. Enjoy!

Some updates coming down the pipe:

• 2gb quota for all users
• fixed poetry server
• better signup process/docs

server restart

Hi. Today tilde.town had to restart to pick up a patch for CVE 2015-0235. data.tilde.town (our poetry server) has also been patched and restated. Sorry for any inconvenience!

lots of people

we have ~370 users. isn't that wild?

Scheduled Downtime Tonight

To accommodate our growing user base, there will be a server resize/reboot tonight (Pacific time). Sadly I cannot give an exact time as I still don't have internet at my new place and will have to opportunistically find some to execute this upgrade.

The server should only be down for a few minutes, but this will terminate any running applications (like tmux/screen/irssi). Any files open in an editor should be preserved by a swap file but you still may want to save and close things in the next several hours.

Also, this upgrade means that tilde.town is no longer an essentially free project, so I may put up something for donations soon.

100+ users party report

tilde.town now has 102 users. We crossed into three digits last night and lots of townies hung out in irc to celebrate. Some new features even launched!

• the homepage userlist is now sorted by modified time
• there is now a shared

  tweet

  command that all users can use to tweet to the @tildetown account (protip:

  haiku | tweet

  )
• run

  random_pokemon.sh

  to get a random ascii art pokemon (thanks, ~sanqui)
• a git-based wiki that all townies can edit (thanks for the help, ~datagrok)
• an IRC bot (thanks, ~selfsame) that plays numberwang
• even moar learnings up on the page of ~shanx
• general good feels

80 users!

tilde.town just added its 80th user. Welcome! Some folks have been having trouble with ssh public keys. Remember, public keys are really confusing if you aren't too familiar with them, and there is no judgement if you can't immediately get them to work. Feel free to tweet at @tildetown if you'd like some help.

60 users

tilde.town is up to 60 users. This is lovely! It is also only a tenth of our planned total user capacity, so if you are interested in a tilde* account we'd love to have you. You can even submit a user request with a fancy form now!

submit a user account request!

Change of IP, warnings when you ssh

In the interest of making sure we don't suddenly disappear from the Internet as a result of a dynamic IP change on AWS I switched to using an Elastic IP (amusingly, "elastic" IPs are static).

The upside is that we now have a static IP (also it's free) (woo).

The downside is that when you try to SSH into tilde.town, now, you'll get an error about "something nasty" and there will be many @ characters. You'll want to edit your .ssh/known_hosts file and remove the entry for tilde.town (your error message should have a cute copy-pasta-able one-liner for doing this for you).

Go ahead and do that, and then log in With Confidence. Hopefully this won't happen again.

I'll close by mentioning the imminent arrival of many new tildeverse members. We (the tildeverse operators) are just about ready to accept the signups currently languishing in a waitlist. This means lots of new users, which is lovely, but may mean some growing pains while I adapt our server to the new user load in the most cost-effective way.

the town lights

a dot is a user. + means they've established a webpage. * means they are logged into the server.

+.....++..++.+*+++.+.....++....+.++..+..+*.+..++..+....+..+.*++++...+...+*....*..+.*+++..*....*..+....+...*+++.*+++.........++++.+.+*+.+.+....++.+.*+*..++*+++.+..*++++*...*.+..+..++.++++++..+++...++.+..++..*.+.+++....+..+++.+....+..++.++*+..+..+..+.++...+++*++.+.+++..+++.....++.+.+++..+...+++....+.+.+.+...+..++..+*+++++++.+++++++.++.+..+...++++......+++.*+++...+..*.+.+.++++++....++..++..+.*+.+..*....+*+++*.++.++..+.+.+.+..+.++.*.+..++*++.++.*.....++..+++.+.....*+.++.+...+.*++.+*+++++..+..+.+..*++.+.++....+++..+..+*.+.+++...+..+*..+.....++++.+*...+++...++.++...*+.+**.+++++....+.....+..++..+.+++++..++++.+.+++..+++.+++...+*+++*..++.+.*.++++.++.+.++.+..+....+..*..+.+.....+.....*..++.++..*+.+.+.++++.....+.++*...**+.......+.+++.+**.+**....++..+...+.+*..+++++.+.++..+.+.+++.++...+++++*.+++++*.++..+++...+++..*.++.++++...*..++.......+++*+..++....+.+*.+.+**+.....+....*++++....++...+++.++..+...+..++.+..+.++.+.+*.+*..+++...+...+.+.++.+...+..+*+.+*...++.+..+.++.++++...*+.+.++++++++++..++.++.++..+..+..+....++.+..+++++.+.++++..*...+.+.+++++.++.*.*...+............++.+....++.......++..+++.+.++**.+*+...++.+++.+.+**+.......+.++.+......*+++++.+++.+*.+......+.*.+*+.++.++.++.+*..+*..+.+++++.....++*+*+.+.+.++.+++++++....+.+.++..++++...+.+..++.++.++++.+.+++++..+..++...+..+..++..+.+..+.+.+.+*.++..++...+..++.....++..+.++.+++.+.+.+.......+++++.+++..+..*++.+.+*.+.*+.+++......++++*++++*..+.+++.+.++++.......+......++++.+.+..+...+.++..+...+++..++*++.+.++.*.++*..++++++.*...++..++...++.+....+.++.++*++...++*++...++.+*....+++++*+++..+..+.+..+..+.+++++.+..++..+.+..++.+.++*.++.+++..+++...+...*.++..+++.+..+...+..++*.++..+...++*++.*...+++....*+*+...+*.+*....+++..++.+...++++...+.+..++++...+.++.+.++++...+.**+++++++..*.++++.++.+.+++.++.+..+.+.++...+++....*..*.+..++*+.+.+.+*..++*++.*+++.+*++.....*.++....++....+.+.*..+...++++.+...+...+.++++++++..++.+...+...+++..*..+...+.+.++.++++.......*.+++++..+.+.+++*+..++++.+..++*+.++++.+++..++++.+++.+.*+++.++*.+..+.+....**+..+.++.*+..++*+*++++..++++++..+.++++...+*.+.+*.+++.+.+.+..+......+++.+..*.+..*.........*..+*.+++*..++++.+...*+...++..++++....++.+.+..+.*.++++++.++..++.+.+*.+.+.++*....+.+++..**.*++++..+..+..+.+...+++....++*..+++...*+.+*.++.+++..++..++.....+++.+.++.+.*+..*+*+....+++.+++...+..+...+..++.+++++++..+...+.....++......++.+...+.+...+.*.+++..+++..+.+...+++++.+++...*...*+.++...*.+++.*+.++.+.*+++++.+.+.++...+.+..++...*....++......+.+.+++++++...+.+++++......+..+.+.....+.+..+.*..++....*++.+*..+..++++*+++..+++++.+.++.+......++.+++++++...++.*+.+.+.*.+.++..++.++.+..+.+.+++.+.+....++*++++.+.++.+++*...+.++.++++....++.+++.+.+***.+++....**..+.+...*.+++.+++++.+.*.*.*..+..++.++.+..+.++.++....+*++.+.+++++.++.++.+..+.....+.+++++.++++.++....*.++.*+.++..++.+++........+++....+.+++.+..++.+.+++.++..+....+.+.++**+.*..+.+.+...+....+++.++...++++..+.+.+..+.+...*+*+..++++.++++.....+.+....*+.+++*.*..+.+++....+++++*++.++..++++.+.+..+*+.+.++++++.....++..+++++.++.+.++....+++*+++.++.+++++++++.+++.+++...*++.++.+*...+++++++.++.++++.*+.+...++++..+.++++.+....+..+..+.++..+.*++.+++.+.**.+.+.++.+..+++.+*..+++++..+.+..+...+.*++++.++.*.+......*.*..++.+++.+..*+*..++++ <3