I honestly don’t remember when I first signed on to tilde.town, or the wider tildeverse either. I think it was around the lockdown, though it feels like it was earlier … but I definitely increased my involvement during and just after the lockdown. I was working at the library at the time, and had a lot of free time at work (if you’ve worked in a library you know what I’m talking about).
While I sat at my desk waiting for a patron to walk up or call, I played with portable Emacs and chatted on IRC via webchat. This was, in retrospect, a golden time in my life—I was lucky to not be too affected by Covid and stayed employed throughout.
But this isn’t about that. This is about the communities I found online that serve as an oasis against all that. This is also about the small tilde I made, breadpunk.club, and ran for a while before giving it up to a friend. So let’s talk about breadpunk.
—started as a joke, I think, on either tilde.town or tilde.team. I had fallen into the bread-baking part of lockdown insanity and was baking a decent amount, talking about it—I’d even organized a local flour bulk buy from a distributor in New Orleans! Add that to the suffix -punk (it was in vogue at the time) and add a vanity TLD, and blammo! BREADPUNK was born.
BREADPUNK was mostly the same as any other tilde server. Shared IRC, files, Unix logins, that kind of thing. Really lucidiot—BREADPUNK’s cofounder—set up all the complicated stuff; I just faffed about with whatever and half-made various projects that really didn’t do much. My main contribution was the silly rule—that I came to half-regret—that all usernames had to be some pun on “bread.” I half-regretted it because it meant that I never knew who anyone was, really. But it was fine.
Anyway we chugged along on BREADPUNK for maybe a year? I got a podcast episode out of it, and I think by the end around 130 sign ups or so. Ultimately, I felt like it didn’t do anything that was otherwise missing from the tildeverse, so I shut it down. Piusbird expressed interest in keeping it going, so I gave the domain to them.
The main way I was interacting with tilde servers for some time was with IRC at work. I used a variety of methods to connect, culminating in a cursed ssh->irc->biboumi->web/phone setup that I ended up nixing because it was consuming my life. I shifted to plain IRC over SSH at town for a while. I told myself it kept me sane at work, but really I ended up wasting a lot of time on the clock, which made me nervous about meeting my quota et al. So …
—I mostly hang out on IRC in #tildetown, on tilde.chat, and on a friend’s IRC server. Sometimes I dip into Libera, but honestly those channels are pretty wild most of the time. I have a little alias called “daily” that runs botany, bbj, bink, and alpine (and now feels!) on town that’s helped me actually keep some plants alive finally.
To connect with IRC, I use catgirl. It spins up
one connection per server so I have one for each server I hang out in.
For town, I have an invocation like
ssh -t town catgirl town that connects me to a catgirl on
the local server. Instead of using tmux, I ssh with another xterm.
There’s a part of me that misses the fully-online person I was a few years ago. But honestly, that was unsustainable. I was using chatting with IRC friends as a way to ignore things I needed to do…. Now I hope I’m going to have a healthier relationship with the internet and with everyone I talk to on here.
I’m not totally sure what the point of all this is. I value the connections I’ve made on tilde.town very much; I don’t have many IRL friends so the bulk of my socializing is on IRC. I did meet up with nebula one time, that was cool! I’d love to make it to a towncon at some point but I haven’t been able to so far. It’s far and with me having a kid, affording the time and money isn’t super feasible. We don’t want to be here in Louisiana forever, though, so I hope towncons keep happening!