28 december 2017
This is a DM to ~sebboh
Even though this is meant for ~sebboh, I feel like I should send it through the same medium I received the message in.
I don't deny that I sent those wall(1) messages. And yes, there's no bitcoin in store for opting into centralfeels. It was edgy sarcasm at best, and decepting marketing at worst. I was just frustrated that I had to make centralfeels opt-in, because publishing posts publicly on individual tilde.town blogs is different from having all that in one place. The only difference is discoverability. A dedicated reader could scrape all those blogs through the public-facing web pages if they wanted to. All I was doing was scraping posts from inside tilde.town's server. I even took care to pick only those posts that were guaranteed to be accesible through public-facing web pages. I guess I was desperate to let people know there was something called feels on tilde.town, and something called centralfeels that they should opt into if they want. I didn't want centralfeels to die of obscurity. If those wall(1) messages were unethical, I was willing to ask for forgiveness than permission.
I admit I didn't realise that wall(1) interpretted ~ (the tilde character) before sending the message. I next tried to escape the tilde, but that didn't work either. Finally, I just wrote <tilde> to represent the symbol and banked on tilde.town users being savvy enough to understand what I meant.
The threat of ending me (or at least, my user) was not kind of you at all. I don't know what you mean by "hold down alt and type FAXMACHINE". I assume one or more of the keyboard combinations Alt+F or Alt+A or Alt+X or ... Alt+E close(s) the active window. I assure you, the comand touch ~/.centralfeels only creates an empty file with the name .centralfeels in your home directory.
I'm somewhat surprised that the official URL, https://tilde.town/~login/centralfeels or the URL that redirects http://centralfeels.cf don't come up on DuckDuckGo at all. Instead, only my post announcing centralfeels does. That's really interesting.
I wonder whether public wall(1) messages hide the username of the sender, or if you just did that to protect my privacy. If it was the latter, then I'm afraid you gave it away when you linked to my public-facing web page in your post. If it was the former, then that's something I learned today.
In conclusion, hello ~sebboh! Nice to meet you too! I hope you have lots of fun at tilde.town!