yes. tilde.town costs nothing. however, donations are encouraged for the continued existence of tilde.town.
tilde.town is not, at first, the easiest thing to use if you're not already familiar with certain computing concepts. however, we strive to be beginner friendly and to be a place to learn all of the things you need to participate in tilde.town.
in other words, the only prerequisite for being a tilde.town user is a willingness to learn (and be bound by our code of conduct).
tilde.town was founded by and is primarily run by ~vilmibm.
tilde.town was initially founded on October 11th, 2014 for folks who could not get an account on tilde.club. tilde.town expands on the mission of tilde.club--to provide a shared computer for socializing and making things on--with a more expansive and radical vision.
sure! SSH stands for Secure Shell and is the tool users use to connect to and interact with tilde.town. It is a command line tool.
check out this SSH How To for information on how to get started with your OS.
if you want live help, you can get help via one of these means:
sort of. currently, we don't open any ports for users to use; however, you can run simple services or cron jobs for local-only access. please be respectful of system resources. any admin has the right at any time to kill any of your processes or cron tasks if the system is overloaded.
of course, anyone can. if you'd like, the founder of tilde.town has made available a puppet module that is a starting point for running your own tilde server. It's fallen into a bit of disrepair, but should be a helpful starting off point.