The layer where every human activity became a venture-backed destination, every destination became a feed, every feed became ad inventory, and every ad market became a machine for producing more things to interrupt you with.
Underneath that layer is another internet: older, slower, less polished, harder to monetize, and much harder to kill.
It is not utopia. It is full of spam, abandoned servers, broken clients, hostile nodes, strange old commands, half-maintained software, and people arguing in plain text about things no normal person should care about.
The interesting thing is the fediverse and the tildeverse are extensions of that older internet.
Tildeverse?
Tildeverse.org its a group of servers that are community run that are like shell accounts like you would have back in the day. They are modern OSs but you have an account and you share time on that system like you did with a mainframe.
They have IRC, websites, .plan files for updates via finger, mailing and news servers.
Just did a quick dive on it. It looks, and this is just from a quick search, to be similar to fediverse but likely older than our instances here, and has a basing from old school public access Unix systems. Kinda neat might dive deeper to get better understanding.
You got it. SDF and others were doing this for decades. During the pandemic, someone was bored and put a Linux VPS online and asked random people if they wanted shell accounts. Surprisingly, it sparked some really nice small communities of people looking to learn or do little art projects or whatever.
The main difference from the fediverse is a complete apothy for growth. No one is under any illusion large numbers of people are going to want a shell account, and no one wants to sysadmin that anyway. Its also expected that individual tildes will have a finite lifespan, unlike something bigger like SDF with their formal organisation.
Yeah its a great community over there.
I always knew these as Pubnixes which I think is just an older word for Tildeverse
I wonder what that is too. Perhaps that’s ‘today I learned’ but I’m not sure on that.
A tilde is this ~ thingy, but that’s the best I got
The tilde is a shortcut for home in most shells.
In the “old days”, when you got a shell account somewhere, they usually had Apache set up so that anything you put in your home directory at ~/public_html would get served up at http://their.domain.tld/~username
That was my website at my university for many years.
What’s a shell?
You may know it by command prompt or terminal. The shell is what’s actually executing the commands you type in there. Bash is the most commonly used one for most Linux systems, zsh is the default for Mac in recent years, but there’s others like fish, etc.
The shell you use also determines the syntax so if you use one, scripts meant for another might not work.