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goodbye tilde.black
September 05th, 2020
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A few days ago I woke up to a string of emails about abuse from
a member of tilde.black upon EFNet, the IRC network. I was about
to start work and didn't have the energy or time to deal with the
problem, so I took the server offline. The next day I thought more
about the situation and realization came to me that I had
absolutely no desire to spend my time figuring out who the bad
apple was this time, removing them, and sealing the door against
them returning. It wasn't the first time I'd had to act upon
someone taking advantage of the system and it sure looked like
this wouldn't be the last time either.
When I created tilde.black it was on a whim. I had this silly idea
that I could pre-generate usernames from dictionary words and then
when people joined they would get a random name. What better way
to provide anonymity, right? Since it was going to be a system
about privacy, I felt a secure OS was warranted and I went with
openbsd despite knowing nothing about it. This was an opportunity
to learn, and learn I did. I learned to value and appreciate a lot
about that system. The sane defaults, the truly incredible
documentation, and the intuitive configuration were all pleasant
surprises. The web server, horribly named httpd (try web-searching
for help on that) was another matter. Shortly before this incident
I had finally broken down and just installed nginx.
The experiment was good. It lasted far longer than I expected and
gained far, far more users than I ever thought would find it
interesting. For one thing the very nature of this private tilde
went against the concepts of community building that really make
a tilde work. There was almost no peer engagement happening. But
people were attracted to the idea of the server. I think, in the
end, I was too. I really liked the concept of a private, anonymous
place where people could experiment. In reality it was pretty
boring, though.
From a user perspective the best thing that came out of it was
brool, a user who kept a file called "stoned.txt". It was in
essence a never-ending phlog/journal of random thoughts, ideas,
and art that came to them while they were high. It was fantastic.
I'm sad that's not around anymore. I hope whoever made it has
a copy somewhere and finds a way to ressurect it on another
server. It spawned a few copy-cat files, but it was a true
masterpiece and really deserves some recognition.
Beyond that there was some stock market analysis, a few irc bot
coding projects, the odd shell scripting thing here or there, and
a few minimal websites. Not a lot to miss.
I had put my initial gemini work up on the server. In fact, I made
it a point not to put gemini on gopher.black or on any of my
tomasino domains specifically as an excuse to log into tilde.black
and do something. That was all backed up in git, though, and has
since migrated over to tilde.team[0].
[0] Tomasino's Gemini site
Tilde.Black is shut down for good. I stopped seeing it as fun at
some point and it had become a burden. I hadn't been able to put
that into words until this EFNet incident. Were it not for this
trigger the site may have continued for months more, but it would
have inevitably fallen. It was a neat idea and that's good enough.
Now I have cosmic.voyage as my sole remaining tilde community and
I want to put my love back into it. With the growing popularity of
black I hadn't spent nearly enough time looking after cosmic. It's
been sort of on autopilot, you might say. There's still writers
writing. There's still chatters in the channel in IRC. I find
I still have a passion for it and an excitement for it to continue
and grow.
This November I'm going to put out a series of writing prompts as
a sort of mini-contest to see how much we can all write. I don't
know that there are any prizes, but hey, maybe? I just want to
really do something for it to give it the love. Do you know what
I mean?
It reminds me a bit of cat's sites: baud.baby, baud.vision, and
konpeito.media. There's a guy who has some incredible passion to
the stuff he puts out there and I am in awe of it each time he
does so. But like cat, I get bored of it sometimes. Bored isn't
even the right word. Other things come first and it sort of
doesn't matter. Or maybe it does matter, but the fact that it
matters annoys me so I ignore it. Or maybe my mind is just sick of
dealing with thoughts in the way required to engage with my
project. There's a hundred metaphors and none are quite correct.
Cosmic will be getting more love soon. Hopefully my gopher hole
will as well. Once I start writing in one place it's hard not to
write everywhere. Maybe this post will help kick it off! Either
way, saying goodbye to Tilde Black feels great.
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