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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].
       
 (HTM) [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.