So, a couple friends of mine are on a tilde. As I'm sure you can imagine, I'm immensely jealous of them. Beyond that jealously, however, I am deeply attracted to the concept of the "Pubnix", the "tilde", the whatever. Tildes are a specific type of pubnix that are sort of associated with each other for ideological reasons; typically comprised of big smallweb advocates and blogger types. I use the words interchangably; I'm new to both this medium and the subject matter I'm writing about. Sue me.
A pubnix is a "public-access unix" system. The idea is that you take a computer with a unix-like OS, set it up with some services; i.e. internal IRC, internal email, web hosting, FTP file-hosting, etc. and then give users accounts so they can SSH in. This creates a shared space for users to experiment with programming, web design, or just hang out and chat. Typically, each user will get their own page at https://domain.name/~USER which they can put whatever they want on, within reason. This allows for far more customisation than any social media profile page, and the communal nature of it all incentivises creativity through seeing what your friends are making, while the limited, hand-picked membership allows a real sense of community to grow.
I am deeply in love with this concept. It calls to me, it's evocative. It excites me aesthetically in a way the web hasn't since I was like 9 years old, envisioning a metaphysical space that tied all the games on Roblox together. These things lend themselves more to comparison to physical space than almost anything on the modern web does. I think it's the closed-off-ness of it all: The imposition of a defined boundary, one that is literally physical, that you can see in a photograph of the machine the community is hosted on is a significant part of what ties it together, I think. This creates a definite sense of scale, and stands in stark contrast to distributed systems that run across several data centers. This is not a "Platform", this is not some all-encompassing mycelic mesh with its tendrils buried deep within the flesh of the internet. This is a tower in the mist, a silo buried deep in the earth, something with definite and rigid structure for people to reside within, put stake in.
On the one hand, this desire for online spaces that are analogous to the physical world in some sense feels a little childish. Is not a significant part of the magic of digital "spaces" that they aren't really spaces? Sure, but on the other hand, is it not a tragedy that the most common forms of online interaction don't spark the imagination whatsoever? What's aesthetically interesting about a timeline, a feed, a dashboard? What part of Instagram Reels' user experience sparks an emotional response, beyond an empty slop-fuelled fugue state, and the occasional nose-exhalation? Sure, you can imagine that it's, like, a souped up evil Rolodex designed to make you feel like shit and turn your every waking moment into labour to extract value from, but literally who even knows what a Rolodex is now? They're fucking Rolodexes. No one uses those! No one even remembers them. If you use a Rolodex still I love you.
People nowadays almost invariably dislike their avenues for online communication. No one likes Discord. What the fuck are Discord Orbs, man? Fuck your orbs. Die. No one likes Twitter, other than insane Hitlerites that are just larping as if they do to Own the Libs. The most compelling content on Instagram is the occasional 1000 view video of someone who genuinely and truly believes they're descended from African aliens and can move things with their mind, Tumblr's a transphobic wasteland, and Facebook has been openly resented by the general populace for over a decade, serving only as a tool to radicalise your nan into believing in QAnon if you're American or some shit about London being under Sharia Law if you're British. It's all shit! We all, inavariably, hate all of it. Everything everywhere is shit. The global economy of sign value has been fucked sideways by AI and now we're barely even the majority producers of images anymore. And it was bad enough when we were doing it to ourselves! In this era of slop, of apps we begrudgingly use that mean nothing to us and do nothing unique for us, and of schizophrenic robots that keep driving people mental, of using ChatGPT to apologise to your girlfriend, I find the tilde a refreshing concept.
Anyway, one final note: I tried to set one up on a mini PC I've had laying around for months. Stuck NetBSD on it, it booted, I configured pretty much everything I needed to but then ran into trouble when I remembered I have very little logistical wiggle-room while I live with my parents and thus can't really get it online very easily without it being a home network security nightmare. So, the project is shelved-ish, at least until I move out and buy a new network switch. To be honest with you, network security is the final barrier I haven't crossed with homelab stuff. Should really do a deep dive into it when I'm in a better spot to. I honestly might be overthinking it, but I'd rather not get my parents' home network bent over backwards because I was larping as a sysadmin for fun.
Tune in next time for something a little more focused and well put-together; I mostly just shat this out so I'd actually have something in the blog area of my site. I'm aware it's a little incoherent. If you want more information on this kind of thing, go check out the tildeverse and read about the history of the Super Dimension Fortress. I encourage you to set up your own or apply to join one of these, they provide a compelling alternative to the rest of the web, especially in the face of rising authoritarianism and Payment Processor Fascism. all rise for the Mastercard/Visa pledge of allegiance, etc.