Tildeverse
The internet has become a noisy, overly complicated mess full of sites pushing cryptocurrency scams, optimizing for AI generated drivel and ad delivery, and intrusive tracking and profiling. The big social media sites like X, LinkedIn, Medium, and Facebook punish users who post links to things outside of their walled garden networks and promote content that is authored directly on their sites. Maybe this is a case of “old man yelling at cloud”. but most of what made the web interesting and special in the early days has been lost.
That said, there are pockets out there on the internet that are still interested in capturing the spirit of the early days of the web. Collectively the are call the Small Web, and this post will look at a subset of the small web known as the Tildeverse. Tildes are public access UNIX/Linux systems, sometimes called a pubnix, focused on building a community of people interested in learning about computing, programming, and related topics with a focus on simple services like basic HTML web hosting, IRC, Gopher, and Gemini. (Gemini in this case refers to the transfer protocol, not Google’s garbage AI that they insist on stuffing into every service they own.) There are many other services that are offered. The main thing they have in common is that they are reasonably simple to self host. These are places that encourage curiosity, experimentation, and learning and a stark contrast to modern computing which discourages such activity in hardware and software.
I haven’t gone as far as to request an account on a tilde yet, but I am interested in exploring the principles and ideals further in my own projects. I am also interested in looking into other topics related to the Small Web, so expect to see more posts on this topic in the future.
