- [tty.space, community]

How tty.space came to be and how I see it

How tty.space came to be

A while ago, Paul Ford created tilde.club, while he was drunk. And a bunch of people liked the idea and joined it.

It had streak me as a very interesting project at the time, but as things happen when they hit Hacker News, it was all crazy hyped. There was no way to get an account, and I didn’t want to dedicate time for trying to be part of that.

But the other day, I was browsing and reading some about the new TLDs when one pair of TLDs got my attention. tilde.club has a really cool new .club TLD, and there was a .space TLD as well. The price was affordable and there was a bunch of namehacking available on this fresh new TLD spaces (pun intended).

I got really excited. “I could run my own tilde.club!”. After all, it is just a server with a HTTP server and users willing to play with it. I asked a bunch of friends around some cool domain names, and settled on tty.space. Short, geeky and cool domain hack.

How do I see tty.space

tty.space is just one more web server on the cloud. But I see potential on it.

It is kinda of a nostalgia from a time I didn’t participate. I keep reading about how the internet was made of small distributed connections, sharing news all over the world over between small groups of conencted nodes, not assuming that the network is reliable and I want to see how that was.

It sounds like a vibrant community, getting together on a shared resource and sharing knowledge. A resource that feels just enough handcrafted compared to the cloud. It could be rebuilt, but it will be not the same.

I’ve learned so much about NNTP, email, wall, processes from other users, and permissions. Tiny bash scripts generating HTML pages. And there is no rush feeling of needing to be web scale or real time. No feelings of shame on the management scripts. No fear of crashing production.

And it is OK. This is a space to mess with things, to hack it open and learn with the crashes. I see the potential to build a little small hacker community amidst so many other production line communities.

Happy Hacking.