Frequently Asked Questions

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What is "tilde"?

It's this symbol: ~. It's home. On multi-user Unix systems in the 1990s at the beginning of the web, each person had their own little web area. If your unix system was called www.example.com and your username was nancy, your own website was www.example.com/~nancy. When you logged into that server, your website lived at ~/public_html.
Here the ~ meant "my home directory" or $HOME as we like to write.

So really "There's no place like ~ "

For more history, Paul Ford describes describes his accidental launching of the tilde community back in 2014.

Looking to join? We can't wait to meet you!

Send us an email! from your @crashspace.org email address with the info:

  • your preferred unix username / handle
  • your first & last name
  • (optionally) the SSH public key you want to use

And we'll set up a user for you and email you a temporary password.

How did this awesome thing get started?

Paul Ford wrote an explanation on Medium and you can follow along with his thinking on his tilde blog.

There's a whole universe of tilde communities, many are open to the public, so join a few others and find cool things to bring back here!

I'm on Tilde, now what?

Tilde servers are for learning Unix/Linux, HTML/CSS, and "how to write websites like back in the 1990s". Because it turns out: all you need to make a public website is a text editor, an SSH client, a login somewhere with a webserver.

The Tilde community culture is great and we're trying hard to keep it that way. We're working on some netiquette outlines for people who are new to all of this. In the meantime...

  • DON'T HACK THE GIBSON.
  • no drama. be respectful. have fun. we're all trying, and we're all in this together :)

Got it, don't be a jerk. But how do I, like, do things?

Here are some good places to start

What programs are installed?

The server is running Ubuntu 24 server, which gives you the scripting languages:

  • bash
  • python3
  • perl

Additionally the following packages for fun and learning have been installed:

  • zsh
  • make
  • finger
  • talkd talk
  • fortune
  • figlet
  • toilet
  • cowsay
  • fortune
  • bsdgames
  • ncdu
  • starship
  • imagemagick
  • aafire

If you'd like to have other programs installed, let me know!

Learn more about these by doing "man ", like "man figlet", or by doing a websearch to learn you can do things like: 

todbot@tilde ~ % figlet "linux is cool"
 _ _                    _                       _
| (_)_ __  _   ___  __ (_)___    ___ ___   ___ | |
| | | '_ \| | | \ \/ / | / __|  / __/ _ \ / _ \| |
| | | | | | |_| |>  <  | \__ \ | (_| (_) | (_) | |
|_|_|_| |_|\__,_/_/\_\ |_|___/  \___\___/ \___/|_|

Disk Quotas Enforced

To help keep tilde.crashspace.org running smoothly, we've introduced disk quotas. This helps make sure everyone gets their fair share of space and keeps the system in good shape.

Here's what you need to know:

  • Soft Limit: 500 MB – You'll get a heads-up if you go over this, but you can still use more space up to the hard limit.
  • Hard Limit: 600 MB – This is the max. If you hit this limit, you'll need to clear some space before adding more files.
  • Grace Period: 1 week – If you exceed the soft limit, you have 7 days to get back under it before the hard limit kicks in.

You can check your usage and see how much space you have left by running the resources-used script in your home directory.

If you have any questions or run into any issues, just reach out. We're all in this together!

How do you pronounce "tilde"?

Tilde the word is pronounced TIL-duh. Tilde the community is pronounced TIL-dee.

We can't wait to meet you. Seriously.

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