On Wed, 2026-04-15 at 10:38 +0000, hruodr@tilde.institute wrote:
rdh@tilde.institute wrote:
(((...))), the social aspects of a multi-user UNIX system, is sure facinating, /home contains 967 directories, the experiment is worth even if the users get few MB quotas, but I miss the meeting points,
There are too many services where Tildeverse can meet. That may be the problem. I see that with other Pubnixens too.
Email lists as forum are inefficient. BTW, I am writing this with tilde.institute's nail, it is the mailx feeling of the last century.
I can reply from home. Using a *nix at home, you probably can too.
I used mailx in mailing list discussions with high trafic, but today CLI mail are disappearing, even experienced UNIX users use bloated GUI mail clients for normal mail.
I still occasionally mail or post news via telnet or netcat, but own cheat sheets sure are a big help. I try without them first and sometimes succeed even then.
USENET as forum is better.
I'm surprised that there is such a big difference between NNTP, mailinglists and shared and public IMAP folders. They could compete for the same niche, but de facto we only see two of them being widely used. Well, newsgroups and mailinglists still exist in big numbers, maybe only a small number of users is actively involved. MUAs playing bad newsreaders may be one of the problems involved there.
I used nn to read news, but was not ableto use the one installed.
One? I've no idea how many newsreaders are installde @tilde.institute, you mentioned one, I sometimes test configurations of a different one (Gnus) on ~institute, so that makes already two. I'm very optimistic that there are even lots more of them.
In most cases I read and post from home.
USENET got replaced with WEB forums software and seems to be dying.
Web forums are all different. Everyone seems to happily reinvent wheels with different counts of edges or in shapes of eights or moebius loops. They just suck!
Perhaps because it is not flexible in creating and ordering discussion forums, because of spam, because it needs a special news reader. This problems could perhaps be solved with a nntp to http gateway and some custom nntp headers, but needs some programming.
Less is more. Pubnixens seem to happily run into the too many services trap and that makes near to every of those meeting places a lonely space.
The original atoms of communication were texts with header lines being sent between nodes, so basically mail and news. With faster permanently connected nodes chat got traction too.
We should restart a network uning only these from scratch.