Hello friends! My name is Paul Ford. I started tilde.club but now am just regular ~ftrain (still id 501, though). Greetings from the distant past, and please indulge a slightly longer note.

When Mike asked if he could take over tilde.club I thought, "What sort of utterly ridiculous motivation could drive a person to volunteer to be sysadmin for a large group of opinionated creative-tech types who constantly forget how to log in?" Later I realized that described me, too. He was respectful of what people had made on this little server and wanted to see if he could make more fun happen, and that is a great goal. After a reasonable amount of back and forth, and looking around the growing world of the tildeverse, I felt comfortable giving him the (ssh) keys as well as the account backlog of 10,000 aspirants. I mean, what could possibly...

After the new server booted up I was glad to see that one of the first conversations to happen was about setting up a code of conduct, resulting in this GitHub issue: https://github.com/tildeclub/site/issues/2. When you read those other linked tildeverse codes of conduct you see that everyone in this new/old world shares the goal of creating something kind and positive. It's very reassuring.

From my POV, tilde.club was a fun accident that became an all-consuming month of late-night labor, thousands of emails, a lot of overthinking, and at least one (somewhat joking) offer of acquisition. It was also a real nurturing community that was making wonderful things online. But after that month I realized, with regret, that I couldn't give it much more energy. I probably should have given it away then but there wasn't such a clear path. I sent it upstate to live on the shame farm with all the other projects that give me recurring guilt. And kept paying the server bills.

In the intervening years I wrote a lot of articles for a lot of magazines and web publications, and a whole issue of Businessweek called “What Is Code,” which was kind of a breakout. Then I co-founded a digital product company called Postlight with my friend Rich. I still write from time to time, and code, too, but the company, and my twins Abe and Ivy, who are now eight, take almost all my time. The respective learning curves for capitalist CEOing and Brooklyn co-parenting are both steep and involve a certain amount of humiliation and coming up short, yet onward we go.

Enough on me—how great that there's a tildeverse, growing up in the meantime, fueled by like-minded people with their own goals? And that its citizens would want to adopt the original tilde.club and tend to it.

I like very much that we are all peers here. And I want to call a few people out. Tilde.club v0 had a wonderful group of advisors and sysops who stood right up to help me, and I hope you all know I love you very much. Thank you to:
- David Jacobs
- Jason Levine
- Chris Pepper
- Dan Phiffer
- Harper Reed
- Jack Rusher
- Jessamyn West

Last bit:

It's been a bad four years, at least emotionally, for a lot of us, especially those of us who love tech and the promise of tech, or for those of us who like...fun. The lesson I take from tilde.club is that you can, at any time, for very little money and relatively little effort, stand up a tiny digital community that basically belongs to itself. And it's just as valid as any other community. I am certain we need more spaces like this, places where you can experiment and be both dumb and kind in equal measure and people either leave you to it, or help you along. So I'm glad this keeps happening, and happy to be a participant.

Love,

Paul

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Paul Ford // (646) 369-7128 // @ftrain // https://tilde.club/~ford/