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