So, tilde.club has sort of renewed a bit of intersest in the old-fashioned UNIX shell account style of life, and that intrigues me. And then I thought, hey, you know what, we already have one of those in SDF, and it's been there for decades. I've never really done much with it myself, which is my own fault, and I really don't know if there's much of a community left or how active it is or anything. Part of that is because I have my own Actual Server, alopex.li, which does whatever I need it to. The UNIX shell, the antisocial aspects of it at least, is no foreigner to me, and there's no place like $HOME. In my case, a $HOME that's empty apart from myself and a bunch of neatly stacked books and notebooks and projects laid out on the workbench.
I dunno if that'll change. Though amusingly, currently I'm probably a lot closer to the olde-timey UNIX experience than a lot of people who are updating their webpages on their phones while flying at 35,000 feet or whatever it is these people do. I'm on a satellite connection out in the middle of nowhere, which means the bandwidth is pretty limited and there's an average of 0.75 seconds of latency for every character I type in. It's less fun than it sounds.
Gods BSD sort of irks me. Why can't the DEL key and BACKSPACE key do the right bloody things? I guess it works fine as long as I never have to bleedin' change anything. I never make mistakes after all, right? In theory I'm not Linux-centric, but in practice I totally am, and adjusting to something else is kinda irritating. "UNIX standard" my foot.
Another issue is that SDF is big, and thus has complicated systems and lineage to deal with, and while I have an ARPA account this doesn't allow me useful things like, say, screen or tmux. Also SDF is big, and so unless I do some intense archeology I'm not going to understand how the whole damn thing works, or even which parts of it are still used. And my tolerance for archeology is lower than when I was young.
One of the interesting/key aspects of tilde.club is people've made a lot of sorta social-reflection tools; who's updated recently, that sort of thing. As far as I know SDF doesn't have these things. THOUGH, of course, all of tilde's content is user-created, so the answer is for me to write some of these tools, or steal and repurpose them. SDF has a lot of these things too, one way or another, they're just freakin' hidden. You can find a lot of things digging through just the public webpages (like I said, archeology), but they're not really organized in order of interest or relevance and there's a lot to dig through.