The layer where every human activity became a venture-backed destination, every destination became a feed, every feed became ad inventory, and every ad market became a machine for producing more things to interrupt you with.
Underneath that layer is another internet: older, slower, less polished, harder to monetize, and much harder to kill.
It is not utopia. It is full of spam, abandoned servers, broken clients, hostile nodes, strange old commands, half-maintained software, and people arguing in plain text about things no normal person should care about.
Just did a quick dive on it. It looks, and this is just from a quick search, to be similar to fediverse but likely older than our instances here, and has a basing from old school public access Unix systems. Kinda neat might dive deeper to get better understanding.
You got it. SDF and others were doing this for decades. During the pandemic, someone was bored and put a Linux VPS online and asked random people if they wanted shell accounts. Surprisingly, it sparked some really nice small communities of people looking to learn or do little art projects or whatever.
The main difference from the fediverse is a complete apothy for growth. No one is under any illusion large numbers of people are going to want a shell account, and no one wants to sysadmin that anyway. Its also expected that individual tildes will have a finite lifespan, unlike something bigger like SDF with their formal organisation.
I always knew these as Pubnixes which I think is just an older word for Tildeverse
Yeah its a great community over there.