Tilde Friends 0.0.2: Good morning, friends!

Good morning, friends.

Here is the release of Tilde Friends you requested: tildefriends-0.0.2.tar.xz.

But that is not why I am writing you.

I am hoping a small handful of 🤔curious, 🧑‍💻ambitious, and ❤️respectful people can hop on https://tildefriends.net/, make accounts, and 🕹️play around.

The way I see this working is:

1. Sign in. This involves creating a new SSB identity that lives on this instance.
2. Find one another in the SSB app.
3. Fumble around with the app editor and make things.
4. Share [3]what you made using [2]SSB.
5. When things don't make sense, things break, or questions come up, send a message my way, and I'll do my best to help.

There will be 🐛bugs galore. This is an independently written mostly-C SSB stack with a peculiar application runtime that blurs the line between server and browser with somewhat unusual storage metaphors and an admittedly weird web interface made by somebody who isn't a web developer. Every single component is in the "good enough for now / I'll fix it up later" phase. Documentation basically isn't there. If you deliberately try to break it, you will almost certainly succeed. If it gets whatever the modern equivalent of slashdotted is, it will surely die an immediate horrible death.

But that's not the point.

It basically works. I use it daily. I am a programmer, I wrote it, and it still feels like magic that I have a place to make things on the web that feels more like writing an email than installing software dependencies. I need to know if anybody other than me gets that, too, or what it would take to get there.

By all means, do download and run it locally if you like. It ought to be quite simple to get going. When running, it tries to aggressively make connections and replicate since that how I use it. Everything, identities and secrets included, is stored in db.sqlite. The dream is mobile apps with good onboarding flow and configuration suited for people who just want to use the social network bit, but nothing like that is going to happen while I'm the only user.

I will be here on Secure Scuttlebutt, as @Cory ~😎, and can be reached by email at cory@tildefriends.net. We can search for #tildefriends until there is proper hashtag support.

Oh, and now that there has been more than one, here is a releases page.

PS: Is that a new hat/shirt/haircut/wristwatch? I like it.

🙄 I just learned how to expand the Let's Encrypt certificate to include both tildefriends.net and www.tildefriends.net. I forgot how I had configured it previously when I had to redo it a while back when the certbot config format changed and neglected to get both working again. My browser happily redirected me from one to the other, so I thought it was cool when it was not. Oh well. 🤷

And just like that, my usual room connections have gone eerily missing. Still I see some votes, so there is some propagation.

Had the week off but realized today that I am properly sick. Negative at-home test for COVID, for whatever that's worth. Probably brought something home from holiday travels. Multiple people had things recently and claimed to be better. So if my informal/formal writing style was especially off the rails, let's blame illness.

I can't be sick, now! ... There's no school to stay home from! This is my time!

Somebody owes me big for this!

-Calvin

Writing some tutorial-y posts might be a good way to pass time while I rest and relax. Let's find out.

Let's make a static site

1. Sign in. There's a link at the top right of every page. Only takes a username and password. I don't want your email address.

2. Navigate to an app that doesn't exist under your username. It will be of the form /~user/app/. You'll get an error that it doesn't exist - just some ugly red text.

1. Click edit or hit alt+shift+e. The editor opens.

1. Send some HTML to the sandbox iframe with app.setDocument(). Now you made a web page.

1. Put the HTML in its own file. Stick an "under construction" image in there like it's the 90s. Now you're a web developer.

1. That's it. It's publicly accessible at https://tildefriends.net/~cory/static/, and you can attach it to an SSB post using the SSB Tilde Friends app, like I've done here.

Oh no. I just made the code compile with the Android NDK. Still undoubtedly bunches more to get it to actually run and have a self-serving WebView, but there are advantages to being only 15k lines of C.

Oh good grief. How long have my images not been working in Manyverse? And why?