Why we brought runv.club back

runv.club almost died. In October, after a year and a half online, we looked at the machine and figured it was going to die of natural causes: few people, too many services to look after, patch on top of patch. We could have switched it off and moved on.

Except there were people in there. Not many, but real people, with pages online, texts published, conversations in the chat. When we sat down to decide what to do, it was everyone's decision, not just mine. Nobody wanted to bury it. We wanted to start over.

Why insist? Look at the world out there. Every corner of the internet has turned into a shop window, a fight or an ad. You write one line and three algorithms decide who sees it, when, and next to which ad. We wanted the opposite: a small place to explore, talk and connect, with nobody in the middle. A safe place, and safe here doesn't mean a hideout to plot anything. It means a quiet corner where you can step away from the madness of the world for a while, among people you know by name.

With that in mind, runv is back.

What's a tilde, anyway? #

The name comes from the tilde, the ~ character. On Unix machines shared by lots of people, every user had their own home folder, and their website lived at server/~name. That's how people published on the web before social networks existed: a bunch of people on the same computer, each with their own little corner.

In 2014, Paul Ford switched on one of those machines, tilde.club, and invited strangers to share a computer again. It became a small, stubborn movement, the tildeverse, with dozens of communities like tilde.town, envs.net and ctrl-c.club. These shared machines also go by another name: pubnix, short for public Unix system.

The beauty is in what they refuse to have. No likes, no feed, no ads, no profile to sell. You log into a real computer, through the terminal, and you learn your way around. You write in plain text, you break things, you fix them, you read your neighbor's page. It's such an old way of using the internet that, being so far out of fashion, it started making sense again.

Doing it right this time #

The first runv was built in a hurry. I kept installing whatever I thought was cool and seeing what happened. Apache here, a database there, a root shortcut to fix things quickly, a password file that half the server could read. It worked, until it didn't. When we wiped everything to start over, the code was saved, but what really mattered, people's home folders, emails and some keys, got lost along the way. Lesson learned.

This time is different.

The whole server is built from a repository with Ansible, from scratch and the same way every time. Nobody changes things by hand, nobody takes shortcuts. Every member runs with limits on memory, processes and disk, with no root access anywhere, and without being able to see anyone else's folder. When someone leaves, their account sits in cold storage for fourteen days before it's gone for good. And backups go out automatically to another machine, instead of "it's all in git" like last time.

What's already up and running #

runv.club is a small public Unix server, run from Brazil, on a shared Debian box. When you join, you get:

• a shell over SSH, with editors, git, Python and a C compiler
• a web page at runv.club/~you, plus a Gemini capsule, a Gopher hole and your own eepsite on I2P
• runv, a dashboard right in the terminal to see your keys, pages, stats and the status of every service
• a blog: write markdown in your folder and it becomes a site with a feed, on the web, Gemini and Gopher at the same time, and it joins the planet that gathers everyone's posts
• paste to throw some text online, twtxt with a timeline of the whole gang, a forum in the terminal and finger to see who's around
• chat out of the box: our IRC bouncer keeps you in #runv on tilde.chat even after you close your laptop, and it works in the browser too
• tunnels to put an app from your own machine online at you.tun.runv.club
• visitor stats that don't store anyone's IP, notifications, an RSS reader at feeds.runv.club, private Git at git.runv.club and a bookmark keeper at links.runv.club

All of it with no ads, no trackers and nobody owning your words but you.

It's also a great place to learn your way around Linux. You don't need to be an expert to join. You need to be curious and a little patient.

Almost there #

We're tidying up the last corners before opening signups to everyone. When we do, joining will work the way that fits the place: you send a request, a real person reads it, and we let in five people a week, no rush. You'll be able to ask from the join page, or straight from a terminal:

ssh join@runv.club

runv.club was never more than a computer shared by people who like sharing a computer. It died once. Now it's back, and this time without the shortcuts that brought it down.

See you on the server.

pmurad