Why we brought runv.club back

· PM-mirror

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.

Every corner of the internet has turned into a shop window or a fight. 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, meaning 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: likes, a feed, ads, a 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.

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:

None of it has ads or trackers, and your words belong to you.

It's also a great place to learn your way around Linux. Anyone curious and a little patient can join, expert or not.

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's back now, without the shortcuts that brought it down the first time.

See you on the server.

pmurad