If you have a website that contains user generated content aimed at technical folks what looks nicer (and maybe what are some more options?):
1. GitHub's implicit username: https://github.com/foo
2. Medium's @username: https://medium.com/@foo
3. Old style homedir (eg tildeverse): http://tilde.club/~foo
4. Explicit user folder: https://example.com/users/foo
My preference is not to use implicit usernames since you then would need to filter against a blocklist (something like https://github.com/marteinn/The-Big-Username-Blocklist). Anybody have any opinions?
Perhaps because I remember having those kind of addresses when I younger, and therefore associate with an older generation? (Not that that guarantees trustworthiness!) Or maybe because a lot of academic personal sites use that as well?
I guess in terms of "what looks nicer", for me:
1. I assume this is just a directory
2. '@' in URLs just feels weird now, it's not a usename:password type thing
3. Not particularly pretty
4. I think that signifies what it is, and who it is
Alternatively, if as you say it is for hosting "user generated content aimed at technical folks", users might want to feel like they own their own (sub-)domain, so how about foo.example.com instead?
The `@` has a special meaning in URLs, but I think all browsers are smart enough to not break on it.
I have all the content off the root and I don't want a collision between /articlename and a user with that same name.
~ just makes me feel too old-school. And of course @ is used everywhere to indicate a username now.
It doesn't. ~user looks up the home directory of "user".
EDIT: it still redirects there from a new tab for me. Is it like this for everyone, has it set a cookie and I'll always be sent there? In any case, I don't care about this product anymore if they're going to be an asshole about it.
For instance, if you were a user "dannyboy" on example.com you might host a website in /home/dannyboy/public_html and it'd be exposed via example.com/~dannoyboy
In some way, i find tilde servers to be some kind of hosting coop where users can tailor to their own needs and contribute more services to the shared infra. For example, thunix.net and fr.tild3.org both have public ansible recipes where users can submit patches.
With fellow people from ~fr, we published an article a few months back arguing how tilde servers change the power balance on the network during lockdowns: https://fr.tild3.org/en/blog/2021/may-first/
There really should be a built in browser feature that prompts the user that the link they clicked redirects somewhere else.
I was inspired by the tildeverse and all the friends I've made on IRC! It's great fun :) Highly recommend.
I got started with https://tilde.town, which is v comfy.
Looks like it's just the homepage that's been rickrolled, the members page appears to be up: https://tildeverse.org/members/
I don't know what any of that means.
>Tilde.club is one cheap, unmodified Unix computer on the Internet.
>That’s it. That’s all it is. It is no more than that.
>If you look for more for it to be you will find nothing.
The implication I'd add is that it's just a 'shared' unix machine.
It's a hodge-podge of punk, DIY, bohemian, counter-cultural weirdos of every flavor. Poets and unabombers and lovers and shitposters.
https://tilde.club/~lab6/quilt.html
Instructions:
Then the Secret Service showed up at my door.
Be careful who you share with. Some of them might actually be a unabomber.
A walled garden is designed by its owners to keep its users inside -- AOL, Myspace, Facebook.