________  ________  ________   
   2021-01-04                                   /        \/        \/    /   \  
                                               /       __/         /_       _/ 
   I  know, I  know. I still  owe  y'all  an  /        _/         /         / 
explanation of where I've been and what I've  \_______/_\___/____/\___/____/_
been  doing. It's  coming, I'm  just  really    /        \/        \/    /   \
distracted at the moment. Before that though   /        _/         /_       _/
I  need to talk about something  that's been  /-        /        _/         /
bothering  me for  a long  while and  that's  \________/\________/\___/____/
tilde.tel.

   Firstly, for  context,  let me explain my  very naive dream  for what  ~tel
would be. I wanted to create a  service  analogous  to an old  fashioned  POTS
network. Phones connected by numbers. People would be able to call each other,
leave voice  mails, people  would be able to organize  meetings on the bridge,
and we'd have a bit of fun with phone gags on the way.

   That, of course, is not the way it  went. It was 2019 and the tildeverse is
mostly timid  nerds and they  all have access to far  more convenient  ways to
contact each other, no one is calling anybody. The vast majority of ~tel users
are people who asked for a login with no intention of using it. The same login
collectors who's name you  see on every roster of every  PUBNIX. The few  that
were interested in using the service never really found the time to I suppose.
As the sysop I have the privilege of seeing the  statistics Asterisk spits out
and they're disappointing. Almost literally, ~tel does nothing. If I turned it
off today, very few people would notice and even fewer would care to ask why.

   But I'm not blameless either, not at all. I let people  not using it as I'd
hoped kill my interest  in the  project entirely  and I stopped  promoting it,
stopped  putting any  work into it and  when people  requested  or recommended
modern features you wouldn't see in a traditional phone  system, SMS/text chat
for example, I actively resisted them.

   So for some time I have been  considering just turning it off. Tilde's have
come and gone,  there's no  shame in calling it  a day and  maybe someone more
interested in a modern VoIP  service with  all the bells and whistles  will be
inspired to make a similar service.

   The alternative  is I take the phone  network out of ~tel  and turn it into
something  else, something  a bit  more in line with  the rest of the  stuff I
build.

   The idea I've  settled  on at the  moment is to  set up a  dial-in  kind of
service. I'd  keep the conference, keep  the function of the 11xx  numbers and
integrate  the content  from the  1900s while still  keeping it  modifiable by
anyone that'd like to.

   To that  I could  then  add  gateways to  the  Asterisk  systems  of  other
tildeverse members as well as C*NET, Futel and whatever else, and I also think
it'd be fun to create a kind of voicemail  dead drop, though I'm not  sure how
I'd use or  present the  results. There's also some DTMF  games I started  and
abandoned that I'd like to revisit, depending on how confused I get when I
look back through my notes hahaha.

   So that's  where  I'm at. That  may  not be  the  final  result, I'm  still
considering my  options, but I can say this  for sure: tilde.tel  as it exists
now will be decommissioned in  the coming  months. I'm deeply proud  of what I
built but I know I will never  improve ~tel as it  stands  now, I'm completely
uninterested  in  working  on it, so it's  time to say  goodbye and  clear the
workbench for something new. 

   My sincerest thanks to it's users,  and everyone who's volunteered help - I
do genuinely appreciate it, even though I always turn it down haha.

   I look forward to being able to share something new with y'all. 



EOF