tilde quilt
lab6


2-dimensional anonymous collaborative microblogging

Visit the tilde quilt[1] to read messages from other tilde users.

Add your own messages (up to 150 printable ASCII characters) by running
a command like the following:

echo "Hi!" > /home/lab6/quilt

Each message has an id in the top left corner, which you can use to
influence where your message is placed. You can prefix your message with
<id><compassdirection>, where direction is one of N, E, W, or S, like
this:

echo "2EThis message goes to the east of the message with id 2" > /home/lab6/quilt
echo "3NThis message goes to the north of message 3" > /home/lab6/quilt
echo "4SThis message goes to the south of message 4" > /home/lab6/quilt
echo "5WAnd this message goes to the west of message 5" > /home/lab6/quilt

If you don’t use a prefix like this, your message will be placed
randomly.

Rate-limiting is in effect. If your write blocks, just wait. If your
write fails, or your message fails to appear on the quilt, wait a minute
or so and try again. The rate-limiting is intended to keep the quilt
slow and human-scale. Please don’t pipe in massive streams of data - it
will clog the pipe for other users.

Have fun and be kind!

What’s going on?

We are building a patchwork quilt with the aid of POSIX named pipes. Any
user able to execute a command on tilde.club can pipe their message to
/home/lab6/quilt. Messages are anonymous - there is no way to detect
which user sent data into the pipe. Users from outside the tilde.club
server can read the quilt[2] but cannot add to it.

Backups will be taken regularly and the quilt will never be reset. The
quilt is strictly append-only. Old messages are never edited or
overwritten (spam and nastiness may be spray-painted over but I trust
you folk to be better than this). The quilt grows without bound in all
four directions.

Be creative. Use your 150 characters wisely. If you didn’t use them
wisely, try again. Hold a conversation. Vent a thought. Play
correspondence chess. Golf some perl. Branch off into the void.

Early adopters who snag the low messages IDs will be venerated by the
generations to come.

Contact ~lab6 if it’s broken. Contact ~lab6 if it’s not broken - he
loves getting postcards.

Roadmap

-   Unicode
-   2D blockchain
-   z-axis

[1] https://tilde.club/~lab6/quilt.html

[2] https://tilde.club/~lab6/quilt.html