What is the Kinwilder Outpost?

The outpost is a small, shared Unix computer on the internet, in the tradition of the public-access systems people have kept running since the 1980s (SDF), and of the tildes: tilde.club, tilde.town, Circumlunar Space and their many neighbours.

A resident gets a shell account and 500 MB of space. Whatever you put in your public folders is served to the world as a web page, a gemini capsule and a gopher hole, all at once. You can talk to your neighbours at the campfire, leave notes on the board, keep a logbook, send local mail, play old games, learn Unix, write code, or just read the small internet in peace.

Why a frontier?

Every resident gets a cabin on the frontier map. The map grows as the community grows: the town is literally made of the people who live here. Decorate your cabin by writing three short lines in the file ~/.cabin.

What you can do here

• Make a homepage in ~/public_html, a gemini capsule in ~/public_gemini and a gopher hole in ~/public_gopher
• Keep a logbook; public entries become the Outpost Dispatches
• Chat around the campfire (IRC, #campfire), and post on the trading-post board
• Write a .plan that anyone can read with finger
• Learn and use the old tools that still work: alpine, mutt, irssi, weechat, lynx, vim, emacs, tmux
• Play nethack, crawl, colossal cave adventure and friends
• Write programs in Python, Perl, Ruby, Lua, Go, Rust, C or shell

Who runs it?

One person, the sysop, who reads every application and keeps the machine patched, and who hopes the people here become a real community: online first, and maybe one day in person. It is free, with no advertising and no tracking.

How do I join?

Fill in the form at /join with a username, an SSH public key and a few honest sentences about what you would like to do here. A person reads it. Accounts are free; space and good behaviour are the only limits.