tomo chan
#r34 #hentai #nsfw #lewd #tomo #tomochan #aizawatomo #tomochanisagirl #animegirl

haven't done this before

taking a week's break after 3 months of nonstop #tomo development and contract work for clients

working on a SimLife/SimEarth-styled wildfire simulation game for a few days to recharge the creative batteries 🙏

here's the beginnings of the UI for Wildfire

#gamedev #1bit #monochrome

once a week i treat myself to an americano at the best coffee roaster in #yeg. 🤤

programming #tomo and #gamedev every day tends to narrow my scope a lot, so having some design reading once a week helps to keep me open to new ideas for building online social worlds

open design question for future #tomo architecture:

what aspects of customizable #bbs (renegade, iniquity, wildcat, etc) or personal web pages (myspace, others?) were interesting or enjoyable for you as a user?

one of the best requests i've received for tomo has been to allow people to create & visually customize their discussion groups.

i've thought about just allowing for css tweaks, but allowing users to write custom html seems like a lot more fun. i'm all ears if you've got experience or ideas.

just for a fun saturday afternoon project, i took @round's challenge, of adding a little orange rss icon to the corner of my #tomo site :)

took about an hour, but http://tomo.city now barfs out a live rss.xml feed, all hand-coded in PHP 🙏

@Difegue i hadn't thought of Go myself - that's a good example. i've very much considered adding a geo-coordinates option to #tomo which basically says "the server is in this approximate area of earth", and letting users decide if that's a valuable thing.

(whether or not the server actually is physically in that area is besides the point)

now that i've got a lot of the core parts of #tomo working, i have an open design question for you fellow amateur architects of social communities:

the #internet of the #90s was seen as a means for replacing regionalism with globalism. i think we lost something vital in that transition.

the #bbs of the 80s and 90s was unique in that most were inherently geared to local use within a 5-20 km radius, often due to telco long distance fees. users already had locality in common by the time they began a conversation.

local user meetups were commonplace. people would spontaneously invite everyone in an area code to a "403 gathering" or a "667 meetup", have beer and coffee, and chat for the sake of chat.

i'd like to facilitate letting users weave their local social fabric into tomo's design, and i'd like some examples of how that has worked elsewhere.

have you ever seen an online community that had a unique way of creating a sense of locality for its users? what did you like about it?

@smallsco one of my eventual jobs for #tomo is going to write an API so folks can write their own custom clients.

i was curious about how old macs can handle OAuth2/modern authentication needs? was modern authentication provided via python libraries?

i tried browsing the macstodon source on github, unfortunately it is all loaded on a single line and unreadable from a web browser :\ i'm guessing git didn't respect mac-style line endings

@KC8JC agreed on all points.

how about a decentralized NNTP network designed so hams can post to discussion groups over packet radio, if they so desire, too?

i'm working on server software called #tomo. it's a user-owned and operated bulletin board system, that syncs up with other tomo servers across a network.

blog/info here: http://tomo.city

i'd really, really like to make supporting hams a central part of it, if there is interest in having discussion groups without the centralized platform BS.

@littlealex i haven't - thanks! right now #tomo distributes everything between peers using a store-and-forward technique over nntp. i imagine offering an nncp option would not be too difficult to implement.

as promised, tomo.city now runs a finger daemon for those on the planet who still finger others for fun

all three of you can now finger tomo@tomo.city for the #tomo .plan instead of visiting the website

😅

@simon_greenwood @ChartreuseK

#tomo update for anyone interested in seeing how the sausage is being made with a new decentralized #nntp based better-than #reddit network:

- the server software is a fork of Rocksolid-Light https://github.com/novabbs/rocksolid-light
- the back-end for connecting to the server and reading/writing posts is 100% nntp protocol compatible.
- you can connect to a tomo shard from any newsreader like thunderbird (win/mac/linux), tin, SeaMonkey, NewsTap (iOS) or even classic programs like Forté Agent and Netscape Communicator
- posts written on the tomonet.* discussion group hierarchy are shared across all tomo shards.
- posts written to private groups on your shard, stay only on your shard.

i'm currently rewriting the front-end so users/shard admins/mods can do anything from the web interface, without dropping to a shell. now you can:
- create your own discussion groups
- delete messages, delete groups
- permit/deny access to admin and moderator areas

the big job this week was writing a Roles & Permissions system (RBAC) so group owners, admins and moderators can manage who can read/post, create/delete groups, and so on.

the most important part of this involves running a tomo shard itself. it's running a #BBS in 2023: as a sysop you are responsible for your users' data, dealing with moderation, and carrying (and not carrying) the kinds of groups your users are into. i'm putting a massive amount of care into providing sysops and mods with the front-end tools for making running a shard enjoyable

i'm seriously falling in love with php after 15+ years since i last used it

writing my own markup language to generate static html in php is SO much fun. and i don't know a damned thing about writing parsers

i find markdown kinda needlessly complex, so i stole a handful of its symbols that make sense, and stripped it down to its bare necessities

now i can generate bold, italic and highlighted text as i write documentation for #tomo

https://tomo.city/index.php?page=history

some of you know that i've been working on a decentralized reddit-like that uses an ancient ambrosian protocol called nntp, minus #usenet, called #tomo

after several requests for a project status page, and lacking the courage to build a fancy web portal that is 190mb and 20,000 javascript calls, i did the exact opposite:

i stayed up until 2am and wrote a #homepage is absolute raw satan-approved php. it generates the webpages from text files with a tiny markup i wrote at the same time

for now, the tomo homepage is a plain old .plan file (when's the last time we heard that word, since the carmack vs romero wars?), and you can have any colour you want as long as it's amber and looks like wordperfect 5.1 running on some godforsaken library terminal

is it like a blog? kinda. i'll set up some more static pages for project-related stuff in the coming days

if people really, really want to, and someone asks nicely, i'll even run a fingerd server so you can finger me and pull down the .plans down yourself 😅

https://tomo.city/index.php

@vga256 @billgoats as usual, I found it 2mins after I posted 😀

Yes, it was #tomo I was thinking of, so now I’m watching with renewed interest!

Thanks!

@billgoats @lpbkdotnet 😊 that sure sounds like #tomo to me!

https://dialup.cafe/@vga256/110637361651638656

really impressed with the depth that the author of this extensive article about the history of #UltimaOnline went into.

was glad to see that #furcadia got a mention, and that both kristin and raph were acknowledged as its original designers

some of the gameplay experiences i had in UO have shaped what #tomo is becoming. user-created/governed communities and server sharding is a big part of it.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/17/1068027/ultima-online-oldest-metaverse/

@tomjennings i'm writing a decentralized peer-to-peer network of discussion groups with an nntp server back-end and a reddit-like frontend, called #tomo.

a lot of the ideas and implementation came from watching bbs interviews about #fidonet.

but because it's peer-to-peer (using nntp store and forward), i'm having trouble coming up with a reliable system for maintaining a master list of discussion group names (e.g. tomonet.pets.cat). i want to keep it as decentralized as possible, but i'm beginning to realize that "someone has to have a master list of groups" to prevent name collisions across the network.

i'd hate to be in the position where two distant servers NEWGROUP tomonet.pets.cat at the same time, and then have to figure out whose is canonical, and whose gets merged-in or deleted.

i can't find any info on how fido dealt with this situation in the protocol docs. was there a system in place to prevent name collisions like this?

@vga256

If I've understood correctly, it should be possible to connect an nntp client to the #tomo server. In this case, the tree-style format would seem to be the obvious choice.

as some of you know, i'm writing a decentralized #foss reddit-like, not- #usenet server/web client called #tomo.

i'm at the stage where i need to make some decisions about how discussion groups are organized on the network, and i'd like your thoughts.

an open question for #fidoNet, #usenet and #reddit users of yore:

1. do you prefer nntp's hierarchical tree-style format for groups, e.g. alt.binaries.warez.ibm.pc.old, or reddit's flat organization of /r/mysubreddit? how about fidonet-style?

2. what's a reasonable character limit on group names? e.g. reddit enforces a 21 character limit on subreddit titles.