(Since the questions are mostly the same,
this post is franken-crafted specially [1] as a singular reply
cross-posted to both Tildeverse Netnews and Tilde.club mailing list)

snowcrash wrote on Netnews [a]:

Why did you decide to join tildeverse in the first place
[...]
How do you spend your time on the server?

The Free Thinker wrote on Netnews [b]:

Though I'm not on Pink,
I'm quite curious about this last question
relating to all Tilde/Pubnix users.
So forgive me for hyjacking the thread,
but I for one would be interested to hear
from anyone on this.

redsun wrote on Tilde.club mailing list [c]:

What do most people do with their tilde?
Web development,
email,
learning Linux,
or just hang out on IRC?
I was just curious :)

(For anyone who would like just a quick TLDR
without all the backstories;
skip to the next `%<-----` cut)

My *original* and intended use of Tilde.club
is literally written on Tilde.club's slogan [2]:
which is making and hosting web pages--
in a similar manner as college communal Unix account
and (to less extent) ye olde GeoCities.

In my use, I also have to choose Tilde.club specifically,
as it is one of the only two Tildes in the Tildeverse network
which provide WWW service in retro-compatible
HTTP/HTTPS dual-served fashion. [3]
This is where I host my online art gallery--
the one you see on the Usenet signature of this post;
which was migrated from DeviantART,
due to the service's redesign there
that rendered it unusable on a legacy setup I use.

(The journey on restoring a service-hosted digital art gallery
into a form of a classic hand-crafted website
with multiple interwoven elements of legacy-first design
was a whole adventure on its own;
but that is a story for another day)

When I discovered Tilde.club however,
the WWW part wasn't only the "goodies" I was looking for.
Email is also what I consider a standard part of pubnix experience.
Tilde.club ticked that box, unsurprisingly.

But there were some parts that I did not expect
which made me went wide-eyed
when I read through the on-site documentation:
Gopher and NNTP Netnews.
They are protocols which I see as useful
and would like to see more use of,
but they went out of fashion for so long
that how to use and operate them become a "lost art" to majority of people
and even mainstream technologists.
When I got into Tilde.club,
I could finally made full uses of them,
help managing some of them,
and making some creative hacks;
like Netnews games [5],
and not-ASCII art gallery on Gopher
(seen on this post's Usenet signature)
for example.

(Gopher also has special importance to me in this regard.
Prior to joining Tilde.club,
I had used Gopher *once*
back when Mozilla Firefox could still view Gopher out of the box.
Since then,
having my own Gopher site became an item in my bucket list)

For Tildeverse IRC,
to be frank,
my participation there was originally just an _afterthought_.
On that day,
after finished putting an "Under construction" placeholder
on my Tilde.club WWW space [4];
I thought I would drop in to introduce myself,
hand out some gifts;
and that was just... it.

Somehow that sprawled into an addict-like usage,
leading me to hack 30+ chat windows into a TTS stream,
learned GNU Sed to manipulate it to my liking,
and monitored that all day long
to the point that it became an unbalanced usage of my time;
so I cut back on it,
and turned back to emphasize more on asynchronous communication mode now.

%<-----

Anyway; in summary,
these are on-Tilde passive communication (publishing) services I use,
by the descending order of importance:

- WWW Hosting (+CGI +plain HTTP1)
- Gopher Hosting (+executable Gophermap)
- Finger Hosting (dynamic efingerd page)

And these are active communication service I use here,
by the descending order of my everyday usage:

- Tildeverse Netnews
- Tildeverse IRC
- Email

(^ If it was by order of importance, Email will be at the top)

And these are services and on-Tilde software
that I sometimes use (or have used) as novelties:

- Botany [6]
- BBJ (read-only) [7]
- Among-SUS [8]

And when I log in to a SSH session here,
these are what that I spend my screen time on nowadays,
in the descending order of screen time spent:

- Tildeverse Netnews (via GNU Less, Alpine, or text editor)
- Tildeverse IRC (via Irssi, local-connected)
- Email (via Alpine, or text editor)
- Botany
- BBJ

Writing shell scripts and CGI programs
kinda-sorta used to be on this list,
but since I intentionally authored them in
"Write once, run beyond my death" fashion;
they were more like a one-time thing.
Once settled,
I would normally change it
only when I need it to do something more or different.

(As I also use GNU/Linux as my daily-driver,
I don't experiment on-Tilde more than what I need to--
since I try to be conscious of my usage of shared resource as well)

Cheers for the Internet of DIY,
~xwindows

-----

[a] "What do you use pink for?" by snowcrash [2022-02-02T15:58:35Z]
<news:slrnsvlahb.jra.snowcrash@tilde.pink>
<nntp://news.tilde.club/tilde.pink/20>
<https://tilde.club/~xwindows/tools/netnews/groups/?tilde.pink/20>


[b] "Re: What do you use Tildes for? (was: What do you use pink for?)"
by The Free Thinker [2022-02-02T23:09:47Z]
<news:stf2vq$1i4kc$1@tilde.club>
<nntp://news.tilde.club/tilde.meta/189>
<nntp://news.tilde.club/tilde.pink/23>
<https://tilde.club/~xwindows/tools/netnews/groups/?tilde.meta/189>


[c] "What do you use tilde.club for most" by redsun [2022-03-02T01:33:55Z]
<https://lists.tildeverse.org/hyperkitty/list/tildeclub@lists.tildeverse.org/message/4EBKN6Z6MHCBF4UKOTNA4S6QI3TBSZP3/>


[1]
Apart from cross-posting magic;
this post is also written in Buckminster Fuller's "Ventilated Prose" style, hacked into RFC 2646 "text/plain; format=flowed" message format.

Depending on the news/mail client used,
this post may look either
(on supported clients)
very silky, or
(in source view and unsupporting clients)
weirdly poetic.
That duality is intentional
and they aid reading in different ways.


[2]
<https://tilde.club/>:

tilde.club is not a social network
it is one tiny totally standard unix computer
that people respectfully use together
in their shared quest to build awesome web pages

<gopher://tilde.club/>:

WELCOME TO TILDE.CLUB A PLACE FOR WEB PAGES

[3]
The other Tilde server with this characteristic is Tilde.town,
but the email system there is mostly local-only
which is... not ideal.


[4]
It looked like this: <https://tilde.club/~xwindows/art/cyber-wasteland/original/index.html>


[5] "ASCII Of?" by xwindows [2021-07-14T08:22:37Z]
<news:b5618b23-9af8-400e-a520-950437c740d7@tilde.club>
<nntp://news.tilde.club/tilde.art.ascii/39>
<https://tilde.club/~xwindows/tools/netnews/groups/?tilde.art.ascii/39>


[6]
Unrelated:
apart from virtual Botany plant,
I also have a real edible garden on my balcony;
which I (coincidentally) started cultivating around the same time
that I started playing Botany.


[7]
Having Internet-based BBS-like service is okay;
but I have chosen to spend my time and effort participating in Netnews,
but not BBJ,
as I also pay attention to technical characteristics
of discussion parlor as well.

Netnews has standardized message format and client interface
with long history of backward and forward compatibility,
as well as ability for user to hand-type message or protocol interaction, together with threaded replies,
discrete discussion groups,
inbuilt offline-first usage assumption,
and multi-site full/partial federation.

I consider these traits important for my participation,
as I often read the posts and write replies _offline_
(this post included),
and I don't make just ephemeral posts concerning current events.
Sometimes I put out multiple-pages long technical comments
that people still reference to more than a year afterward.

For this reason,
I consider it being important for individual post to be archivable as well. (Netnews message format is very suitable for this.
There are also standardized `news:` URI and `nntp://` URL scheme
for linking to individual message over the network as well)


[8]
A AGPL-licensed text game clone
of Among Us multiplayer mobile game.
One can play on Tildeverse instance by connecting Netcat or compatibles, ideally with readline-capable input or wrapped with `rlwrap`,
to sus.tildeverse.org TCP port 1234.
Tildeverse IRC channel #sus is a place for players' rendezvous.
Source code at
<https://git.sr.ht/~martijnbraam/among-sus>
--
xwindows' gallery of freely-licensed artworks
https://tilde.club/~xwindows/ http://tilde.club/~xwindows/ gopher://tilde.club/1/~xwindows/
--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113