Ok, so I joined a retro computing site called sdf.org a while ago and got the basic verification thanks to another user in the chat

this site provides a lot of communication resources including some old ones as well as more current ones

A few I am currently using include

• local homepage at http://alexlehm.sdf.org
• Pixelfed - this is an Instagram clone based on a federation model similar to Mastodon, in fact you can follow the account via Mastodon and see the posts, https://pixelfed.sdf.org/alexlehm
• Plain old email with Pine with the local address alexlehm, this also works as [email protected] though you can send a mail to my main email much easier since I will only read the sdf mail when I an logged into the shell
• com and bboard are two local clients for chat and forums that are read via the tty shell
• I created a Jabber address as xmpp:alexlehm@jabber.sdf.org for IM chat, this works with e.g ConverseJS or with a client like Pidgin (though I will not be online in that most of the time)
• I set up a .plan for finger so that you can check my status with finger alexlehm on the shell, this is quite retro I think
• IRC server on irc.sdf.org, I use Mibbit for a web client and it connects to the #helpdesk channel, joining other channels works as well, e.g. #sdf. Login to a registered IRC user does not work since that is not supported by my user level (which sucks, but as long as nobody registers my username, it does not matter, I do not know if the irc corresponds to the sdf username)
• I looked into Gopher and Gemini, but for now I am not using that and I probably will not create a page, Gopher is certainly a blast from the past
• I created a VOIP account so I have an extension 2369 that can be called from other VOIP accounts of SDF (not sure if that works external, it would be sip:2369@sip.sdf.org)

I have currently the user status of verified user since another user in the com chat verified me, so I could create a homepage, this is apparently disabled for non-verified users. Other services like full IRC access require a higher level that involves a payment which I didn't do. Usually verifying the user requires a $1 donation which seems reasonable to keep spammers off.

I have tried a few services that I thought were available, but apparently a higher user level is required so you can either not log in or you cannot activate the service in the maintenance shell, I am fine with that, obviously some features have to be limited to paying members since they are more expensive to operate or more likely to be abused by spammers.

E.g. I would have tried Peertube on https://toobnix.org, but that is limited (so I signed up for an open instance elsewhere on https://cliptube.org), probably I tried a few more services that didn't work

One general tip about using SDF, if you are using Windows using MobaXterm works quite well for the ssh and it has a nice retro-looking display with a white on black console.

To get it working properly I have cached my password so that you can log in with ssh [email protected] automatically.

To get the backspace key I have added stty ^h to .profile.

I changed my shell to bash with the maint comamnd

When logging in ssh on MobaXterm tries to establish X forwarding which is not supported since X is not installed on the target system, so you can use ssh -x [email protected] to avoid the error message (or export DISPLAY= to disable it)

I didn't try ssh agent forwarding yet since I cannot do outgoing ssh from the sdf system, this would be convenient when using the GIT server from sdf.