70 lines
3.9 KiB
Plaintext
70 lines
3.9 KiB
Plaintext
________ ________ ________
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2021-01-04 / \/ \/ / \
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/ __/ /_ _/
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I know, I know. I still owe y'all an / _/ / /
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explanation of where I've been and what I've \_______/_\___/____/\___/____/_
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been doing. It's coming, I'm just really / \/ \/ / \
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distracted at the moment. Before that though / _/ /_ _/
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I need to talk about something that's been /- / _/ /
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bothering me for a long while and that's \________/\________/\___/____/
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tilde.tel.
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Firstly, for context, let me explain my very naive dream for what ~tel
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would be. I wanted to create a service analogous to an old fashioned POTS
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network. Phones connected by numbers. People would be able to call each other,
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leave voice mails, people would be able to organize meetings on the bridge,
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and we'd have a bit of fun with phone gags on the way.
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That, of course, is not the way it went. It was 2019 and the tildeverse is
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mostly timid nerds and they all have access to far more convenient ways to
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contact each other, no one is calling anybody. The vast majority of ~tel users
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are people who asked for a login with no intention of using it. The same login
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collectors who's name you see on every roster of every PUBNIX. The few that
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were interested in using the service never really found the time to I suppose.
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As the sysop I have the privilege of seeing the statistics Asterisk spits out
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and they're disappointing. Almost literally, ~tel does nothing. If I turned it
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off today, very few people would notice and even fewer would care to ask why.
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But I'm not blameless either, not at all. I let people not using it as I'd
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hoped kill my interest in the project entirely and I stopped promoting it,
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stopped putting any work into it and when people requested or recommended
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modern features you wouldn't see in a traditional phone system, SMS/text chat
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for example, I actively resisted them.
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So for some time I have been considering just turning it off. Tilde's have
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come and gone, there's no shame in calling it a day and maybe someone more
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interested in a modern VoIP service with all the bells and whistles will be
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inspired to make a similar service.
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The alternative is I take the phone network out of ~tel and turn it into
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something else, something a bit more in line with the rest of the stuff I
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build.
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The idea I've settled on at the moment is to set up a dial-in kind of
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service. I'd keep the conference, keep the function of the 11xx numbers and
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integrate the content from the 1900s while still keeping it modifiable by
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anyone that'd like to.
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To that I could then add gateways to the Asterisk systems of other
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tildeverse members as well as C*NET, Futel and whatever else, and I also think
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it'd be fun to create a kind of voicemail dead drop, though I'm not sure how
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I'd use or present the results. There's also some DTMF games I started and
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abandoned that I'd like to revisit, depending on how confused I get when I
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look back through my notes hahaha.
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So that's where I'm at. That may not be the final result, I'm still
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considering my options, but I can say this for sure: tilde.tel as it exists
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now will be decommissioned in the coming months. I'm deeply proud of what I
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built but I know I will never improve ~tel as it stands now, I'm completely
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uninterested in working on it, so it's time to say goodbye and clear the
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workbench for something new.
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My sincerest thanks to it's users, and everyone who's volunteered help - I
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do genuinely appreciate it, even though I always turn it down haha.
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I look forward to being able to share something new with y'all.
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EOF
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