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11/07/2026, 08:47:08 PM
rdlu
From the "I wanted it to exist so I made it" department, I present: rdlu. It's a Sokoban clone. But you can create and share levels on Secure Scuttlebutt. The levels also contain full cellular automata-style rules for the game (@$_ => _@*), so you can modify and add to those, too. Finally, I made it in Tilde Friends, so you can muck with the source as much as you like and make it into your own thing entirely.
It publishes and consumes rdlu-level messages with a source field containing a description of the level and rules as text.
If you just want to see it in action, it lives here, no Tilde Friends account required to play: https://www.tildefriends.net/~cory/rdlu/.
10/18/2026, 01:46:30 PM
I started a little RSS reader in Tilde Friends. You can play with it here, and I'll publish the app in a bit.
It currently just fetches feeds from the client every load (using a CORS proxy on failure). It has some of the old Google Reader j/k/v key bindings. You edit your list of feeds by putting RSS/Atom links in a textbox and clicking save (they're saved in Tilde Friends or localStorage depending on whether you're signed in). That's about it.
But I'm super excited about its potential. I think if I'm a little smarter about caching news, authoring SSB post messages to share or comment on an article, and displaying posts that mention articles, I'm 99% of the way there to feeling like Google Reader. Also my feed parsing needs to be better, but eh. 🤷♂️️
Comments
Update: displaying referring messages as though they are comments on the article was fun and easy. I'll add sharing and commenting later.
As with all these sorts of things, I ask myself whether it makes sense to build it into the SSB client interface instead, but I'm going to continue to resist and keep them separate in the faint hope that there will one day be an ecosystem of all sorts of different apps that interact in fun ways I wouldn't have imagined.
Update: now with link sharing. It's basically perfect. As perfect as it can be for 334 lines (plus dompurify + commonmarkjs).
10/03/2026, 04:40:28 PM
Tilde Friends 0.2026.9
The latest release is out on all of the platforms.
Change notes:
- Improved load times.
- Fix an issue where a canceled autocomplete would truncate messages.
- Better error handling for missing or partial apps.
- Add gui executables on desktop that open a webview like on mobile.
- Recover automatically when app is disconnected when backgrounded.
- Update: CodeMirror, emojis 18.0, libbacktrace, libuv 1.53.0.
The GUI executables are an experiment that I think is somewhat interesting. The Windows tildefriends-gui.exe and Linux AppImages all run like a local app using an embedded browser, very similarly to the mobile version. I couldn't get the MacOS version working in time, but that might be in the cards, too. The Linux version has some glibc / gtk dependencies which make it not guaranteed to just work, but they're pretty old, so I expect they will.
There are also .debs and docker containers available.
As always, feedback is welcome on all things.
08/27/2026, 12:18:16 AM
Tilde Friends 0.2026.8 is working its way through the various review processes and release pipelines.
The chess app is the most exciting part to me, though that has been usable since I published it independently weeks ago. It is also very work in progress, but we totally played a game, so there's that.
I've been gradually building up and automating various web-facing things. In addition to the files in the gitea releases, I am publishing deb files, AppImage, and docker container images to a gitea package repository.
The blog link on www.tildefriends.net leads to a bespoke blog app showing my latest #tildefriends posts. I realize I'm not clever enough to maintain a whole separate channel of content, so visitors/scraper/feed readers/what have you will get what I'm already occasionally posting here.
Maybe interesting only to me, but I also got all of my tests running on continuous integration finally, which will hopefully help me stay honest about staying on top of intermittent issues and fixing things.
07/11/2026, 01:41:32 PM
I'm on not very good wifi, and tildefriends.net loads significantly worse than I would imagine. It feels like not just low bandwidth or high latency, but like something else is going fundamentally wrong. This upsets me, and I will look into it. Though various other things load poorly too.
On a positive note, in dusting off the wiki app, I found a roadmap I made for myself in 2023, and I'm pleasantly surprised how many of the things I though were just wishful thinking at the time are now basically done: mobile apps, rewrites I wanted at the time, videos, .... The main big area I've neglected is developer experience: type checking, integrated debugger, autocomplete, git integration, and things like that. That was deliberate, and I'm OK with that.
Comments
I realize this means I need to set more ambitious goals. Working on it...
I'm finding that Habitat is well behind where I thought it would be by now, though that's partly due to how I sometimes have relatively long periods of not touching it.
@Jeremy List Maybe another up-side of the slow moving ghost ship flotilla is that we'll probably still be around in a similar form when you pick it up the next n times. Plus I feel like you've bit off some extra challenges by trying to ingrate deep with Haiku and rendering outside of a web browser.