For me, SDF is a refuge. It’s a part of the Old Internet where I can go and just enjoy a shell account for its own sake. Usenet, email, and a simple web page. Now with mastodon and lemmy, I feel like I’m contributing to a better Internet of the future while preserving and honoring the technology that started it all.

The mission statement is so simple:

-=- a community platform for inspiring, facilitating and implementing new ideas -=-

Exploring! SDF is like the coalition of servers I ran in college with friends and campus friendlies. A little of it was explicitly practical, some of it unstable, all of it educational and fun and sometimes stuff took off. I love that SDF survives, and I love that they have paying members.

When new or esoteric stuff hits, whether it’s 9front or the latest fedi service, SDF is where to see if it makes sense for you. Sure there’s home labs, but a home lab doesn’t have the community around it that we have here on SDF, which means it doesn’t give you the sense of how a service runs at scale or in the (sometimes positive, sometimes corrupting, but always informative) presence of others.

Mostly these days as a community and also a web presence. Through the years I’ve used it for many things: file storage, places to practice coding or run builds on other systems, a place to learn, gopher, a VoIP provider, a VPS provider, DNS host, blogging service, mail+usenet service, games, mailing lists, VPN, and a bunch of other stuff I’m sure I forgot.

I’ve been a member verifiably for 20 years (see my uinfo) but I’ve been around for longer than that. Probably closer to 25. It’s always just sort of been an extension to my computing. My membership has waxed and waned but there was rarely a time when I wasn’t donating at some level.

I find I don’t rely on services on SDF for critical stuff because sometimes they go down for extended periods of time or they go neglected. I do, however, appreciate the hell out of it.

SDF was the first legitimately obtained shell I had that wasn’t tied to my ISP.

I appreciate the retro computing functionality a lot (comm, bboard, etc), it’s just fun to dive back into TUI land for a bit.

I have my own boxes for small scale stuff, but for stuff like Lemmy or Mastodon I prefer something with a community base.

I point newbs that want to learn more advanced computer stuff at SDF as a resource as well.

Mostly I just like what SDF does and what they “stand for”.

I am way younger than you guys at 29 (Although I feel old now, I feel I cant change my life direction because of it, but… meh), but I use it for messing around with a large shared server. As odd as that sounds. Its fun being a limited user on a server that is being used in the same way by a bunch of people at the same time.

As for what is it actively doing? It hosts a meme website built with iframes for nostalgia. Thats about it. I might mess around with the other paid features at some point. I find using something shared like this a lot of fun, even though I rarely interact with others.

I’ve kind of lurked around SDF since the mid 90s. (My first time on IRC was via SDF!) I keep meaning to participate more in the community, but my ADHD seems to give me a lack of object permanence with communities 😅

Either way, I’m glad to be reminded periodically that SDF still exists and I ponied up for a membership a few years back. The shell account comes in handy, occasionally. Glad to see new services pop up from SDF. Happy to see things still trucking along!

I mostly use it for my website and gopher space, thought it’s nice to have a trustworthy instance to use as a home base in the fediverse.

Lately, mastodon (and now lemmy!). It’s also been super handy as a “swiss army knife” unix system. Need to test access outside my network? ssd -D to sdf. Need to copy files between two systems that would normally be a PITA? scp to and from sdf! Also nice to have access to a bsd machine since everything I personally run is Linux.

I’ve also used it in the past for Plan 9 learning and a couple other random things here and there.

When I was graduating from college, I realized that I would soon lose terminal access to their main server. I wanted a place to store my old programming bits and bobs that I could still SSH into. I found the SDF back then and it served that purpose well. At that point, I learned of bboard and I like to read that from time to time (although I have never posted to it).

(For those not in the know, bboard is described at https://sdf.org/?tutorials/bboard-tutorial )

SDF is notable to me because it a shell account plus more things. This elevates it past any computer I can just set up with any Linux distro. The “more things” is what keeps me checking back and what makes SDF special to me.

SDF was my first Unix experience. I logged in using telnet from my Win98 computer back in the early 2000s.

Back in the days, I used the SDF free unix shell, which helped me alot to learn more about UNIX basics, and motivated me to iterate my first franken-homelab with bits of old laptops and desktops. If I’m an happy sysadmin nowadays, it’s part thanks to SDF.

Then with a bunch of good friends we started our non-profit ISP (circa 2010) and diversified the services we offer to our users (VPS, VPNs, shells, Wiki, BBB, “cloud” (ahem) storage, monthly tutorials and workshops…). Nowadays we have half a rack of servers, and, home-side, my homelab grew (although it’s still a franken-lab with NUCs, old desktops and one “real” server). Once again, thanks to SDF for igniting the spark which gave us the will to start our own community of kind and pasionnate people.

With the current reddit debacle, although I don’t use SDF services nowadays, I was happy to see that SDF hosts a lemmy instance, because I know the values of the SDF community. So, thank you - again - SDF!

I used SDF for pretty much everything for a while: usenet, email, shell, and hosted my gopher site here (until I deleted it a year or two ago). These days I’m mostly on SDF’s Mastodon instance and (occasionally) Pixelfed.

I’ve lurked on the sdf for a really long time since about 2010, and some of their more colorful user pages, but last year i finally decided to register because it reminds me of pre 10’s internet, i want to do more, but don’t feel like what i have to say is kinda relevant to start a thread inside the bboard

I’m thinking on becoming an ARPA user though, i feel like I have to give back to the internet and keep alive the sdf

I’ve used it to host my personal website since I was in high school around the turn of the new millennium. At one point it was kind of popping for everyone in my grade and one of the nearby schools since I had a hidden discussion board. Pre-Fb/Myspace days. Probably full of cringe, at one point we were discussing the merits of invading Iraq versus standing by and doing nothing (lol) and anyway that was with full understanding that many of us would end up getting sent over if it happened (it did).

During college, I think I used a compiler here to test some conditions that weren’t present on my school’s Solaris system, or my own (at the time) Arch Linux system (yes, Arch Linux is a pretty old distro).

I closed the account at one point when I became a professional and built my own homelab, but then signed up again a year or so later.

Later on, at one point a decade later, I built an interface for me to remotely view my baby camera here. Which later became a security camera. Now I’ve moved on to a more secure, COTS system that not everybody in the world can find if they just knew the URL.

I have an email address going back years, so I ssh and use alpine to read those emails.

I use the Mastodon instance, and just discovered the Lemmy instance yesterday. I should probably migrate everything to the same username and bring my Pixelfed account here as well.