tharavad
Tharavad (also spelled Tharavadu) is a Malayalam word for ancestral home, joint family, and root lineage: the traditional multi-generational house and the extended family that shares it. That is the model. Not a product login. A house with keys.
We run a public machine so nerds can have a real Linux box: mess around, deploy something small, break it on purpose, fix it, repeat. Membership is a pull request. After review you get a NixOS microVM under your name, not a shared account on someone else’s machine.
What you get once you are in:
-
ssh you@you.tharavad.xyzfrom anywhere with a normal key -
optional public HTTPS: declare a port in git, serve on
https://you.tharavad.xyz - your own guest; your mess stays yours
Why bother: a lot of people still wish they had a box at 13 (or later) and never get past signup walls, credit cards, or the feeling that the useful rooms closed when the forums did. We cannot reverse that. We can keep one house open.
YES, THIS SITE IS https:// NOW. WE HAD TO.
We ran cleartext on purpose for a while — see
On HTTP — as a quiet love letter to a simpler
web, not a sermon about padlocks. Then half the internet threw a tantrum
because they do not know how to open an http:// link: browsers
scream, phones “upgrade” you into a dead end, and people paste the bare
domain and assume the house burned down. So we flipped Let's Encrypt on the
front door. Not a morality conversion. A truce with humans. Full
apology-shaped rant: Back to HTTPS. Your
shell still uses real keys either way.
TinkerHub bought the iron. We frob the bits, bring guests up, and share the cycles with the community. How to land a shell is on Join. Longer story on About. Notes (rants) on Notes. Stay cool.