# New user engagement idea (nixOS tildeverse)
**URL:** https://discourse.nixos.org/t/new-user-engagement-idea-nixos-tildeverse/17876
**Category:** Marketing
**Created:** [February 24, 2022, 2:11pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/new-user-engagement-idea-nixos-tildeverse/17876 "2022-02-24T14:11:38Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@efx](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/efx)
#### Post date: [February 24, 2022, 2:11pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/new-user-engagement-idea-nixos-tildeverse/17876/1 "2022-02-24T14:11:38Z")
I recently stumbled upon the wonderful world of tildeverse. (See [https://tilde.institute/](https://tilde.institute/) and [https://tilde.team/](https://tilde.team/)).
Tilde institute is “a public-access UNIX system running OpenBSD.”
You can sign up, ssh in, and play around.
I would find it quite neat to see a NixOS tildeverse node.
Ephemeral explorations of nix are great. But I find long-lived ssh accessible state shared with other nix users has great adoption and learning potential. I wager it would be a more social and fun way to learn nix.
This of course requires more work, energy and time than I have now. But figured I throw this idea out there!
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### Author:  [@OliverEvans96](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/OliverEvans96)
#### Post date: [November 30, 2022, 8:49am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/new-user-engagement-idea-nixos-tildeverse/17876/2 "2022-11-30T08:49:40Z")
I really like this idea. I’ve registered the domain [http://flaky.town](http://flaky.town) (inspired by [http://tilde.town](http://tilde.town) and [https://trash.town](https://trash.town)) a few months ago hoping to create something like this. I haven’t had time to do anything beyond the static landing page you see, but I just want to share some thoughts.
One special consideration that comes to my mind is that NixOS can be very storage-intensive, due to often having multiple versions of the same package, especially when different flakes are locked to different versions of nixpkgs.
It seems like in order to share a NixOS instance with a fairly large number of users without using an absurd amount of storage space, it would be helpful to have a way to define a global nixpkgs version for the system, and request that all users refer to it, at least as a general rule.
Also, having some tooling for nix-aware, per-user usage monitoring (and quotas?) would be helpful to identify and resolve resource usage issues.
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### Author:  [@Solene](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/Solene)
#### Post date: [November 30, 2022, 9:18am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/new-user-engagement-idea-nixos-tildeverse/17876/3 "2022-11-30T09:18:37Z")
People aren’t suppose to use these shell systems as builders, I don’t think console tools that may be used there take too much space in the end. You could just run a garbage collector with min-free and max-free and notice users about it.
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### Author:  [@efx](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/efx)
#### Post date: [November 30, 2022, 2:33pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/new-user-engagement-idea-nixos-tildeverse/17876/4 "2022-11-30T14:33:48Z")
Sounds splendid @OliverEvans96 ! Thanks for taking that on.
I echo @Solene’s points. As an aside, I maintain a GitLab instance that runs on an Amazon Linux EC2 server where I use nix for multiple project’s continuous integration. I have a job scheduled that does garbage collection:
```auto
nix-collect-garbage -d
nix store optimise
```
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### Author:  [@max](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/max)
#### Post date: [December 19, 2022, 5:55pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/new-user-engagement-idea-nixos-tildeverse/17876/5 "2022-12-19T17:55:29Z")
For what it’s worth, my tilde-inspired service [Soda](https://soda.privatevoid.net) runs on NixOS, even though that fact is not advertised anywhere on the site.