A whole internet, behind one wall.
The front page gives you the postcard; this is the walk. Everything a 1996 machine could dial into, kept warm and answering — and every service on one account, one screenname, one sign-on.
Electronic Mail
you@yiffcloud.com, delivered like it's 1996.
The address is real and the protocols are the originals: SMTP carries it in, POP3 hands it over, and Eudora, Outlook Express or Netscape Mail do the rest. 10 MB of mailbox — a fortune, when a message is 4 KB of plain text.
Delivery is garden-internal by design. Every address that works belongs to a member, which means spam would have to subscribe first — and the invite desk has questions. IMAP is listed but temperamental; POP3 is the supported path, exactly like your ISP said in 1997.
+OK POP3 ready USER you +OK PASS ******** +OK welcome, you LIST +OK 2 messages (3140 octets) RETR 1 +OK message follows From: fox@yiffcloud.com Subject: welcome to the garden
IRC Chat
#lobby is the town square; the operator idles there.
irc.yiffcloud.com answers on 6667 to anything that speaks the protocol — mIRC with your old scripts, ircII in a terminal, a classic Mac client with a toolbar full of smileys. Your nick is your screenname, ready the moment you connect.
Anyone can open a channel; owning one is different. A registered #channel of
your own — yours to keep, yours to run — is a $2.95 add-on, which is also
roughly what dignity cost in 1996.
/join #lobby *** you has joined #lobby *** Topic: the town square <fox> evening. <you> it works. it actually works. <fox> it never stopped.
Instant Messengers
AIM, MSN and Yahoo! — three networks, one buddy universe.
The original clients sign on unmodified: AIM 1.x–3.x over OSCAR, MSN Messenger 1–2 over MSNP, classic Yahoo! Messenger over YMSG. No patched binaries and no shims — the login servers your client shipped with simply resolve to us.
Underneath, it is one shared presence. Go online in AIM and your friend running MSN sees you arrive; one screenname works everywhere. Pick your client for the sounds — the door slam has aged better than most software.
▼ Buddies (3/8)
fox · AIM
scratch · MSN
pawline · Y!
▼ Offline (5)
...
» you are online everywhere
Your Homepage
yiffcloud.com/~you/ — a real address on our internet.
10 MB of static hosting under your screenname, with +50 MB blocks to stack when the tables-and-GIFs ambition strikes. Upload through the portal's file manager from the modern side, or straight from the vintage machine over FTP.
Static means static: HTML, images, CSS, a little JS if your browser dares. No build step
ever invented applies here. Want to be somebody? An Internal Domain add-on puts
your-name.com inside the garden with 500 MB of its own.
C:\> ftp yiffcloud.com 220 YiffCloud FTP ready. User: you 331 Password required. Password: ******** 230 Logged in. ftp> put index.html 226 Transfer complete. ftp> quit 221 Come back soon.
The Walled Web
Browse a web that never reaches out.
One proxy setting — yiffcloud.com:8088 — and the browser wakes up:
curated period pages, weather, news, member homepages, all fetched by us and served from
inside. Nothing you click ever touches the live web.
The compatibility bar is absolute: if Netscape 2 renders it, it ships. No TLS walls, no frameworks, no cookie banners — the web as it looked when view-source was the documentation.
Location: http://www.yiffcloud.com/ [ MEMBER PAGES ] [ WEATHER ] [ NEWS ] Today inside the garden: members online, pages fresh, #lobby arguing about SCSI again
Printing & Finger
The utilities nobody bothered to improve, because they were done.
The garden runs network printing the old way: LPD, IPP, or raw port 9100. Print from the 1996 side, collect the PDFs on the modern side — the paperless office, thirty years late and finally true.
And finger, the original status page: one query per member, presence and plan files, no profile pictures, no algorithm. It answered in 1979 and it answers now.
C:\> finger fox@yiffcloud.com [yiffcloud.com] Login: fox Name: The Operator Plan: keeping the door.
Your first hour
A suggested itinerary, assuming a freshly authorized line and a machine that still smells like 1996.
Sign on
Open AIM, type your screenname and service password, and listen for the door. The login servers your client shipped with resolve to us — there is nothing to reconfigure.
Say hello
/join #lobby from any IRC client. The operator idles there, and first sign-ons get noticed.
Get mail
Set up POP3 in Eudora or Outlook Express and send your first message to fox@yiffcloud.com. It gets answered from inside.
Claim your corner
FTP in, drop an index.html, and yiffcloud.com/~you/ is live to every member. Then finger yourself to make sure you exist.
Getting connected
Three steps: subscribe here, authorize your line in the portal, point the machine's DNS at the garden. The Handbook has the exact menu paths for Windows 95, classic Mac OS, and anything UNIX-ish.