TentCities Community Server
The whole "no one owns anyone" promise, in a real product.
What it is
A TentCities Site is your fully-featured personal website, hosted inside a community server, built with the TentCities Builder. Either a distinctly-different 3D web experience or a standard 2D layout, your call. Bring your own domain or use the community's subdomain. Yours to keep even if you leave the community or the community shuts down.
Why it matters
Without TentCities, InertSpace VPS is just another WordPress host. TentCities is what makes the community-server product actually distinctive. It is the concrete form the "portable, sovereign personal site" idea takes. It is also what makes the community-server layer worth turning on.
It is the modernized BBS / Webring / GeoCities lineage as a real product, not a nostalgia project.
Current state
Where it is right now: in design. The core idea is defined: compose a 2D or 3D scene, bring in your own artwork, draw on a shared art pool, and save the result in a portable form. No Builder has shipped. An older plugin version of the tent model exists but is not running anywhere today.
What is next: a first working Builder that saves a tent and shows it at a public URL. Then PACT, so the tent belongs to a portable identity rather than an account on one server.
Connections
Depends on PACT for identity. Designed to run on a community server. The room and shop work on AnalogCirc.us is the groundwork: composing a space, saving it, and showing it to everyone is the Builder's problem, being solved on one site first.
Build log
Plugin foundation, then the product wrapper. The bridge between the two happens on AnalogCirc.us.
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Early years
Classic TentSpace + the shape of a tent
Prototypes of an in-page site builder that let a member add sections and pages without leaving their own site. The "tent" metaphor arrived as the way to say "your presence inside a community, not the community itself."
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Late 2025
TentSpace v3 · the Acorn rewrite lands
The plugin is rewritten onto Roots Acorn (Laravel service container). Version 3.0.0 is the foundation that everything after this builds on.
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Jul 7, 2026
AnalogCirc.us reframed across inertspace.com
The /tentsites/ and /projects/ pages get rewritten so the TentCities product is positioned as the cooperative-marketplace-shaped thing it actually is.
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Jul 10, 2026
Naming split: TentSpace (plugin) vs TentCities (product)
The plugin keeps the TentSpace name; TentCities becomes the product wrapper: the hosted community server carrying many tents. The site-side copy gets aligned to match.
More
- The split cleans up a confusion that was quietly making every conversation harder: was this a plugin, a hosted product, or both?
- Plugin (TentSpace): what a WP developer installs and adopts.
- Product (TentCities Community Server): what a community leader signs up for: a hosted, managed instance of the plugin plus the surrounding infrastructure.
- Same code, two audiences, two names, one conversation each.
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Jul 16, 2026
The member board ships on AnalogCirc.us New surface
The AnalogCircus BBS goes up as the member's billing terminal, with Stripe for payment and PACT for identity. WooCommerce is retired the same day.
More
- BBS as a real product surface, not a bit: the retro terminal isn't just decorative. It's the actual place a member checks dues, changes plans, and manages their affiliation.
- Dues on Stripe: real subscription plumbing behind the terminal. Modern payment rails, retro presentation.
- PACT wired in: the member's identity comes from PACT, not from a per-site account. First real integration of PACT into a cooperative flow.
- WooCommerce out: the placeholder store that had been sitting there since scaffolding is retired the same day. The board and dues carry the load.
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Aug 31, 2026
Builder still in design
The billing and membership surface on AnalogCirc.us is real. The Builder that turns a tent into a saved, portable scene is still design-phase.
More
- The August work on shelves, arrangement and placement is groundwork for this whether or not it was framed that way. Composing a space, saving it, and rendering it somewhere else is exactly the Builder's problem, being solved one site at a time first.
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Oct 10 – 20, 2026 You are here
The room gets its own builder v1.0
The room is now arranged with its own builder, version 1.0. Walls, floors, shelves, decor and the words on them are set up on a test copy of the site, then sent live in one step. Every save is kept, so any earlier layout can be put back, and if the test copy and the live site both changed the same thing, it stops and asks which to keep. A Layers list shows everything in the place you're standing in, even things that draw nothing, and a click picks any of them up. It builds one tent on one server for now. Saving a tent to a portable identity is still the next step.
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Next
Builder prototype
A first working Builder that saves a tent and shows it at a public URL, with PACT so the tent belongs to a portable identity rather than an account on one server.