[archimedespi]

There /is/ a modern, well-managed open-registration shell and IRC service, similar to what you're talking about, called Hashbang. You can join via https://hashbang.sh.

We're reasonably active, and we have almost 1400 registered users [edited: i was corrected by a hashbang admin as to the amount].

The ultimate purpose of hashbang is to expose more users to a traditional remote UNIX server and command line, as well as teaching people how to use it. We've created a slight barrier to entry with the intentionally obtuse signup flow, as we don't want completely non-technical users flooding the service.

I promise we won't bite :D

[Aloha]

To join would require me to run code from the website.. or initiate a call to their API via curl?

[toothbrush]

My initial reaction was to run (and the gpg call made me curious):

    curl hashbang.sh

I was encouraged by what i saw.

[archimedespi]

Yep. You can download/verify that script by hand, or hit the endpoints yourself. They just run stuff to provision your user and files and add you to our LDAP directory.

[corford]

Can confirm hitting the endpoint with curl works. Thanks for the account! :) Going to go poke around.

[tokenizerrr]

Or take a look at the page source.

[dorianm]

Source is: https://github.com/hashbang