I reached out to my friend Zack Schollz who's behind croc (past thread - [3]) and asked him whether he could add support for ssh and he... just did. He added read, read+write, web and terminal client sharing support. It's bananas, and it works super well (just tested on a fresh digital ocean droplet).
Just wanted to PSA/Tell HN!! Tmate was a really beautiful and great solution - it's sad that it went away. But we have something else now! Cheers
[0] https://github.com/tmate-io/tmate
[1] https://tmate.io/ - 503 error
[2] https://github.com/tmate-io/tmate/issues/322 "I'm closing the servers permanently"