People prefer AI-generated poems to Shakespeare and Dickinson
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Thinking about how underrated is Thomas Feiner!

I’ve been testing our new APRS digipeater, that allows us to report our geographic position via radio.

the smell of fog is soo gud <3

@eapl.me@eapl.me here are my replies (somewhat similar to Lyse’s and James’)

1. Metadata in twts: Key=value is too complicated for non-hackers and hard to write by hand. So if there is a need then we should just use #NSFS or the alt-text file in markdown image syntax ![NSFW](url.to/image.jpg) if something is NSFW

2. IDs besides datetime. When you edit a twt then you should preserve the datetime if location-based addressing should have any advantages over content-based addressing. If you change the timestamp the its a new post. Just like any other blog cms.

3. Caching, Yes all good ideas, but that is more a task for the clients not the serving of the twtxt.txt files.

4. Discovery: User-agent for discovery can become better. I’m working on a wrapper script in PHP, so you don’t need to go to Apaches log-files to see who fetches your feed. But for other Gemini and gopher you need to relay on something else. That could be using my webmentions for twtxt suggestion, or simply defining an email metadata field for letting a person know you follow their feed. Interesting read about why WebMetions might be a bad idea. Twtxt being much simple that a full featured IndieWeb sites, then a lot of the concerns does not apply here. But that’s the issue with any open inbox. This is hard to solve without some form of (centralized or community) spam moderation.

5. Support more protocols besides http/s. Yes why not, if we can make clients that merge or diffident between the same feed server by multiples URLs

6. Languages: If the need is big then make a separate feed. I don’t mind seeing stuff in other langues as it is low. You got translating tool if you need to know whats going on. And again when there is a need for easier switching between posting to several feeds, then it’s about building clients with a UI that makes it easy. No something that should takes up space in the format/protocol.

7. Emojis: I’m not sure what this is about. Do you want to use emojis as avatar in CLI clients or it just about rendering emojis?

Thanks @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org! I’m replying here https://text.eapl.mx/reply-to-lyse-about-twtxt

This is beautiful and made my day

@bender@twtxt.net cos I live outside the United States and they don’t send to my country

I wish I had someone who could send me the Hacker Decals and Patch from Hackerboxes. Mail forwarding systems are so expensive!

I have lots of things to do at home. All I need is more energy.

I wonder how many hamradio operators use twtxt.net

One of my quirks—don’t ask me why—is collecting backpacks, bags, patches, and watches, especially those related to aviation and the military. Just yesterday, I added a Direct Action Messenger bag and a 5.11 backpack to my collection.

I’ve been thinking of a few improvements for the next generation of twtxt spec, let me know if these are useful or interesting :) https://text.eapl.mx/a-few-ideas-for-a-next-twtxt-version

I feel exhausted, burned out. The workload just keeps piling up, and there’s less and less time to rest. What keeps me going are these little escapes to the smolweb.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah. All I saw was boring bad news. Even the Tech news doesn’t grab my attention anymore

@prologic@twtxt.net Hi Prologic! How you doin’?

@wbknl@twtxt.net i’m currently working on my cyberpunk novella: gemini://wbknl.smol.pub/wbknl-radio-outpost

@wbknl@twtxt.net adopting the smolweb philosophy for my digital life

👋 Hello @wbknl@twtxt.net, welcome to twtxt.net, a Yarn.social Pod! To get started you may want to check out the pod’s Discover feed to find users to follow and interact with. To follow new users, use the ⨁ Follow button on their profile page or use the Follow form and enter a Twtxt URL. You may also find other feeds of interest via Feeds. Welcome! 🤗

Would it make sense for twtxt v.2 to do something similar to bluesky, where you use a domain as you handle by creating a specific DNS record as explained by: https://matthiasott.com/notes/how-to-set-your-domain-as-your-bluesky-handle

It is past 16:00 ET, and so the weekend begins. Here is to hoping it transcurs slowly in our minds—or, at the very minimum, in mine.

Just throwing this out there, but does the edit, delete and reply feature work for any of you, through the website? I can only Yarn. Trying to do those other actions, generates a popup, asking me if I trust some # URL thing. Confirming it refreshes the site, without doing the thing.

Wouldn’t you rather have work and private seperated? Any thought behind this decission? I like tags, like Gmail does it. I still think mail needs a big rethink. It’s too prominent in life, to be this archaic.

Time to catch up with the news

i’m so glad i gave up christianity. i might be a little less glad when i get purged, but at least i won’t be doing the purging. jesus of nazareth has some chill teachings, but the whole thing is poisoned by the actual history of the religion. genocide, book burnings, and ethnic cleansing are not exactly noble teachings.

due to the gemini-centric nature of my setup, I don’t get webmentions. I just scrape the network and grep. maybe my aggregator will produce notifications at some point lol

@codebuzz@www.codebuzz.nl I have some shell scripts that handle some of the log formatting details, but I mostly write my mesages by hand. Lately I’ve been browsing twtxt.net since they aggregate most of the known network. I have a couple of demo aggregators sitting around, but I’m in the middle of some infra rebuilds so a lot of my services are offline rn. They’re both built on a simple social graph analysis that extracts urls for your direct follows the follows listed on each of those feeds (friend-of-a-friend replication). certain formatting operations are awkward with my setup, so I may write an app of some kind in the future. likely gemini-based, but I have a number of projects ahead of that one in the queue.

Hey, @ I know. Just wondering the kind of apps or software and how you all stay up to date in conversations. Is it through webmentions?

How about storing the contents of the twtxt.txt file in TXT DNS records? :-P Like so:

dig +short txt poem.netbros.com | sed 's/[\" ]//g' | base64 -d

So, we need a computer for house (that is, wife and I) usage. We have none, we rely on our pocket computers. I would like to fill the void with the recently announced Mac mini. What technique could I use with an already stressed out wife, to accomplish this goal? 😅

So I am really curious, now that I am building upon @sorenpeter@darch.dk’s Timeline app, how other users write/add their twtxt, and how you follow conversations. Comment svp!

Oh, wow. That is a frightening level of protocol ossification.

The last week I’ve been playing around with https://github.com/comfyanonymous/ComfyUI , dang good tool for testing ai models and such. I really like the node based workflow.
And makes it super easy to test any AI model.
Only thing I miss now - is one of those image to video setup’s, that’s what I’m working on fixing now. So that I can generate images, and then automatically make them into short videos as well.
Fun to play around with.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’ll try and join next time :) I did not see your reply until now.

Roses are red, violets are blue,
Why devs hate Google, and so should you?

Google ☠️ The cloud

Google Drive vs their own API: Many of us developers, go out of our way to support Google Drive in our apps, programs and websites, to make things easier for users, but over the years, Google keeps making it harder and in some cases demanding “solutions”, that conveniently involve us paying their partners:
$Our Android app is frozen in carbonite
$End of the road for Google Drive and Transmit

Google ☠️ The Internet

Google OAuth vs the Canidae browser: Users interested in testing my CEF (Chromium Embedding Framework) browser, back when the project still existed, were prohibited from passing Google OAuth in my and any other CEF browser, unless they changed their user agent string. I managed to contact Google and was told this was a necessary protection against bad actors. As we all know, no bad actor would ever add two lines of code, to change the user agent of their malware.

Google vs the point of SSL: Google Chrome presents all sites access over HTTPS as secure and all sites accessed over HTTP as dangerous. This is very misleading to less educated Internet users, falling for “secure” phishing sites with SSL certificates and avoiding “dangerous” static webpages, that never needed one.

Google ☠️ Android apps

Googles friends vs FOSS
developers: X and other big social media platforms running their own servers, are allowed to host seemingly any user generated content, while Google forces us, developers helping to maintain XMPP clients for Android, to exclude features, that allow our users to discover chatrooms, that anyone can host on their servers. We are thus not only held responsible for what we publish, what we host, but also for the whole XMPP network. I offer my version of the client, unrestricted, on my website, others choose their repo or F-droid.

AI helps driverless cars predict how unseen pedestrians may move
A specialised algorithm could help autonomous vehicles track hidden objects, such as a pedestrian, a bicycle or another vehicle concealed behind a parked car ⌘ Read more

What are peoples #IRC setup? Do you have your own bouncer server or just have a you computer always on? And do you IRC on mobile?

🤣 Indeed. It’s like using disallow is only pointing them to look for more stuff to index. Those few kB’s for a twtxt file, meh.. shouldnt even be a discussion.

IMHO, the original spec had it right when it said (paraphrased) “just upload your tw.txt file wherever”. The essence of micro-blogging, as opposed to full-scale blogging, is low friction and low stakes. Imposing a norm that you can’t just use any ol’ url, looking down on people with insufficently cool urls (as in “Cool URIs don’t change” https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI), puts up too much of a barrier to entry.

the test would be: how often does unwanted content get pushed on your feed? do incongruent posters easily disrupt harmonious connections? &c. less about the community, more about how the social dynamics play out as various groups and individuals interact.

Hope you all enjoy the weekend!

There. Re-enabled the old subdomain url (twtxt.prismdragon.net), and just pointed it to the file in my twtxt file’s url field. Either should work, so links won’t be broken.

Rebuilding my twtxt file after deciding to return, and trying to get back into working on my fork of txtnix as a reason to continue learning Perl again.

Simplified twtxt - I want to suggest some dogmas or commandments for twtxt, from where we can work our way back to how to implement different feature like replies/treads:

1. It’s a text file, so you must be able to write it by hand (ie. no app logic) and read by eye. If you edit a post you change the content not the timestamp. Otherwise it will be considered a new post.

2. The order of lines in a twtxt.txt must not hold any significant. The file is a container and each line an atomic piece of information. You should be able to run sort on a twtxt.txt and it should still work.

3. Transport protocol should not matter, as long as the file served is the same. Http and https are preferred, so it is suggested that feed served via Gopher or Gemini also provide http(s).

4. Do we need more commandments?

@prologic@twtxt.net Why does twtxt.net still show my old avatar?

@Codebuzz@www.codebuzz.nl Welcome to the twt’verse 👋

THE LAST HUMAN POST ON THIS FEED IS MORE THAN FOUR YEARS OLD. PERHAPS TWTXT CLIENTS SHOULD THEN FETCH THE FEED VERY RARELY.

Google tool makes AI-generated writing easily detectable
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Ethical framework aims to counter risks of geoengineering research
As interest grows in geoengineering as a strategy for tackling global warming, the world’s largest association of Earth and space scientists has launched an ethical framework as a guide to responsible decision-making and inclusive dialogue. ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net With respect, a client can not identify whether an edit took place. Not unless that same client witnessed both the original twt and the edited one. This won’t be the case if a person you’re following is joining a thread started by people you aren’t following after the first twt of that thread has already been modified. Or if you’re knocked offline by a multi-hour power outage that spans then entire time window between a twt getting uploaded and modified.