Twtxt was made for nerds, by nerds.
I’d like to change that. It’s by nerds/hackers, for nerds/hackers and friends of these. It doesn’t have to be hacky all the time, as you don’t need to be a nerd to have a blog.
But, for that to happen, someone has to build the tools to improve UX.

by design there really is no way to easily discovers others
Yeah, I agree, and although there are directories of email addresses, usually you don’t want that, unless you are a ‘public figure’.
I couldn’t say that a microblogging is a “social network” by default, as a blog is not either. At the same time, people would expect to find new people and conversations, as you’d do in a forum.

I think of two features on top of the current spec:

• Clients showing a few posts of what your following are watching but you don’t, so perhaps you find something interesting to follow next. Or that feature of “Your ‘followings’ are following these accounts/people”. (Hard to explain in english, but I hope you get the idea)
  
• Sharing your .txt into some directory, saying “Hey, I have this twtxt URL, I want to be discovered”. I’m thinking of something like the Federated tab on Mastodon.

Hmm so looking at the swagger of the registry spec client it seems to just take a “page”.. That seems worse than doing an offset. Lol.

https://github.com/DracoBlue/twtxt-registry/blob/master/src/swagger.json

An AI clock is correct twice a day.

:{:|:&};:

Super stressful day at work and, once I got home: Internet outage.

I guess that’s a sign.

@bender@twtxt.net I gave up after page 4 (DuckDuckGo) 🤣

@bender@twtxt.net I tend to think of Twtxt like Email. It is truely decentralised. So therefore by design there really is no way to easily discovers others except through social interactions and a sort of “word of mouth” of human exchanges of communications.

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev and how will that help “discover people”? I am missing something, I am sure, as I don’t understand.

Twtxt was made for nerds, by nerds. So one would script a way to often (and/or ongoing) check your web server logs for new mentions, “follows”, etc.

@doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt why? The Gemini protocol is an obscure, niche, good-for-nothing (yeah, I am trolling) protocol. Search for “Gemini”, and tell me in which page, on your search engine of choice, you see it being referred as a protocol.

@bender@twtxt.net thinked about Gemini protocol. Why corporations shit this name with cryptocurrency and LLMs?

@bender@twtxt.net I taught the whole ecosystem 😁
@prologic@twtxt.net @eapl.me@eapl.me The question I was asked the most was: How do I discover people?
Someone came up with a fantastic idea, instead of adding the new twt at the end of the feed, do it at the beginning. So you can paginate by cutting the request every few lines.

@xuu@txt.sour.is no disagreements from me!

I’m not much a fan of registry limit/offset paging. I think I prefer the cursor/count method. And starting at zero for first and max for latest.

So smooth. love it!

@doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt haha its not coming back. he talked of a stand alone thing like feeds. but not in yarnd

@xuu@txt.sour.is it is called “reaffirmation”. It is a lesser known feature that activates randomly to make sure you get the gist on things that matter. 😅

hmm @prologic@twtxt.net how did replying to lyse double up here?

if it hasn’t updated in a while so i put the request rate to once a week it will take some time before i see an update if it happens today.

I need to figure out a way to back off requests to feeds that don’t update often.

“Unread messages: -1”: Well, classic off by one error. I gotta have to hunt that down.

Guilty pleasure, blasphemy, shitty audio, … something like that. Seven Nation Army on double bass. 🤪 https://movq.de/v/e3a4dcff2e/sad-nation-army.ogg

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s not very retrocomputing!

If you’ve played Grim Fandango back in the day, you’ll enjoy this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNc58NznIUM

@bender@twtxt.net 🙈🙈🙈

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I remember WebKit having a similar list, but I can’t find it right now … 🙈

@eapl.me@eapl.me Interesting! Two points stood right out to me:

1. Why the hell are e-mail newsletters considered a valid option in the first place? Just offer an Atom feed and be done with it! Especially for a blog of this very type. This doesn’t even involve a third party service. Although, in addition he also links to Feedburner, what the fuck!? No e-mail address or the like is needed and subject to being disclosed.

2. When these spam mailers want to prevent resubscribing, then for fuck’s sake, why don’t they use a hash of the e-mail address (I saw that in yarnd) for that purpose? Storing the e-mail address in clear text after unsubscribing is illegal in my book.

@prologic@twtxt.net In all seriousness: Don’t worry, I’m not going to host some Fediverse thingy at the moment, probably never will. 😅

But I do use it quite a lot. Although, I don’t really use it as a social network (as in: following people). I follow some tags like #retrocomputing, which fills my timeline with interesting content. If there was a traditional web forum or mailing list or even a usenet group that covered this topic, I’d use that instead. But that’s all (mostly) dead by now. ☹️

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I see, fair point, yeah.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yikes! I didn’t know about about:compat. Crazy!

@xuu@txt.sour.is Wow, that’s a giant graveyard. In my new database I have 16,428 messages as of now. Archive feed support is not yet available, so it’s just the sum of all the 36 main feeds.

@david@collantes.us Ah shit, sorry, you’re right! :-D

Did you demoed Yarn? When it comes to less friction nothing can beat a web browser!

Thank you @python_valencia@twtxt.python-valencia.es for letting me show you the secrets of a decentralised plain text social network like twtxt.
I hope you enjoyed the talk! ❤️🐍

Image

Image

@bender@twtxt.net That … was better than expected. 😂

@prologic@twtxt.net Gemini has an answer for you:

This is a conversation thread from a twtxt network, detailing a user’s (movq) frustration with the Mastodon “export data” feature and their consideration of self-hosting a fediverse alternative. Here’s a summary:

• movq’s initial issue:
  
  • movq is concerned about the volatility of their data on their current Mastodon instance due to a broken “export data” feature.
    
  • They contacted the admins, but the issue remains unresolved.
    
  • This led them to contemplate self-hosting.
    
• Alternative fediverse software suggestions:
  
  • kat suggests gotosocial as a lightweight alternative to Mastodon.
    
  • movq agrees, and also mentions snac as a potential option.
    
• movq’s change of heart:
  
  • movq ultimately decides that self-hosting any fediverse software, besides twtxt, is too much effort.
    
• Resolution and compromise:
  
  • The Mastodon admins attribute the export failure to the size of movq’s account.
    
  • movq decides to set their Mastodon account to auto-delete posts after approximately 180 days to manage data size.
    
  • Movq also mentions that they use auto-expiring links on twtxt to reduce data storage.

Wait! What’s going on?! 🧐

The Mastodon admins say that it’s probably because of the size of my account (~600 MB), so the export process times out. And I understand that. Here on twtxt, I always use auto-expiring links when I post images or videos. It just gets too much data otherwise. I think I’ll just set my Mastodon account to auto-delete posts after ~180 days or something like that. Nobody cares about old posts anyway.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @bender@twtxt.net It already is a tiling window manager, but some windows can’t be tiled in a meaningful way. I admit that I’m mostly thinking about QEMU or Wine here: They run at a fixed size and can’t be tiled, but I still want to put them in “full screen” mode (i.e., hide anything else).

@movq@www.uninformativ.de let’s host yarnd! Or maybe wait until @prologic@twtxt.net return activitypub support which deleted in this commit

Wow, phishing is just around the corner 👀

A Sneaky Phish Just Grabbed my Mailchimp Mailing List
https://www.troyhunt.com/a-sneaky-phish-just-grabbed-my-mailchimp-mailing-list/

I need to import my yarn cache. It’s sitting at about 1.5G in registry format. That should make things interesting…

neat! my watcher is currently sitting at about 75 MB following over 1500 feeds. only about 200 are currently somewhat active.

-rw-r--r--. 1 xuu  xuu   69M Mar 25 20:46 twt.db
-rw-r--r--. 1 xuu  xuu   32K Mar 25 21:34 twt.db-shm
-rw-r--r--. 1 xuu  xuu  5.6M Mar 25 21:34 twt.db-wal

sqlite> select state, count(*) n from feeds group by 1;
hot|7
warm|8
cold|183
frozen|743
permanantly-dead|857

@movq@www.uninformativ.de so glad I don’t use Firefox! And now I will pretend I haven’t seeing your screenshot. Hahahahaha!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I don’t see the utility, nor artistry in it, but if it works for you, 🥳! 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de LOLZ! 🤣

There are 82.108 read statuses, but only 24.421 messages in the cache. In contrast to the cache with the messages, the read statuses are never cleaned up when a feed was unsubscribed from. And the read statuses also contain old style hashes, before we settled on the what we have today. Still a huge difference. Hmm.

Thanks, @movq@www.uninformativ.de!

My backing SQLite database with indices is 8.7 MiB in size right now.

The twtxt cache is 7.6 MiB, it uses Python’s pickle module. And next to it there is a 16.0 MiB second database with all the read statuses for the old tt. Wow, super inefficient, it shouldn’t contain anything else, it’s a giant, pickled {"$hash": {"read": True/False}, …}. What the heck, why is it so big?! O_o

you just haven’t read this yet.

The brokenness of the web can be examined by opening about:compat in Firefox.

Lots and lots of workarounds for specific websites.