@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Wow, those are some great shots. Fall is finally here! 😍 (Might be a bit exaggerated by my redshift. 😅)

That temperature drop was pretty sudden. Boom, cold, no warning. Give me some time to adapt, man! 😂

Speaking of public transportation, though: If it works, then it’s an amazing system. I love it.

I recently took the time to find an alternative route to one of my doctors. Hardly any people using that route and it’s faster. Absolutely brilliant. It’s like having a chauffeur. 😅

But navigating through that system is also a total nightmare. Which bus takes you to which places at which times, getting info about current construction sites, all that stuff. It takes forever.

And it doesn’t help at all that this is what their website looks like:

https://movq.de/v/acb23dc1c2/s.png

You can’t move that window at the bottom. It just sits there and takes up space from the map. It gets even worse: When you ask for a route, you get to see the buses and individual stops and all that – but all in that little window with that large font! Why do we all have widescreen monitors and than stack UI items vertically?

Sure, 30 years ago it was much worse. But it could also be much better today. 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Gosh, that sounds so horrible. 🙈🤢

Another idea for the upcoming Advent Of Code 2024:

OS/2 Warp 4 came with Java and that not only meant a runtime but a JDK including API docs. So, for AoC, I could try to solve as many puzzles as I can in that environment, directly on my old Pentium. For later puzzles, I’ll definitely want to switch to my normal workstation for faster development cycles – but I can still use Java and try to backport the solutions.

Sounds interesting. 🤔

https://movq.de/v/81ac0142f2/1.ff.jpg
https://movq.de/v/81ac0142f2/2.ff.jpg

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Yeah, that’s pretty close to what was outlined here: https://twtxt.net/twt/ansuy4a 😅

I went straight to bed after posting this and slept for 3 hours. 😩 Can’t I just win the lottery and be done with this whole “money” thing? 🤪

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oof, well, good luck. Those multi-day meetings are usually really exhausting (and mostly pointless) in our company, hopefully it’s different at yours. ✌️

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Indeed, great news! If you need testers at some point, let me know. 😅

Lest we forget … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mp5gksq_OEI … !

It’s one of those days.

It’s been a little over 14 years since Isis broke up and I have yet to find a band as good as them. Not a single song that disappoints (at least since the Oceanic album). Glad I could see them live a couple of times. // Isis - Grey Divide // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI2-8I3j4Vg #NowPlaying

Great, now I fell into a rabbit hole of “old” music. 😂 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGNiXGX2nLU

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Venus?

@prologic@twtxt.net Come on, that’s a little condescending, isn’t it? 😅

For the record, out of the 89 feeds that I follow, only a single one has more than one # url = field:

gemini://gemini.ctrl-c.club/~nristen/twtxt.txt

And I wonder if @nristen@gemini.ctrl-c.club is aware that the order of those fields matter. 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net Oh, wait, there’s already another thread about it. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net No, it’s all just speculation and I don’t like spreading rumors. 😅 It would be more interesting to hear from the twtxt folks themselves why they stopped working on the original twtxt.

@prologic@twtxt.net

the right way to solve this is to use public/private key(s) where you actually have a public key fingerprint as your feed’s unique identity that never changes

Okay, this is interesting. How would this work in practice? 🤔

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org If the timestamp included a nanosecond part (which is not a valid twtxt feed at the moment, because it mandates RFC3339 timestamps and those only permit one subsecond digit), this could solve the editing problem with little effort. 🤔

Btw, @prologic@twtxt.net, in my experience, people editing their twts is a much more common thing than people changing the URL of their feed. 😅 It breaks threading all the time.

Wow, there are a lot of ideas in this thread already. 😃

@prologic@twtxt.net @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, same. They say:

If you post quality content and you’ve developed a loyal audience, you should be able to ask your most passionate followers to support you with a premium subscription.

You already can ask your most passionate followers to support you: You can ask for donations.

I regularly donate to people if their content is great and if they actually ask for donations (many just don’t). The platforms for that already exist, I think. 🤔

I’m not interested in the slightest in stuff that has a paywall. “Subscribe for more content!” No, why, go away. Pages that do this immediately feel shady and not trust-worthy. 🤔

(Let’s not rush things, obviously. Such a change would have to be well thought through and actually be worth it. It’s not like the current state of Yarn/twtxt is completely unusable.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @prologic@twtxt.net Sorry, I have hardly slept last night. 😅 I probably didn’t chose the best words to describe this. 🥴

Yes, I’m all for dedicated message IDs. That would be a whole new format then. But I would be fine with it.

Honestly, me too. When Yarn originally showed up, I was concerned that it would extend twtxt in dramatically incompatible ways or, worse, change it in a way so that you needed server software. 😅 The latter would have ruined it for me. A major reason why I still use twtxt/Yarn is that it’s still just a file you put somewhere. If there was the need to run a daemon, I’d give up and just use some ActivityPub thingy instead.

What I did not expect, however, was that the original twtxt itself would just … die. There has been no development in the original software anymore and virtually all the original feeds are dead. Some feeds are left, but they’re just used as an alternative to Atom/RSS for some blogs. I don’t know what happened behind the scenes that killed off twtxt (I have a few guesses, though), but the sad truth is that it’s gone.

So, yeah, maybe this gives us the freedom now to break with the original twtxt spec (if needed) and come up with a format that fixes the issues we’re seeing.

(Oh god. Are we re-inventing Usenet then? Again? 😂)

All this hash breakage made me wonder if we should try to introduce “message IDs” after all. 😅

But the great thing about the current system is that nobody can spoof message IDs. 🤔 When you think about it, message IDs in e-mails only work because (almost) everybody plays fair. Nothing stops me from using the same Message-ID header in each and every mail, that would break e-mail threading all the time.

In Yarn, twt hashes are derived from twt content and feed metadata. That is pretty elegant and I’d hate see us lose that property.

If we wanted to allow editing twts, we could do something like this:

2024-09-05T13:37:40+00:00   (~mp6ox4a) Hello world!

Here, mp6ox4a would be a “partial hash”: To get the actual hash of this twt, you’d concatenate the feed’s URL and mp6ox4a and get, say, hlnw5ha. (Pretty similar to the current system.) When people reply to this twt, they would have to do this:

2024-09-05T14:57:14+00:00	(~bpt74ka) (<a href="https://we.loveprivacy.club/search?tag=hlnw5ha">#hlnw5ha</a>) Yes, hello!

That second twt has a partial hash of bpt74ka and is a reply to the full hash hlnw5ha. The author of the “Hello world!” twt could then edit their twt and change it to 2024-09-05T13:37:40+00:00 (~mp6ox4a) Hello friends! or whatever. Threading wouldn’t break.

Would this be worth it? It’s certainly not backwards-compatible. 😂

@bender@twtxt.net The size … it depends. 🥴

$ du -sh ~/Mail/twt
244M   /home/user/Mail/twt

But:

$ du -sh --apparent-size ~/Mail/twt
33M    /home/user/Mail/twt

There are about 60k twts in there.

Regarding one-way junk: True. Looks like I mostly unfollowed those, I don’t really have that in my inbox. 🤔

These are the Top 10, btw:

$ awk '/^From: / { user[$2]++ } END { for (u in user) { print user[u], u } }' * | sort -k1rn | head -n 10
24020 "prologic"
5269 "lyse"
3928 "movq"
2285 "adi"
1985 "abucci"
1713 "mckinley"
1415 "off_grid_living"
1352 "darch"
1280 "eaplmx"
956 "bender"

@bender@twtxt.net On twtxt, I follow all feeds that I can find (there are some exceptions, of course). There’s so little going on in general, it hardly matters. 😅

And I just realized: Mutt’s layout helps a lot. Skimming over new twts is really easy and it’s not a big loss if there are a couple of shitposts™ in my “timeline”. This is very different from Mastodon (both the default web UI and all clients I’ve tried), where the timeline is always huge. Posts take up a lot of space on screen. Makes me think twice if I want to follow someone or not. 😅

(I mostly only follow Hashtags on Mastodon anyway. It’s more interesting that way.)

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org @prologic@twtxt.net @bender@twtxt.net The twt was edited. In my cache, it also has hash st3wsda and it started like this:

(<a href="https://twtxt.net/twt/yqke7sq">#yqke7sq</a>) I've been sketching out some …

When fetching the feed now, the twt starts like this and the current twt gets the hash 6mdqxrq:

(<a href="https://we.loveprivacy.club/search?tag=yqke7sq">#yqke7sq</a>) I've been sketching out some …

This can’t be avoided, really. Publishing twts and then editing them is like doing a git push --force after rewriting the commit history. Chaos will ensue. 😅

@cuaxolotl@sunshinegardens.org Ah, thanks for reporting back! Okay, so you’re basically manually “crawling” feeds right now. 🤔 What do you think about the idea of adding something like # follow_notify = gemini://foo/bar to your feed’s metadata, so that clients who follow you can ping that URL every now and then? How would you even notice that, do you regularly read your gemini logs? 🤔

And the bonus read is also interesting:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20211129-00/?p=105979

Confession: I completely forgot that Alt+Tab existed in text mode. 🤦 It’s not even a hidden feature, it’s advertised right when you start a fullscreen dos box. Well, Alt+Tab wasn’t a thing I did regularly anyway – it was usually Ctrl+Esc to open the window list (which also worked in OS/2). 🤔 I think I only started using Alt+Tab when Windows 95 removed Ctrl+Esc (because it had no use anymore, it essentially got replaced by the tasklist).

Interesting read about the Windows 95 bluescreen by Raymond Chen:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20240903-00/?p=110205

All this Virtual Machine Manager stuff went completely over my head back then … 🤯

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Quick! Play the lottery! HURRY!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

But maybe with the climate getting hotter and hotter, they migrate north to me, too.

And a lot of other nasty stuff with it, bugs, spiders, you name it. Didn’t we migrate all this way up north to be free from such Ungeziefer? 😅

There was a time when WebKit (I think it was WebKit) stored metadata of downloads in extended attributes. Like the URL you were downloading it from.

https://movq.de/v/f79b94485a/s.png

This was really useful. 🤔 Chromium also did it for a while and then they removed it due to privacy concerns. Now none of the popular browsers do it anymore. 🫤

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665531
  
• https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/a9b4fb70b4318b220deee0da7b1693d16b8ed071
  
• https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=260778

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com He … slapped you? 😂 Typical for a cat! 😂

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Well, I guess that goes to show how completely irrelevant it was to Computer History. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net There’s another thing to consider: I have a feeling that (some/most/many?) Gopher/Gemini users wouldn’t even want that. I’ve heard them say a couple of times: “If you follow me, just drop me an e-mail.” 🤔 I don’t know if this is a widespread opinion or not, but I do feel the need to first gather some feedback from them, before we start drafting a spec. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net Ahh, found it, there were some ideas in this thread from January 2022: https://twtxt.net/twt/ansuy4a I haven’t read all of it yet.

@prologic@twtxt.net So a new metadata field like this?

# follow_notify = gopher://foo/bar

And we ping that every now and then? 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net You mean a way of letting them know that someone is following them? 🤔 I guess that’s gonna be hard (I think we discussed stuff like that a few years ago), but I’m open for suggestions. 😅

This would have been a lovely morning, wind softly rustling in the trees. If it wasn’t for the constant droning of the air planes. 🫤

I also saw a string of starlink satellites passing by. What a strange sight that was.

@prologic@twtxt.net I don’t think so, no. Judging by their web site, they appear to be primarily a Gemini user (no concept of a “user agent” there). This also works:

gemini://sunshinegardens.org/users/xj9/twtxt/tw.txt

But there are nick, url, and description metadata headers in the feed, even an avatar. 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org That is one flat snake. 🫤 Looks quite pretty, what’s left of it anyway.

What’s going on with the frogs? I guess they can’t properly see in the dark? 🤔

That large “individual” towards the would have freaked me out. Was it at least furry? Or was it a huge spider? 🤪

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’m not surprised, it’s pretty archaic. It’s the only browser readily available on OS/2 Warp 3 and 4, though. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net In a collection of (old) wallpapers that I downloaded a while ago. The source appears to be this:

http://www.avernus.com/desktop-textures/copyright.html

But the following addendum does not exist yet in the COPYRIGHT file on my disk. 😅

This restriction does not apply to use in World-Wide Web pages served from or viewed on Windows machines.

Lest we forget Mosaic: https://movq.de/v/f85fd317b3/mosaic.jpg

In the process of tweaking my little static HTML index/thumbnail creator so that it a) properly supports dark/ligh mode and, more importantly, b) gracefully degrades on ancient browsers.

Why? Because I often exchange data via HTTP with old systems and my tooling automatically invokes that indexer/thumbnailer script. 🥴 It’s really annoying when I just see garbage in Netscape 2 or IE5.

Screenshots and videos: https://movq.de/v/348819c482

Found this in an old copyright notice from 1993:

These images are not for use with the Microsoft Windows environment. Using these patterns in a Windows environment consitutes a copyright violation.

Someone clearly didn’t like Windows.

@quark@ferengi.one

I think you are worrying about a non-issue.

That’s what I do best. 😏

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com @quark@ferengi.one Yep, I like it as well. 😅

There’s another situation that I’m not quite happy with.

Suppose there’s a twt like this:

2024-08-28T19:57:58Z    <a href="https://we.loveprivacy.club/external?uri=https://foo.example.com/tw.txt&nick=person_a">@person_a<em>@foo.example.com</em></a> <a href="https://we.loveprivacy.club/external?uri=gemini://a.b.c/tw.txt&nick=person_b">@person_b<em>@a.b.c</em></a> Hey! 👋

There’s no hash, so --fetch-context won’t do anything at the moment.

Option A: jenny asks interactively to fetch those feeds once.

No thread hash found
Do you want to fetch the entire feed https://foo.example.com/tw.txt? [Y/n] y
Do you want to fetch the entire feed gemini://a.b.c/tw.txt? [Y/n] n

(Bonus points for skipping feeds that you already follow.)

Option B: There could be an external/third-party tool that scans a twt for all mentions and asks the user if they want to follow them (permanently). Why an external tool? The thing is, the follow file has been completely user-managed so far and I kind of want to keep it that way. And if this is an external tool, then users can do all kinds of fancy stuff, like using fzf or whatever. Or it could allow the user to preview the feed before following it. I don’t want to have stuff like that in the core program, it depends too much on users’ preferences.

To “implement” option B, I’d only add some hints to the docs, maybe an example.

I think I’m leaning towards option B at the moment. 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net The equator is your enemy. Stay away from it, as far as you can! 😱

(I just looked it up, your “winter” is barely cooler than our “summer”, according to those fancy climate diagrams and my rough understanding of them. 😅)