@bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net meanwhile i want to try microblog but can’t because not able to pay for it. They have trial but…

@movq@www.uninformativ.de this is so real… i think we need to bring back topic focused groups but like with a little off topic side of things just in case people wanna go off topic. so the option’s there but the intent is the topic! microblogging isn’t best for this yeah. i think this is part of why IRC still goes strong for many tech people

Confession:

I’ve never found microblogging like twtxt or the Fediverse or any other “modern” social media to be truly fulfilling/satisfying.

The reason is that it is focused so much on people. You follow this or that person, everybody spends time making a nice profile page, the posts are all very “ego-centric”. Seriously, it feels like everybody is on an ego-trip all the time (this is much worse on the Fediverse, not so much here on twtxt).

I miss the days of topic-based forums/groups. A Linux forum here, a forum about programming there, another one about a certain game. Stuff like that. That was really great – and it didn’t even suffer from the need to federate.

Sadly, most of these forums are dead now. Especially the nerds spend a lot of time on the Fediverse now and have abandoned forums almost completely.

On Mastodon, you can follow hashtags, which somewhat emulates a topic-based experience. But it’s not that great and the protocol isn’t meant to be used that way (just read the snac2 docs on this issue). And the concept of “likes” has eliminated lots of the actual user interaction. ☹️

Timeline of Evolution of Twtxt/Yarn.social:

• 2016 – Twtxt created by John Downey: plain text + HTTP = minimalist microblogging
  
• 2017–2019 – Community builds CLI tools, but adoption remains niche
  
• 2020 – Yarn.social launched by @prologic@twtxt.net with federation, threading, UI
  
• 2021–2023 – Pods sync, user mentions, blocking, search, and media support added
  
• 2024+ – Yarn.social becomes the reference Twtxt platform, with active federated pods

I asked ChatGPT what it knows about Twtxt 😂 And surprisingly it’s rather accurate:

Twtxt is a minimalist, decentralized microblogging format introduced by John Downey in 2016. It uses plain text files served over HTTP—no accounts, databases, or APIs.
In 2020, James Mills (@prologic@twtxt.net) launched Yarn.social, an extended, federated implementation with user discovery, threads, mentions, and a full web UI.
Both share the same .twtxt.txt format but differ in complexity and social features.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com That’s how twtxt started: As microblogging. Yarn shifted up some gears and now it’s more like social media – more powerful, but a bit different. 😅

twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers.

The keyword here is microblogging. But it doesn’t feel like we’ve been (relatively speaking) doing much of that lately… maybe I go the concept of microblogging wrong.

That’s very sad… Btw twtxt is more hardly to spam because of bad discovery. So you can only spam to your followers. Did you really want abandon best method of microblogging?

This is my first official cross-post to twtxt using my offline microblog script. Hello, world!

Future of Yarn.social

Today I’m going to talk about Yarn.social’s future, a roadmap into where we’re going and thinking. I’ll also write a little about it’s history of where we came from and highlight how Yarn.social is different and in my opinion better.

For those of you new to my blog or Yarn.social; Yarn.social is a decentralised social media platform, a microBlogging platform. It was originally crea … ⌘ Read more

@adi@f.adi.onl I don’t remember. I knew about twtxt for a long time. I often seek information about microblogs, and I believe I came across Yarn while browsing the Tubes.

I’m finding the microblogging format to be really useful for working out ideas.

⌘ https://www.prologic.blog/2020/11/30/the-microblogging-twitterlike.html

plans for weewiki: a zettelkasten-like interface, a microblogging platform inspired by !twtxt, and some utilities for managing collections of SQLar archives. #updates #halfbakedideas

⌘ https://www.prologic.blog/2020/10/06/does-microblog-have.html

a microblogging creative coding platform like dwitter, but for sound. users would be encouraged to remix, the output of one persons code would become the input of the new code. only text would be stored on the server, with audio rendered client-side. to save on time, there could be caches of frozen audio for remixes. #halfbakedideas

twtxt – a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers. ⌘ https://www.prologic.blog/2020/07/02/twtxt-a-decentralised.html

This one is coming to you from the Alfred launcher https://albertlauncher.github.io/ and a Bash script calling txtnish https://github.com/mdom/txtnish and oysttyer https://github.com/oysttyer/oysttyer #microblogging