@bender@twtxt.net You are totally correct! The thing is: The Caveman within was thinking how minimal can one go before things start to get too uncomfortable? And if cavemen weren’t supposed to be too self-conscious about their spelling, I could have just ssh remote echo "$(date -Is)\tTwt Twt Mother-Lover! 🤣🤣" >> /path/to/twtxt.txt and called it a day.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com yeah, it looks tedious because it is. LOL. I can twt no matter where I am because a) with Yarn is as easy as opening a web browser, and b) with jenny is as easy at SSHing to my VPS. But, the keyword is fun. That’s what matters!

Just typing twts directly into my twtxt file.

Details:

• Opening my twtxt file remotely using vim scp://user@remote:port//path/to/twtxt.txt
  
• Inserting the date, time and tab part of the twt with :.!echo "$(date -Is)\t"
  
• In case I need to add a new line I just Ctrl+Shift+u, type in the 2028 and hit Enter
  
• In order to replay, you just steal a twt hash from your favorite Yarn instance.
  

It looks tedious, but it’s fun to know I can twt no matter where I am, as long as can ssh in.

Holly! I thing I might have figured out a way to twt like a true caveman 🤣
The sad thing tho is this caveman will have to cheat a bit in order to replay properly…
(P.S: I hope the multi-lines trick works, if not then F..rog it!)

I meant, “jlj”. He used to be at https://twt.nfld.uk/, long gone now too. I wonder…

@alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it Yeah I think we’re overstating the UNIX principles a bit here 🤣 I get what you’re trying to say though @zvava@twtxt.net 😅 If I could go back in time and do it all over again, I would have gotten the Hash length correct and I would have used SHA-256 instead. But someone way smarter than me designed the Twt Hash spec, we adopted it and well here we are today, it works™ 😅

@zvava@twtxt.net Going to have to hard disagree here I’m sorry. a) no-one reads the raw/plain twtxt.txt files, the only time you do is to debug something, or have a stick beak at the comments which most clients will strip out and ignore and b) I’m sorry you’ve completely lost me! I’m old enough to pre-date before Linux became popular, so I’m not sure what UNIX principles you think are being broken or violated by having a Twt Subject (Subject) whose contents is a cryptographic content-addressable hash of the “thing”™ you’re replying to and forming a chain of other replies (a thread).

I’m sorry, but the simplest thing to do is to make the smallest number of changes to the Spec as possible and all agree on a “Magic Date” for which our clients use the modified function(s).

Nothing serious! just a sanity check Twt x) ...

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Mine shows 1/1 of 14 Twts 😆 I think this is a bug 🤯

Oops, maybe I should have posted a reminder. 🥴

@dce@hashnix.club By the time you posted your twt, the red phase was already over. 🙈 Stellarium has a pretty good simulation of the whole thing.

Looks like here’s something wrong with Markdown parsing. 🤔 The original twt looks like this:

>This extension was turned off because it is no longer supported

Thanks Google.
This browser was uninstalled because it absolutely sucks!

So only the first line should be a quote.

PSA: setpriv on Linux supports Landlock.

If this twt goes through, then restricting the filesystem so that jenny can only write to ~/Mail/twt, ~/www/twtxt.txt, ~/.jenny-cache, and /tmp works.

@bender@twtxt.net @aelaraji@aelaraji.com Sorry this was my fault 🤦 For whatever reason my pod had never seen that particular Twt from @movq@www.uninformativ.de – And… There’s a bit of a “behavioral” problem with the Trusted Peers functionality that means operators have to periodically re-trust peers manually 😭 Need to rework this 🤞

@bender@twtxt.net Can’t you see this twt ??

(#a23wqyq) @aelaraji@aelaraji.com I am missing the root for this twtxt. What was it? Hmm, referring to https://twtxt.net/twt/g5sjnlq.

I’m also thinking of adding eye-off icon next to every Twt that, when clicked, hides that feed (tooltip: “Hide this feed”). This would work with the filters as a “temporary additive filter” to restrict/control the current view.

I’m thinking of bringing back filters (this time not as a feature flag, just baked in): New filters: Hide Feed, Hide Bots, Hide News, Media Only, No Replies, Local Only — toggle to trim noise & surface the Twts you care about.

In other words, why didn’t you all do the same that @movq@www.uninformativ.de did, and setup a completely different feed for this?

But Yarn does not like it: https://twtxt.net/twt/yoatzwa

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Kind of, but on the other hand: This twt right here refers to 3rvya6q and your feed, but your feed certainly does not include that particular twt (it comes from my feed).

But my proposal probably isn’t very helpful, either. We have this flat conversation model, so … this twt right here, what should it refer to? Your twt? My root twt? I don’t know.

@prologic@twtxt.net Don’t include this just yet. I need to think about this some more (or drop the idea).

@prologic@twtxt.net Not sure I’d attach any if clauses to this. My point is: Every time I see a hash, I’d like to have a hint as to where to find the corresponding twt.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de If we’re focusing on solving the “missing roots” problems. I would start to think about “client recommendations”. The first recommendation would be:

1. Replying to a Twt that has no initial Subject must itself have a Subject of the form (hash; url).
   

This way it’s a hint to fetching clients that follow B, but not A (in the case of no mentions) that the Subject/Root might (very likely) is in the feed url.

If we must stick to hashes for threading, can we maybe make it mandatory to always include a reference to the original twt URL when writing replies?

Instead of

(<a href="https://we.loveprivacy.club/search?q=%23123467">#123467</a>) hello foo bar

you would have

(<a href="https://we.loveprivacy.club/search?q=%23123467">#123467</a> http://foo.com/tw.txt) hello foo bar

or maybe even:

(<a href="https://we.loveprivacy.club/search?q=%23123467">#123467</a> 2025-04-30T12:30:31Z http://foo.com/tw.txt) hello foo bar

This would greatly help in reconstructing broken threads, since hashes are obviously unfortunately one-way tickets. The URL/timestamp would not be used for threading, just for discovery of feeds that you don’t already follow.

I don’t insist on including the timestamp, but having some idea which feed we’re talking about would help a lot.

Finally I propose that we increase the Twt Hash length from 7 to 12 and use the first 12 characters of the base32 encoded blake2b hash. This will solve two problems, the fact that all hashes today either end in q or a (oops) 😅 And increasing the Twt Hash size will ensure that we never run into the chance of collision for ions to come. Chances of a 50% collision with 64 bits / 12 characters is roughly ~12.44B Twts. That ought to be enough! – I also propose that we modify all our clients and make this change from the 1st July 2025, which will be Yarn.social’s 5th birthday and 5 years since I started this whole project and endeavour! 😱 #Twtxt #Update

And speaking of Twtxt (See: #xushlda, feeds should be treated as append-only. Your client(s) should be appending Twts to the bottom of the file. Edits should never modify the timestamp of the Twt being edited, nor should a Twt that was edited by deleted, unless you actually intended to delete it (but that’s more complicated as it’s very hard to control or tell clients what to do in a truely decentralised ecosystem for the deletion case). #Twtxt #Client #Recommendations

Just like we don’t write emails by hand anymore (See: #a3adoka), we don’t manually write Twts or update our twtxt.txt feeds. Instead, we use modern Twtxt clients that conform to the specifications at Twtxt.dev for a seamless, automated experience. #Twtxt #Twt #UserExperience

@bender@twtxt.net Hehe good sleuthing 🤣 I swear it was an edit ✍️ Haha 😂 yarnd now “sees” both every single time, where-as before it would just obliterate the old Twt, but remain in archive. Now you get to see both 😅 Not sure if that’s a good thing or not, but it certainly makes it much clearer how to write “code logic” for detecting edits and doing something more UX(y) about ‘em 🤔

I have a great idea for fixing the US economy. Get rid of all the nuclear weapons 🤣

$ bat https://twtxt.net/twt/edgwjcq | jq '.subject'
"(#yarnd)"

hahahahaha 🤣 Does your client allow you to do this or what? 🤔

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com I replied to this twtxt with https://twtxt.net/twt/yqrdx4q, and it created its own, totally unconnected.

Related Twt

@bender@twtxt.net allow me to try and explain over several Twts…

@bender@twtxt.net Wild. The twts look garbled. Like The Thing.

I’m thinking of building a hardened peering protocol for Yarn.social’s yarnd: pods establish cryptographic identities, exchange signed /info and /twt payloads with signature verification, ensuring authenticity, integrity, and spoof-proof identity validation across the distributed network.

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Haha 🤣 We’ve explored this idea in the past and we decided that it’s actually a good idea to have an “append-only” feed for various reasons. We’ve also explored the idea of using Range requests, but opted instead to just archive/rotate our feeds periodically 😅 There really isn’t much point in having a feed in reverse chronological order, except (maybe?) so a human read view the new twts at the top of the file?! 🤣

See:

<textarea id="text" name="text" placeholder="Hi! 👋 Don't forget to post a Twt today!" rows="4" maxlength="576" required="true" aria-required="true"></textarea>

So, 576?

Hmmm there’s a bug somewhere in the way I’m ingesting archived feeds 🤔

sqlite> select * from twts where content like 'The web is such garbage these days%';
      hash = 37sjhla
  feed_url = https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt/1
   content = The web is such garbage these days 😔 Or is it the garbage search engines? 🤔
   created = 2024-11-14T01:53:46Z
created_dt = 2024-11-14 01:53:46
   subject = #37sjhla
  mentions = []
      tags = []
     links = []
sqlite>

Btw @andros@twtxt.andros.dev ; The automated feed you put together for Hacker News… Does it at any point rewrite parts of the feed as it goes along? 🤔 I’ve had to unfollow it because I’ve found in practise it makes a twt, then seems to modify that same twt (observed by content manually) at least twice. This ends up becoming effectively an “Edit” and essentially duplicate (looking) posts 😢

@prologic@twtxt.net This shi_ is as fun as it is frustrating! 😆 the bot is poking at me from a different ASN now, Alibaba’s.

1. Short term solution: I’ve geo-locked my Timeline instance since I’m the only one using it (and I only do so for reading twts when I’m away from terminal).
   
2. Long term: I took a look at your Caddy WAF but couldn’t figure things out on my own; until then, I’ll be poking at Caddy-Defender, maybe throw in a Crowdsec for lols… #FUN

Some A hole has been trying to pull every single Twtxt feed that existed/still exists since forever. How do I know? Welp’ They’ve been querying my Timeline™ instance for all of it, every single twtxt file and twt Hash they can find. 😆🤦 It must have been going on for days and I have just noticed… + it’s all coming from the same ASN AS136907 HWCLOUDS-AS-AP HUAWEI CLOUDS

Thank you Huawei for the DDos you sons of Glitches!!!

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz It’s more like a cache, it stores things like “timestamp of the most recent twt we’ve seen per feed” or “last modification date” (to be used with HTTP’s if-modified-since header). You can nuke these files at any time, it might just result in more traffic (e.g., always getting a full response instead of just “HTTP 304 nope, didn’t change”).

@quark@ferengi.one Yes, I often write a couple of twts, don’t publish them, then sometimes notice a mistake and want to edit it. You’re right, as soon as stuff is published, threads are going to break/fork by edits.

@quark@ferengi.one No editing old Twts that are the root of a thread with replies in the ecosystem. Just results in a fork. Unless the client has an implementation that does not store Twts keyed by Hash.

jenny really isn’t well equipped to handle edits of my own twts.

For example, in 2021, this change got introduced:

https://www.uninformativ.de/git/jenny/commit/6b5b25a542c2dd46c002ec5a422137275febc5a1.html

This means that jenny will always ignore my own edits unless I also manually edit its internal “json database”. Annoying.

That change was requested by a user who had the habit of deleting twts or moving them to another mailbox or something. I think that person is long gone and I might revert that change. 🤔

@david@collantes.us @andros@twtxt.andros.dev The correct hash would be si4er3q. See https://twtxt.dev/exts/twt-hash.html, a timezone offset of +00:00 or -00:00 must be replaced by Z.

(That said, there’s a bug in jenny as well. It only replaces +00:00, not -00:00. 🤡)

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Curious where this root twt is?! 🤣 Apparently my pod doesn’t have it and I can’t find it anywhere. It’s suppose to be #l4doaxa

@xuu@txt.sour.is Seems to be fine here?

$ bat https://twtxt.net/twt/yfv5kfq | jq '.text'
"!<dm-echo https://dm-echo.andros.dev/twtxt.txt> U2FsdGVkX1+QmwBNmk9Yu9jvazVRFPS2TGJRGle/BDDzFult6zCtxNhJrV0g+sx0EIKbjL2a9QpCT5C0Z2qWvw=="

@bender@twtxt.net Sadly my earlier Twt back in ~2020 is now gone from at least this pod’s cache 🤣 – It might still exist in other pods though? 🤔 It does! https://txt.sour.is/twt/o6dsrga

Happy 1st Twtxt~iversary to me … I guess. It feels like it was 5 years since my first twt 😅

Oops, I think this pod (twtxt.net) just sync ~1k missing root twts with god only knows which peers 🤦‍♂️ I forgot a couple of important key things:

• Only coverage with a subset of peers
  
• Only converge with trusted peers
  

Fuck me 🤣 Ooops. Sorry!

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev can you see the screenshot on my first twtxt? Here: https://twtxt.net/twt/mrccg4q