@alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it Personally, I find the reversed order of URL first and then timestamp more natural to reference something. Granted, URL last would be kinda consistent with the mention format. However, the timestamp doesn’t act as a link text or display text like in a mention, so, it’s some different in my opinion. But yeah.

@zvava@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de I’m not entirely sure about the spaces, but maybe they were omitted to simplify parsing of mentions in the form of @<nick url>. If the next token after the @<nick does not look like a URL, it’s not a mention but regular text. This is just wild guessing, though.

Looking at the regex and tests in the original twtxt reference implementation seems to confirm that theory in the sense as it relies on whitespace as the delimiter:

https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/screenshot-2025-09-17-21-30-25.png

Another thing about nicks is that the original twtxt reference implementation converts nicks to all lowercase:

https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/screenshot-2025-09-17-21-20-39.png

You probably know this already, the original twtxt file format specification can be found here: https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/twtxtfile.html

As for extensions, I don’t know of anything outside of twtxt.dev that has actually been (partially) implemented. However, there is also the issue tracker of the official reference implementation. You might wanna dig through that. For example, there is an alternative suggestions of multiline messages: https://github.com/buckket/twtxt/issues/157

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz all @prologic@twtxt.net has to do is to allow <details> and the subset under it. Granted, it could be implemented on the formatting toolbar too…

@zvava@twtxt.net may I recommend to change the mention format upon hitting reply to something similar to what it’s used in Yarn, and perhaps hiding the hash on the post too? Looking good!

Haha, fun! I browsed your gopher hole a little bit. I noticed some entries are fully justified (formatting), while others are not. I didn’t notice a pattern, though it makes sense not to use justification on entries with code. Yet, some prose entries are, and some are not. A mystery. :-)

Prosodical Thoughts: Debian repository key change
We have been working on some changes to our Debian/Ubuntu package repository.
If you use our repository to keep up to date with new Prosody packages, you
need to take action before 4th August 2025 to continue receiving updates
smoothly.

The ‘apt’ utility has been moving towards a new format for specifying package
repositories. If you are familiar with putting deb lines in a sources.list
file, [that method is changing](ht … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I spent so much time in the past figuring out if something is a dict or a list in YAML, for example.

What are the types in this example?

items:
- part_no:   A4786
  descrip:   Water Bucket (Filled)
  price:     1.47
  quantity:  4
- part_no:   E1628
  descrip:   High Heeled "Ruby" Slippers
  size:      8
  price:     133.7
  quantity:  1

items is a dict containing … a list of two other dicts? Right?

It is quite hard for me to grasp the structure of YAML docs. 😢

The big advantage of YAML (and JSON and TOML) is that it’s much easier to write code for those formats, than it is with XML. json.loads() and you’re done.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org yeah same YAML over XML forever bc at least one is more readable lmfao!! doesn’t forgive YAML’s crimes though… cursed formats

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Any text format beats a binary configuration format. However, YAML and XML are both terrible choices in my opinion. I’d prefer YAML over XML if I had to.

Xfce does one thing very right: It stores its settings in plain-text XML files. This allows me to easily read, track, and maybe even distribute these settings to other machines.

(Unlike GNOME’s dconf, which uses some binary file format. Fun fact: The older and now deprecated gconf also used XML files.)

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, this really could use a proper definition or a “manifest”. 😅 Many of these ideas are not very wide spread. And I haven’t come across similar projects in all these years.

Let’s take the farbfeld image format as an example again. I think this captures the “spirit” quite well, because this isn’t even about code.

This is the entire farbfeld spec:

farbfeld is a lossless image format which is easy to parse, pipe and compress. It has the following format:

╔════════╤═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ Bytes  │ Description                                             ║
╠════════╪═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ 8      │ "farbfeld" magic value                                  ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (width)                      ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (height)                     ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ [2222] │ 4x16-Bit BE unsigned integers [RGBA] / pixel, row-major ║
╚════════╧═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

The RGB-data should be sRGB for best interoperability and not alpha-premultiplied.

(Now, I don’t know if your screen reader can work with this. Let me know if it doesn’t.)

I think these are some of the properties worth mentioning:

• The spec is extremely short. You can read this in under a minute and fully understand it. That alone is gold.
  
• There are no “knobs”: It’s just a single version, it’s not like there’s also an 8-bit color depth version and one for 16-bit and one for extra large images and one that supports layers and so on. This makes it much easier to implement a fully compliant program.
  
• Despite being so simple, it’s useful. I’ve used it in various programs, like my window manager, my status bars, some toy programs like “tuxeyes” (an Xeyes variant), or Advent of Code.
  
• The format does not include compression because it doesn’t need to. Just use something like bzip2 to get file sizes similar to PNG.
  
• It doesn’t cover every use case under the sun, but it does cover the most important ones (imho). They have discussed using something other than RGBA and decided it’s not worth the trouble.
  
• They refrained from adding extra baggage like metadata. It would have needlessly complicated things.

I did a “lecture”/“workshop” about this at work today. 16-bit DOS, real mode. 💾 Pretty cool and the audience (devs and sysadmins) seemed quite interested. 🥳

• People used the Intel docs to figure out the instruction encodings.
  
• Then they wrote a little DOS program that exits with a return code and they used uhex in DOSBox to do that. Yes, we wrote a COM file manually, no Assembler involved. (Many of them had never used DOS before.)
  
• DEBUG from FreeDOS was used to single-step through the program, showing what it does.
  
• This gets tedious rather quickly, so we switched to SVED from SvarDOS for writing the rest of the program in Assembly language. nasm worked great for us.
  
• At the end, we switched to BIOS calls instead of DOS syscalls to demonstrate that the same binary COM file works on another OS. Also a good opportunity to talk about bootloaders a little bit.
  
• (I think they even understood the basics of segmentation in the end.)
  

The 8086 / 16-bit real-mode DOS is a great platform to explain a lot of the fundamentals without having to deal with OS semantics or executable file formats.

Now that was a lot of fun. 🥳 It’s very rare that we do something like this, sadly. I love doing this kind of low-level stuff.

The DuckLake Manifesto: SQL as a Lakehouse Format
Comments ⌘ Read more

Flatpak “not being actively developed anymore”
At the Linux Application Summit (LAS) in April, Sebastian Wick said that, by many metrics, Flatpak is doing great. The Flatpak application-packaging format is popular with upstream developers, and with many users. More and more applications are being published in the Flathub application store, and the format is even being adopted by Linux distributions like Fedora. However, he worried that work on the Flatpak project itself had stagnated, a … ⌘ Read more

Paste Without Formatting Should be the Default
Software needs to stop trying to be so dang fancy. ⌘ Read more

NATO announces new Ramstein format meeting next week ⌘ Read more

One of the Last Linux Magazines Ends Print Publication
Linux Format Magazine ends publication after 25 years - joining Linux Journal, Ubuntu User, Maximum Linux and many other now-dead Linux publications. ⌘ Read more

Genode OS Framework 25.05 released
It’s been 9 years since we disrupted Genode’s API. Back then, we changed the execution model of components, consistently applied the dependency-injection pattern to shun global side effects, and largely removed C-isms like format strings and pointers. These changes ultimately paved the ground for sophisticated systems like Sculpt OS. Since then, we identified several potential areas for further safety improvements, unlocked by the evolution of the C++ core langu … ⌘ Read more

DWARF as a shared reverse engineering format
Comments ⌘ Read more

LILYGO T-Embed SI4732 Combines ESP32 S3 with All Band Radio Tuning
LILYGO has introduced a new version of its T-Embed series that incorporates the SI4732 A10 tuner module. This version supports AM, FM, shortwave, and longwave radio bands in a handheld format that visually resembles devices like the Flipper Zero. The T-Embed SI4732 uses the ESP32 S3 microcontroller with a dual-core LX7 processor clocked at 240 […] ⌘ Read more

A brief history of the numeric keypad
The title is a lie. This isn’t brief at all. Picture the keypad of a telephone and calculator side by side. Can you see the subtle difference between the two without resorting to your smartphone? Don’t worry if you can’t recall the design. Most of us are so used to accepting the common interfaces that we tend to overlook the calculator’s inverted key sequence. A calculator has the 7–8–9 buttons at the top whereas a phone uses the 1–2–3 format. Subtle, but … ⌘ Read more

10 Invisible Standards That Make the Modern World Work
Modern life feels seamless. You buy a phone charger, and it fits. You send a letter, and it gets delivered. But behind that convenience is a complex web of invisible global standards—quiet, often century-old decisions that the entire planet just agreed to follow. Without them, your printer wouldn’t know how to format a page, your […]

The post [10 Invisible Standards That Make the Modern World Work](https://listverse.com/20 … ⌘ Read more

@sorenpeter@darch.dk No because as the spec statd originally, and we didn’t change that syntax at all:

Mentions are embedded within the text in either @ or @ format

So the lextwt parser we use will simply call this an invalid mention, which it does.

@sorenpeter@darch.dk Unfortunately it does break all clients, because the original spec stated:

Mentions are embedded within the text in either @ or @ format

Why are we testing, or playing with, an alternate non-fully-compatible feed format within the same feed that we use daily?

What is this ‘format:’ inside of printf? ⌘ Read more

Nobody writes emails by hand using RFC 5322 anymore, nor do we manually send them through telnet and SMTP commands. The days of crafting emails in raw format and dialing into servers are long gone. Modern email clients and services handle it all seamlessly in the background, making email easier than ever to send and receive—without needing to understand the protocols or formats behind it! #Email #SMTP #RFC #Automation

OSTIF Announces NATS Security Audit Results
OSTIF is proud to share the results of our security audit of NATS.  NATS is an open source project made by Synadia Communications for secure always-on messaging for a variety of digital formats and clients. With… ⌘ Read more

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Zulu said:

what is twtxt for you?

For me Twtxt is just the underlying format that Yarn.social builds upon 😅

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz (as I was trying to say…), Glad you think so👌 My goal with Yarn.social has always been to provide the best (best that I can anyway) truly decentralised (slow) social experience that uses the Twtxt format under the hood 😅

Holy hell?! When I post this:

@<kate https://yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz/user/kat/twtxt.txt> Glad you think so! 👌 My goal with Yarn.social has always been to provide the best (_best that I can anyway!_) truly decentralised (_slow_) social experience that uses the Twtxt format under the hood 😅

Something is swallowing it.

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Glad you think so! 👌 My goal with Yarn.social has always been to provide the best (best that I can anyway!) truly decentralised (slow) social experience that uses the Twtxt format under the hood 😅

Glad you think so! 👌 My goal with Yarn.social has always been to provide the best (best that I can anyway!) truly decentralised (slow) social experience that uses the Twtxt format under the hood 😅

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Glad you think so! 👌 My goal with Yarn.social has always been to provide the best (best that I can anyway!) truly decentralised (slow) social experience that uses the Twtxt format under the hood 😅

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Glad you think so! 👌 My goal with Yarn.social has always been to provide the best (best that I can anyway!) truly decentralised (slow) social experience that uses the Twtxt format under the hood 😅

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.

@prologic@twtxt.net @bmallred@staystrong.run So is restic considered stable by now? “Stable” as in “stable data format”, like a future version will still be able to retrieve my current backups. I mean, it’s at version “0.18”, but they don’t specify which versioning scheme they use.

i feel so powerful i wrote a 3 line script that takes an inputted markdown filename from the current working directory and then spits out a nicely formatted html page. pandoc does all the work i did nothing

Managing multi-line logs with Fluent Bit and Python
In this blog you will learn about:  Introduction Logs are essential for monitoring and debugging applications, but not all logs are created equal. While most logs follow a simple line-by-line format, others span multiple lines to… ⌘ Read more

Hello, i want to present my new revolution twtxt v3 format - twjson
That’s why you should use it:

1. It’s easy to to parse
   
2. It’s easy to read (in formatted mode :D)
   
3. It used actually \n for newlines, you don’t need unprintable symbols
   
4. Forget about hash collisions because using full hash
   Here is my twjson feed: https://doesnm.p.psf.lt/twjson.json
   And twtxt2json converter: https://doesnm.p.psf.lt/twjson.js

Registry format is its own thing. It takes the regular feed and appends nick \t uri \t to it. Its something that existed before yarn got big. There is still a bit of work but I will put together a ui for it to make it easier to view and navigate.

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

True. Though if the idea turns out to be better.. then community will adopt it.

if you look at the subject for that twt you will see that it uses the extended hash format to include a URL address.

** mkv no more **
My previous post included a video. I made that video with OBS which outputs .mkv video files.

I wanted to do my best to ensure that folks with a variety of devices and browsers would be able to watch the video if they wanted to, so, I converted it into a few different formats.

Here’s the bash script I wrote to do that. It relies on ffmpeg.

”`hljs bash
#!/bin/bash

if ! command -v ffmpeg &> /dev/null; then

echo "ffmpeg  ... ⌘ [Read more](https://eli.li/mkv-no-more)```

Some satisfying icicle-breaking in our backyard: photos.falsifian.org/video/sM7G3vfS6yuc/VID_20250217_203250.mp4

I couldn’t resist taking home a prize:

Image

Image

It’s been snowy here in #Toronto.

Image

(I tried formatting the images in markdown for the benefit of yarn and any other clients that understand it.)

#photo #photos #winter

UNIX man pages
What might be somewhat more surprising though considering its research origins is that Unix almost since the very beginning had a comprehensive set of online reference documentation for all its commands, system calls, file formats, etc. These are the the manual- or man-pages. On Unix systems used interactively, the man-pages have historically always been installed, space permitting. The way the manual pages have evolved and how they are used has changed over the decades. This set of posts is intended … ⌘ Read more

trying to keep it simple but.. perhaps it can be extended to fix timestamp formats like using " " instead of "T"

m2049r releases Monerujo v4.1.6 with Exolix fixes
m2049r1 has released Monerujo2 patch version 4.1.63 with minor fixes - including for the Exolix 4 exchange integration - and various other changes and updates:

Minimum weblate requirements
Add Arabic Translation
Updated Swedish translation
Update Turkish and French translations
fix toolbar under notification bar
make node parsing and formatting ipv6-friendly
Update default nodes
update exolix ... ⌘ [Read more](https://monero.observer/monerujo-v4.1.6-released-exolix-fixes/)

Run Linux inside a PDF file via a RISC-V emulator
You might expect PDF files to only be comprised of static documents, but surprisingly, the PDF file format supports Javascript with its own separate standard library. Modern browsers (Chromium, Firefox) implement this as part of their PDF engines. However, the APIs that are available in the browser are much more limited. The full specfication for the JS in PDFs was only ever implemented by Adobe Acrobat, and it contains some ridicul … ⌘ Read more

Reviving a dead audio format: the return of ZZM
Long-time readers will know that my first video game love was the text-mode video game slash creation studio ZZT. One feature of this game is the ability to play simple music through the PC speaker, and back in the day, I remember that the format “ZZM” existed, so you could enjoy the square wave tunes outside of the games. But imagine my surprise in 2025 to find that, while the Museum of ZZT does have a ZZM Audio section, it recommends t … ⌘ Read more