@test_dont_fetch@aelaraji.com Let’s raise another from the dead! “Facio, Voco, Ferre” 🧝 🪄 #ForScience

@prologic@twtxt.net don’t jinx it, comrade. Let’s keep a low profile, and be happy. Also, it should have been: “my pod feels…”, or “my pod twtxt.net feels…”. Come on, mon, you are killing me! 😅

Testing mentions, immediately followed by commas. Let’s see: @prologic@twtxt.net, this one is local, it might not break. Now, this one @ isn’t local. Nor this @ one. Will they break. Let’s find out!

@prologic@twtxt.net why not blanket closing everything older than, say, 3 months? Yarnd is quite a different beast today, right? Let’s start over!

So, the Pope died. From my non-religious stand point, I think he has been the best Pope in a generation. Let’s see how the upcoming one does.

@prologic@twtxt.net really? Then we have a problem with bulleted lists. Let me see:

• This is one.
  
• This is two.
  
• This is three, and final.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz At the core, you need an ngircd.conf like this:

[Global]
    Name = your.irc.server.com
    Password = yourfancypassword
    Listen = 0.0.0.0
    Ports = 6667

    AdminInfo1 = Well, me.
    AdminInfo2 = Over here!
    AdminEMail = forget.it@example.invalid

[Options]
    Ident = no
    PAM = no

[SSL]
    CertFile = /etc/ssl/acme/your.irc.server.com.fullchain.pem
    KeyFile = /etc/ssl/acme/private/your.irc.server.com.key
    DHFile = /etc/ngircd/dhparam.pem
    Ports = 6669

Start it and then you can connect on port 6667. (The SSL cert/key must be managed by an external tool, probably something like certbot or acme-client.)

I’m assuming OpenBSD here. Haven’t tried it on Linux lately, let alone Docker. 😅

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz you can let Caddy do it, and reuse the same certificates for Ergo (just enter the certificate/key path on Ergo). Once set Caddy will keep them current.

@iiogama@iiogama.0x212.com Let me guess, it has got an AI sticker on it.. right? xD

“Move to iOS” app continuously refused to run as intended and expected, so couldn’t migrate mum’s Android based phone data. Most of her stuff is on a Google account, but not the SMS/MMS/RCS messages. Haven’t found a way to export, then import those into iOS.

She isn’t too happy having to keep the old phone just for the messages. Need to find a way to go through them, export multimedia attachments, and import them into iOS. I don’t think it’s going to happen, but I am not letting her know yet. 😅

@bender@twtxt.neteapl.me let’s see how this mention comes out. I noticed that @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz’s pod doesn’t have this problem. That is, their mention to you works fine.

@bender@twtxt.net Let’s just optimize/fix those annoyances later on once I’ve finished pagination. Then I’ll merge this branch into main.

@prologic@twtxt.net me neither! Let’s put it on the “Greatest Mysteries of Yarn” list, and move on. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net “Indiana, let it go” 😂

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz @eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club @abucci@anthony.buc.ci – I’ve already spoken to @xuu@txt.sour.is on IRC about this, but the new SqliteCache backend I’m working on here, what are your thoughts regarding mgirations from old MemoryCache (which is now gone in the codebase in this branch). Do you care to migrate at all, or just let the pod re-fetch all feeds? 🤔

@thecanine@twtxt.net I mean I can restore whatever anyone likes, the problem is the last backup I took was 4 months ago 😭 So I decided to start over (from scratch). Just let me know what you want and I’ll do it! I used the 4-month old backup to restore your account (by hand) and avatar at least 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net let’s all go to Australia! We crash on prologic’s house; got enough inflatable mattresses, mate? 😅

Oh well, let’s just start over! 🤣

Chapter 1:
Chapter 2:

if you want a different voice let me know which to use: https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

The big established parties are all bad traitors. I blame them and their actions to help raise AfD. They just [don’t?] give a fuck about the ordinary people, they’re only concerned about their private gain and power.

To a large degree, yes. But I think the media is also equally at fault. There was absolutely no reason to invite AfD people to every event and let them talk. This has been going on for over 10 years. When we give them a stage to spread their hate, are we really surprised that hate spreads … ?

I don’t know the answers to this desaster. I’m beginning to think that people literally just want an outlet for their frustration, nothing more. It’s not about what particular parties actually plan to do. At least I think this applies to people in their 30ies and 40ies.

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Here’s that twtxt-el test replay to my last twt! let’s see how it goes.

@doesnm.p.psf.lt@doesnm.p.psf.lt Cool lets see if this works?!

That pretty cool! I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen an actual IRL rainbow let alone a double rainbow. 😅 Thank you!!

I’m usually comfortable keeping my hardship to myself, most especially AWAY from the internet; an act of kindness of sorts towards others, “Everyone’s got their own problems to worry about” kind of thing.. But maaan am I starting to believe creating a twitter account would be a healthy decision 🤣🤦 Read nothin’ out there, just a one way echo chamber of sorts to let that shi_ out of my chest. It seem that’s what everyone else’s been using it for all this time.

A Bsky would be even better! 😂 I’d get to shi_ post and yap all I want, allll the way from terminal and never ever have to look back at it or whatever comes out of it. But I digress…

I FU_ing despise this … whatever this is. I wish I could just wake up in some sort of parallel universe where everything is just sunshine and rainbows, alas, life would be just as meaningless.

and sorry you had to read this if you did.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh! no need to be sorry and feel free to keep at it if it helps, I don’t mind. It’s just that I’m always on the lookout for corpo-bots and crawlers slipping through the cracks (a fun little game of sorts) 😅 the only thing I let them see is a robots.txt telling them to :diffoff

Also, I’m curious about the invalid lines in my feed. is it something I should lookout for in future?

Shi… I forgot to pull my twtxt file before twtin’ … let me see if I can recover them lost timeline twts.

Ok, amma start twting from my timeline instance, let me know if I break something xD

What should the advantage be to nick = _compared to just not defining a nick and let the client use the domain as the handle?

What is not intuitive is that you put something in the nick field that is not to be taken literary. The special meaning of _ is only clean if you read the documentation, compared to having something in nick that makes sense in the current context of the twtxt.txt.

@eapl.me@eapl.me why not https://domain.com/.well-known/twtxt/:domain/:user ?

the business card test is this can you write it on your business card and have someone you give it to be able to figure it out without added context?

• phone number: yes because everyone knows what a phone number is.
  
• email address: yes, everyone knows an email and their aol or prodigy will let them email.
  
• twitter/x/insta/pintrest handle: no, whats a twitter? do i need to sign up?
  
• domain name: yes its simple and you just type it in a browser right?
  
• twtxt url: kinda? its a bit long and is that a forward slash? or a backward slash?

One benefit with bluesky is your username is also a website. And not a clunky URL with slashes and such. I wish twtxt adopted that. I have advocated for webfinger to for twtxt to let us do something like it with usernames. Nostr has something like it

By default the bsky.social urls all redirect to their feeds like: hmpxvt.bsky.social
Many custom urls will redirect to some kind of linktree or just their feed cwebonline.com or la.bonne.petite.sour.is or if you are a major outlet just to your web presence like https://theonion.com‬ or https://netflix.com

Its just good SEO practice

Do all nostr addresses take you to the person if typed into a browser? That is the secret sauce.
No having to go to some random page first. no accounts. no apps to install. just direct to the person.

@eapl.me@eapl.me here are my replies (somewhat similar to Lyse’s and James’)

1. Metadata in twts: Key=value is too complicated for non-hackers and hard to write by hand. So if there is a need then we should just use #NSFS or the alt-text file in markdown image syntax ![NSFW](url.to/image.jpg) if something is NSFW

2. IDs besides datetime. When you edit a twt then you should preserve the datetime if location-based addressing should have any advantages over content-based addressing. If you change the timestamp the its a new post. Just like any other blog cms.

3. Caching, Yes all good ideas, but that is more a task for the clients not the serving of the twtxt.txt files.

4. Discovery: User-agent for discovery can become better. I’m working on a wrapper script in PHP, so you don’t need to go to Apaches log-files to see who fetches your feed. But for other Gemini and gopher you need to relay on something else. That could be using my webmentions for twtxt suggestion, or simply defining an email metadata field for letting a person know you follow their feed. Interesting read about why WebMetions might be a bad idea. Twtxt being much simple that a full featured IndieWeb sites, then a lot of the concerns does not apply here. But that’s the issue with any open inbox. This is hard to solve without some form of (centralized or community) spam moderation.

5. Support more protocols besides http/s. Yes why not, if we can make clients that merge or diffident between the same feed server by multiples URLs

6. Languages: If the need is big then make a separate feed. I don’t mind seeing stuff in other langues as it is low. You got translating tool if you need to know whats going on. And again when there is a need for easier switching between posting to several feeds, then it’s about building clients with a UI that makes it easy. No something that should takes up space in the format/protocol.

7. Emojis: I’m not sure what this is about. Do you want to use emojis as avatar in CLI clients or it just about rendering emojis?

@prologic@twtxt.net Thanks for writing that up!

I hope it can remain a living document (or sequence of draft revisions) for a good long time while we figure out how this stuff works in practice.

I am not sure how I feel about all this being done at once, vs. letting conventions arise.

For example, even today I could reply to twt abc1234 with “(#abc1234) Edit: …” and I think all you humans would understand it as an edit to (#abc1234). Maybe eventually it would become a common enough convention that clients would start to support it explicitly.

Similarly we could just start using 11-digit hashes. We should iron out whether it’s sha256 or whatever but there’s no need get all the other stuff right at the same time.

I have similar thoughts about how some users could try out location-based replies in a backward-compatible way (append the replyto: stuff after the legacy (#hash) style).

However I recognize that I’m not the one implementing this stuff, and it’s less work to just have everything determined up front.

Misc comments (I haven’t read the whole thing):

• Did you mean to make hashes hexadecimal? You lose 11 bits that way compared to base32. I’d suggest gaining 11 bits with base64 instead.

• “Clients MUST preserve the original hash” — do you mean they MUST preserve the original twt?

• Thanks for phrasing the bit about deletions so neutrally.

• I don’t like the MUST in “Clients MUST follow the chain of reply-to references…”. If someone writes a client as a 40-line shell script that requires the user to piece together the threading themselves, IMO we shouldn’t declare the client non-conforming just because they didn’t get to all the bells and whistles.

• Similarly I don’t like the MUST for user agents. For one thing, you might want to fetch a feed without revealing your identty. Also, it raises the bar for a minimal implementation (I’m again thinking again of the 40-line shell script).

• For “who follows” lists: why must the long, random tokens be only valid for a limited time? Do you have a scenario in mind where they could leak?

• Why can’t feeds be served over HTTP/1.0? Again, thinking about simple software. I recently tried implementing HTTP/1.1 and it wasn’t too bad, but 1.0 would have been slightly simpler.

• Why get into the nitty-gritty about caching headers? This seems like generic advice for HTTP servers and clients.

• I’m a little sad about other protocols being not recommended.

• I don’t know how I feel about including markdown. I don’t mind too much that yarn users emit twts full of markdown, but I’m more of a plain text kind of person. Also it adds to the length. I wonder if putting a separate document would make more sense; that would also help with the length.

@prologic@twtxt.net Do you have a link to some past discussion?

Would the GDPR would apply to a one-person client like jenny? I seriously hope not. If someone asks me to delete an email they sent me, I don’t think I have to honour that request, no matter how European they are.

I am really bothered by the idea that someone could force me to delete my private, personal record of my interactions with them. Would I have to delete my journal entries about them too if they asked?

Maybe a public-facing client like yarnd needs to consider this, but that also bothers me. I was actually thinking about making an Internet Archive style twtxt archiver, letting you explore past twts, including long-dead feeds, see edit histories, deleted twts, etc.

Hmm, this didn’t work, because I made a mistake. Now I have corrected it, let’s see how it goes now.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @prologic@twtxt.net Another option would be: when you edit a twt, prefix the new one with (#[old hash]) and some indication that it’s an edited version of the original tweet with that hash. E.g. if the hash used to be abcd123, the new version should start “(#abcd123) (redit)”.

What I like about this is that clients that don’t know this convention will still stick it in the same thread. And I feel it’s in the spirit of the old pre-hash (subject) convention, though that’s before my time.

I guess it may not work when the edited twt itself is a reply, and there are replies to it. Maybe that could be solved by letting twts have more than one (subject) prefix.

But the great thing about the current system is that nobody can spoof message IDs.

I don’t think twtxt hashes are long enough to prevent spoofing.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org 31°C here, feels like 33°C, with a lovely 75% of humidity. It has been raining, on and off (to make matter “better”) the whole day until now. No horses here, but if you go outside you will smell the same smell of farm animals (like goats, or pigs). That’s because two or three kilometres from here there are private farms, and when the wind blows in such way, well, we are reminded of their existence.

I haven’t left the house, so it feels well under air conditioning. In two more hours I will call it quits from the work day, and will have to dash to the grocery to get supplies for tonight’s meal (arroz con gandules). I will let you know how it truly feels out there then. :-D

For those swollen fingers, nothing better than a mildly cold shower! Oh, and paws off the keyboard! :-P

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I think I have got it, but need to test upon receiving further posts. I added:

set uncollapse_new     = yes  # open threads when new mail
set uncollapse_jump    = yes  # jump to unread message when uncollapse
set collapse_unread    = no   # don't collapse threads with unread mails

Let’s see how it goes.

@bender@twtxt.net, let’s break it!

A stopgap setting that would let me stop all calls to /external matching a particular pattern (like this damn lovetocode999 nick) would do the job. Given the potential for abuse of that endpoint, having more moderation control over what it can do is probably a good idea.

@prologic@twtxt.net I believe you are not seeing the problem I am describing.

Hit this URL in your web browser:

https://twtxt.net/external?nick=lovetocode999&uri=https://socialmphl.com/story19510368/doujin

That’s your pod. I assume you don’t have a user named lovetocode999 on your pod. Yet that URL returns HTTP status 200, and generates HTML, complete with a link to https://socialmphl.com/story19510368/doujin, which is not a twtxt feed (that’s where the twtxt.txt link goes if you click it). That link could be to anything, including porn, criminal stuff, etc, and it will appear to be coming from your twtxt.net domain.

What I am saying is that this is a bug. If there is no user lovetocode999 on the pod, hitting this URL should not return HTTP 200 status, and it should definitely not be generating valid HTML with links in it.

Edit: Oops, I misunderstood the purpose of this /external endpoint. Still, since the uri is not a yarn pod, let alone one with a user named lovetocode999 on it, I stand by the belief that URLs like this should be be generating valid HTML with links to unknown sites. Shouldn’t it be possible to construct a valid target URL from the nick and uri instead of using the pod’s /external endpoint?

@prologic@twtxt.net sounds fair. Let’s see how it works for @abucci@anthony.buc.ci. Speedy fix, that’s awesome! :-)

There is a bug in yarnd that’s been around for awhile and is still present in the current version I’m running that lets a person hit a constructed URL like

YOUR_POD/external?nick=lovetocode999&uri=https://socialmphl.com/story19510368/doujin

and see a legitimate-looking page on YOUR_POD, with an HTTP code 200 (success). From that fake page you can even follow an external feed. Try it yourself, replacing “YOUR_POD” with the URL of any yarnd pod you know. Try following the feed.

I think URLs like this should return errors. They should not render HTML, nor produce legitimate-looking pages. This mechanism is ripe for DDoS attacks. My pod gets roughly 70,000 hits per day to URLs like this. Many are porn or other types of content I do not want. At this point, if it’s not fixed soon I am going to have to shut down my pod. @prologic@twtxt.net please have a look.

@xuu@txt.sour.is I hope everything is sorted out with your ISP. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do to help. I sincerely did not mean to cause you any trouble.

Oops, let a SSL certificate expire.

@jmjl@tilde.green I’m sorry that I’m not super knowledgeable about alternatives to jmp.chat but I’ll tell you what I know.

You’re probably right about jmp.chat not working for you, at least as it is now. You can only get US and Canadian phone numbers through it last time I checked, so if you’re not in either of those countries you’d be making international calls all the time and people who wanted to call you would be making international calls too.

I’ve seen people talk about using SIP as an intermediary: you can bridge SIP-to-XMPP, and bridge SIP-to-PSTN (PSTN = “packet switched telephone network”, meaning normal telephone). You can skip the SIP-to-XMPP side if you’re comfortable using a SIP client. I don’t know very much about SIP or PSTN so I am not sure what to recommend, but perhaps this helps your search queries.

There are a fair number of services like TextNow that let you sign up for a real telephone number that you can then use via their app (I wouldn’t use TextNow–they had tons of spyware in their app). I don’t know if that kind of service works for you but if it does perhaps you’d be able to find one of them that isn’t horrible. This page (https://alternativeto.net/software/jmp-chat/) has a bunch of alternatives; I can’t vouch for any of them but maybe it’s a starting point if you want to go this route.

Good luck!

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net because of course they have.

Emily Bender, a computational linguistic and excellent critic of this generative AI nonsense, uses an analogy of an oil spill to characterize what is happening as a result of generative AI. It’s polluting the world with false information, false images, false “academic” articles, false books. The companies that create this stuff are not cleaning up their misinformation spill; they’re letting the mess spread all over. It’s being used to commit crimes, and that’ll only get worse. Just like an out of control oil spill will destroy entire ecosystems.

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Let’s Move Forward https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2023/06/24/move-forward.html #freeculture #bookclub

These billionaires are profoundly without intelligence or depth. It’s astonishing to see so many shallow, empty fools parading their bad opinions publicly without shame. Let no one ever again fall under the illusion that tech oligarchs are anything more than your racist uncle at Thanksgiving but with more money.

Image

Image

Let’s be clear here. Daniel Penny allegedly choked a black man, Jordan Neely, to death on a subway car. Neely was being loud, but he was not physically threatening anybody and did not have a weapon. In any other context, this would be called “murder”, at the very least, “manslaughter” if one were being gracious. Because of the US’s history, a white man murdering a black man in sight of the public is oftentimes, and rightfully, called a “lynching”. It has a public, political purpose amounting to terrorism.

Daniel Penny was allowed to go free for awhile after this event. He is only now facing accountability, having been recently indicted (arrested and charged with a crime) as he should have been day of. And here is racist right-wing toadie Ben Shapiro saying that Daniel Penny–the white alleged killer–is the one being lynched. Not the black man who was allegedly murdered by Penny in view of the public, and who is now dead. Penny himself, who is still very much alive.

@prologic@twtxt.net, I don’t know how you go on defending Ben Shapiro, but in the context of US society, what Shapiro is saying is reprehensible and unacceptable. He’s a right-wing troll with disgusting, not to mention flat out stupid, opinions.

@prologic@twtxt.net

Let’s assume for a moment that an answer to a question would be met with so many words you don’t know what the answer was at all. Why? Why do this? Is this a stereotype of academics and philosophers? If so, it’s not a very straight-forward way of thinking, let alone answering a simple question.

Well, I can’t know what’s in these peoples’ minds and hearts. Personally I think it’s a way of dissembling, of sowing doubt, and of maintaining plausible deniability. The strategy is to persuade as many people as possible to change their minds, and then force the remaining people to accept the idea because they think too many other people believe it.

Let’s say you want, for whatever reason, to get a lot of people to accept an idea that you know most people find horrible. The last thing you should do is express the idea clearly and concisely and repeat it over and over again. All you’d accomplish is to cement people’s resistance to you, and label yourself as a person who harbors horrible ideas that they don’t like. So you can’t do that.

What do you do instead? The entire field of “rhetoric”, dating back at least to Plato and Aristotle (400 years BC), is all about this. How to persuade people to accept your idea, even when they resist it. There are way too many techniques to summarize in a twt, but it seems almost obvious that you have to use more words and to use misleading or at least embellished or warped descriptions of things, because that’s the opposite of clearly and concisely expressing yourself, which would directly lead to people rejecting your idea.

That’s how I think of it anyway.