@bender@twtxt.net Both Gopher and Mastodon are a way for me to “babble”. 😅 I basically shut down Gopher in favor of Mastodon/Fedi last year. But the Fediverse doesn’t really work for me. It’s too focused on people (I prefer topics) and I dislike the addictive nature of likes and boosts (I’m not disciplined enough to ignore them). Self-hosting some Fedi thing is also out of the question (the minimalistic daemons don’t really support following hashtags, which is a must-have for me).

I’ll probably keep reading Fedi stuff, I just won’t post that much, I think.

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. ☹️

Some more arguments for a local-based treading model over a content-based one:

1. The format: (#<DATE URL>) or (@<DATE URL>) both makes sense: # as prefix is for a hashtag like we allredy got with the (#twthash) and @ as prefix denotes that this is mention of a specific post in a feed, and not just the feed in general. Using either can make implementation easier, since most clients already got this kind of filtering.

2. Having something like (#<DATE URL>) will also make mentions via webmetions for twtxt easier to implement, since there is no need for looking up the #twthash. This will also make it possible to make 3th part twt-mentions services.

3. Supporting twt/webmentions will also increase discoverability as a way to know about both replies and feed mentions from feeds that you don’t follow.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de

We should be able to remove those subject hashtags, they’re just noise.

Yes! I would say they are not even needed on the web UI. You click conversations, and that’s done by Yarn. No need for humans to see it.

@prologic@twtxt.net Exactly, but that reduces the argument for URLs in the post. The client should figure out how to search based on the hashtag.

I don’t think I’m implementing twtxt.net-style hashtags (for now?). The “” is bad enough for nicks, but they just make the plain text unreadable.

@prologic@twtxt.net Testing if this will be added to the thread just adding the hashtag. #utwnv7q

@prologic@twtxt.net I see them is why I ask. like here #cwqmygq they use both hashtag and bangtag?

just made a !links page for myself to keep track of interesting things I find. Anything with the hashtag #links gets placed there automatically.

testing #hashtags

there are also things like using #hashtags, which could be a useful tool to coordinate with weewiki somehow.

Fixed txtnish timeline formatting of hashtags on BSD by installing coreutils and replacing fmt with gfmt in the configuration file #twtxt #txtnish #gnu #bsd

Thanks @kdave@kdave.github.io for the new default colors. And colored hashtags are also a thing now. And text wrapping at 76 characters. #txtnix