Aggred. But reading twtxt in raw form sounds… I can’t do this

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.

Finally pubnix is alive! That’s im missing? Im only reading twtxt.net timeline because twtxt-v2.sh works slowly for displaying timeline…

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Rsync has a ton of options and I probably still haven’t scratched the surface, but I was able to memorize the options I actually need for day-to-day work in a relatively short time. I guess I’m the opposite of you, because I don’t know any scp(1) options.

Been trying to get acquainted with rsync(1) but, whenever I Tab for completion and get this:

λ ~/ rsync –
zsh: do you wish to see all 484 possibilities (162 lines)?

I’m like: Nope! a scp -rpCq ... or whatever option salad will do just fine. 😅 [Insert: “Ain’t nobody got time fo’that!” Meme.]

@prologic@twtxt.net violent enough to be taken away by the police. 🤭😂

I know what keeps me coming back to twtxt. It is the little group of people with whom I interact. I don’t need a big audience. More often than not I have nothing interesting to write, but I enjoy the small interactions: bugging prologic, reading abucci, browsing Lyse’s clicks. I enjoy movq commentaries (I imagine him as a professor of some kind, don’t ask me why).

Anyway… cheers!

@eapl.me@eapl.me are you sure X will bring joy, and value? Will you have clear conscience knowing you are contributing to such despicable platform? It is your decision to make, sure.

Joy starts at you, not the platform you use. When you get bored, disgusted, offended, and leave X, come and let us know. I will be interested to read all about your experiment then. For now, “¡hasta pronto!”

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yes, the tools are surprisingly fast. Still, magrep takes about 20 seconds to search through my archive of 140K emails, so to speed things up I would probably combine it with an indexer like mu, mairix or notmuch.

Aunque me gusta mucho el concepto descentralizado de ‘twtxt’, este año no lo he utilizado tanto. No pude tener a mi círculo cercano, con quienes surgen las conversaciones que me gustan, y por el que se da un efecto de red significativo.

También estoy buscando un minimalismo digital, utilizando servicios que brinden alegría, valor y un uso de tiempo razonable.
Aunque es un tema controversial, ¿por qué no tener una comunidad de personas con las que sintamos que el mundo (digital al menos) es un lugar mejor?

Quizás un poco idealista el punto, aunque la intención es que el tiempo que pasamos en ‘la red’, nos ayude a crecer como personas, a disfrutar el tiempo, y a vivir esta vida digital con sentido.

Por todo esto, el poco tiempo que esté en microblogging, lo buscaré en las dos plataformas que más conversaciones significativas me generan, que por un lado es X, para todo lo profesional, y Mastodon, para lo hipster, indie, idealista, etc.

Si algo de lo que he compartido por twtxt ha sido importante para ti, o quieres que sigamos charlando, me puedes encontrar en alguna de estas otras plataformas:
https://text.eapl.mx/microblogging

#fzf is the new emacs: a tool with a simple purpose that has evolved to include an #email client. https://sr.ht/~rakoo/omail/

I’m being a little silly, of course. fzf doesn’t actually check your email, but it appears to be basically the whole user interface for that mail program, with #mblaze wrangling the emails.

I’ve been thinking about how I handle my email, and am tempted to make something similar. (When I originally saw this linked the author was presenting it as an example tweaked to their own needs, encouraging people to make their own.)

This approach could surely also be combined with #jenny, taking the place of (neo)mutt. For example mblaze’s mthread tool presents a threaded discussion with indentation.

LMAO 🤣 … I’ve been scrolling through mutt(1) man page and found this:

BUGS

  None.  Mutts have fleas, not bugs.

I demand full 9 digit nano second timestamps and the full TZ identifier as documented in the tz 2024b database! I need to know if there was a change in daylight savings as per the locality in question as of the provided date.

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org I believe the preserve means to include the original subject hash in the start of the twt such as (#somehash)

@bender@twtxt.net Ha! Maybe I should get on the Markdown train. You’re taking away my excuses.

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org you can colorise things in Mutt/Neomutt. I have have colours for bold, italics, code, and blockquotes. In a way, I can “see” markdown! 😊

@bender@twtxt.net

Sorry, you’re right, I should have used numbers!

I’m don’t understand what “preserve the original hash” could mean other than “make sure there’s still a twt in the feed with that hash”. Maybe the text could be clarified somehow.

I’m also not sure what you mean by markdown already being part of it. Of course people can already use Markdown, just like presumably nothing stopped people from using (twt subjects) before they were formally described. But it’s not universal; e.g. as a jenny user I just see the plain text.

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org The GDPR does not apply to the processing of data for a purely personal or household activity that is not connected to a professional or commercial activity.

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org it would be easier if instead of a bulleted list you would have used a numbered one. That way it would be easier to refer to the specific miscellaneous comment.

I have little to contribute on this reply. On bullet two, he meant the original hash. On the last bullet, markdown is already part of it (after all, it is plain text). Yarn, being a web client/server, simply renders it.

@prologic@twtxt.net Do you feel the same about published vs. privately stored data?

For me there’s a distinction. I feel very strongly that I should be able to retain whatever private information I like. On the other hand, I do have some sympathy for requests not to publish or propagate (though I personally feel it’s still morally acceptable to ignore such requests).

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’d suggest making the whole content-type thing a SHOULD, to accommodate people just using some hosting service they don’t have much control over. (The same situation could make detecting followers hard, but IMO “please email me if you follow me” is still legit twtxt, even if inconvenient.)

@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.

Meanwhile in Florida we are having a very Autumnal Equinox day, with temperatures 10-14° cooler than normal. That, on its own, isn’t normal at all, but I taketh! 😂

Sassy pererê

Hello!

@prologic@twtxt.net Care to explain how that proves anything when someone else already got the spoofed twt with no way to tell it was? can’t an old twt just be deleted and give a similar result when grep-ed for?

Le me is worried! 😅

@bender@twtxt.net Just desktop notifications at the moment, but you could easily throw in a Ntfy server and get notified about anything you want, wherever you want. 🤣

The three things we briefly talk about tonight (your morning), so that I don’t forget:

1. Add the ability to allow feed address changes.
   
2. Increase hash from 7 to 11, and/or change the hashing algorithm to something else, better.
   
3. Implement movq (I simply can’t mention while on mobile) second option (the one you like, which maintains content addressing).

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org makes me want to be there. Sunny, but “feels” fresh. Lovely!

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com it looks good! Where do you see those notifications?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I cases of these kind of “abuse” of social trust. Then I think people should just delete their replies, unfollow the troll and leave them to shouting in the void. This is a inter-social issue, not a technical issue. Anything can be spoofed. We are not building a banking app, we are just having conversation and if trust are broken then communication breaks down. These edge-cases are all very hypothetical and not something I think we need to solve with technology.

Been thinking about it for the last couple of days and I would say we can make do with the shorter (#<DATETIME URL>)since it mirrors the twt-mention syntax and simply points to the OP as the topic identified by the time of posting it. Do we really need and (edit:...)and (delete:...) also?

@prologic@twtxt.net 🕵🏻 Hint: it was a twt about stolen property…

I have just made yet another convoluted twtxt notifications script! Feeling like an old dog learning new tricks! 🤣

Image

@prologic@twtxt.net You’ve done extremely well for ~$125/month, but that’s not figuring in labor. I’m sure you’ve put a lot of hours into maintenance in the last 10 years.

@prologic@twtxt.net “Even though there are some 😉 that have different views on this 🤣” — coyly raises the hand… LOL.

I like the (replyto:...) as well. If the feed changes, well, it is the same as changing emails (and deleting the old one). No?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de good job!

Something’s broken.

@prologic@twtxt.net the one I relied to. It vanished now.

@prologic@twtxt.net where is the parent on your reply? 🧐🤔😅

@prologic@twtxt.net right, because it was deleted, and purged from cache, of course! Good try, mister, you are in trouble. Call the Yarn Police! 😂

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @falsifian@www.falsifian.org @prologic@twtxt.net Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about and You’ve probably already read this: Everything you need to know about the “Right to be forgotten” coming straight out of the EU’s GDPR Website itself. It outlines the specific circumstances under which the right to be forgotten applies as well as reasons that trump the one’s right to erasure …etc.

I’m no lawyer, but my uneducated guess would be that:

A) twts are already publicly available/public knowledge and such… just don’t process children’s personal data and MAYBE you’re good? Since there’s this:

… an organization’s right to process someone’s data might override their right to be forgotten. Here are the reasons cited in the GDPR that trump the right to erasure:

• The data is being used to exercise the right of freedom of expression and information.
  
• The data is being used to perform a task that is being carried out in the public interest or when exercising an organization’s official authority.
  
• The data represents important information that serves the public interest, scientific research, historical research, or statistical purposes and where erasure of the data would likely to impair or halt progress towards the achievement that was the goal of the processing.
  

B) What I love about the TWTXT sphere is it’s Human/Humane element! No deceptive algorithms, no Corpo B.S …etc. Just Humans. So maybe … If we thought about it in this way, it wouldn’t heart to be even nicer to others/offering strangers an even safer space.
I could already imagine a couple of extreme cases where, somewhere, in this peaceful world one’s exercise of freedom of speech could get them in Real trouble (if not danger) if found out, it wouldn’t necessarily have to involve something to do with Law or legal authorities. So, If someone asks, and maybe fearing fearing for… let’s just say ‘Their well being’, would it heart if a pod just purged their content if it’s serving it publicly (maybe relay the info to other pods) and call it a day? It doesn’t have to be about some law/convention somewhere … 🤷 I know! Too extreme, but I’ve seen news of people who’d gone to jail or got their lives ruined for as little as a silly joke. And it doesn’t even have to be about any of this.

P.S: Maybe make X tool check out robots.txt? Or maybe make long-term archives Opt-in? Opt-out?
P.P.S: Already Way too many MAYBE’s in a single twt! So I’ll just shut up. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net I have no specifics, only hopes. (I have seen some articles explaining the GDPR doesn’t apply to a “purely personal or household activity” but I don’t really know what that means.)

I don’t know if it’s worth giving much thought to the issue unless either you expect to get big enough for the GDPR to matter a lot (I imagine making money is a prerequisite) or someone specifically brings it up. Unless you enjoy thinking through this sort of thing, of course.

@prologic@twtxt.net woot, woot! Glad everything went well. I feel it faster already!

Gotta unplug for a couple of minutes. I’m suspecting the extension cord to be the root of my monitor dead rows of pixels and flickering problems.

https://spiritualsprings.proboards.com/thread/46/flat-earth-round-explorer

And they have arrived (well, they did around 3 hours ago, LOL). Buttery smooth, my 16 Pro (one with dark cover). It took a bit over an hour to transfer all my data.

Image

Ah, and now he is “conveniently” sleeping. How, well, convenient! LOL.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org yeah, tell us, @prologic@twtxt.net, what isn’t true? 🤔 You can’t just go around, “that’s not true, and that’s not true; and that, and that!” without spelling out exactly what isn’t, and why? For the love of god, why?! 😂

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org comments on the feeds as in nick, url, follow, that kind of thing? If that, then not interested at all. I envision an archive that would allow searching, and potentially browsing threads on a nice, neat interface. You will have to think, though, on other things. Like, what to do with images? Yarn allows users to upload images, but also embed it in twtxts from other sources (hotlinking, actually).

@david@collantes.us Thanks, that’s good feedback to have. I wonder to what extent this already exists in registry servers and yarn pods. I haven’t really tried digging into the past in either one.

How interested would you be in changes in metadata and other comments in the feeds? I’m thinking of just permanently saving every version of each twtxt file that gets pulled, not just the twts. It wouldn’t be hard to do (though presenting the information in a sensible way is another matter). Compression should make storage a non-issue unless someone does something weird with their feed like shuffle the comments around every time I fetch it.

I ended up installing Headscale on my little VPS. Just in case the collide, I turned off WireGuard. Turning that one off (which ran on a container) also frees some memory. Headscale is running quite well! Indeed, I have struggled getting any web management console to work, but it really isn’t needed. Everything needed to commandeer the server is available through the CLI.

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org “I was actually thinking about making an Internet Archive style twtxt archiver, letting you explore past twts” — that’s an awesome idea for a project. Something I would certainly use!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I don’t think it has to be like that. Just make sure the new version of the twt is always appended to your current feed, and have some convention for indicating it’s an edit and which twt it supersedes. Keep the original twt as-is (or delete it if you don’t want new followers to see it); doesn’t matter if it’s archived because you aren’t changing that copy.

@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.

@prologic@twtxt.net what time in UTC?

@prologic@twtxt.net cool, I will be there! Are you going to post the regular banner notice? It will serve as a reminder, at least for me.

i kinda click a yarn then a fork and the back button. i have to do a few goes before it does it.

Seems to be working OK 🤔

@david@collantes.us Well, I wouldn’t recommend using my code for your main jenny use anyway. If you want to try it out, set XDG_CONFIG_HOME and XDG_CACHE_HOME to some sandbox directories and only run my code there. If @movq@www.uninformativ.de is interested in any of this getting upstreamed, I’d be happy to try rebasing the changes, but otherwise it’s a proof of concept and fun exercise.

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org hiya from the Sunshine State (also known as a never-ending hell, LOL)!

I forgot to git add a new test file. Added to the patch now at https://www.falsifian.org/a/oDtr/patch0.txt

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org this one hits hard, as jenny was just updated today. :‘-(

its replacing the contents of body for some reason.

@david@collantes.us Hello!

@prologic@twtxt.net Hi. i have noticed sometimes when i hit the back button i lose all the surrounding layout and just have a list of twts.

BTW this code doesn’t incorporate existing twts into jenny’s database. It’s best used starting from scratch. I’ve been testing it using a custom XDG_CACHE_HOME and XDG_CONFIG_HOME to avoid messing with my “real” jenny data.

I wrote some code to try out non-hash reply subjects formatted as (replyto ), while keeping the ability to use the existing hash style.

I don’t think we need to decide all at once. If clients add support for a new method then people can use it if they like. The downside of course is that this costs developer time, so I decided to invest a few hours of my own time into a proof of concept.

With apologies to @movq@www.uninformativ.de for corrupting jenny’s beautiful code. I don’t write this expecting you to incorporate the patch, because it does complicate things and might not be a direction you want to go in. But if you like any part of this approach feel free to use bits of it; I release the patch under jenny’s current LICENCE.

Supporting both kinds of reply in jenny was complicated because each email can only have one Message-Id, and because it’s possible the target twt will not be seen until after the twt referencing it. The following patch uses an sqlite database to keep track of known (url, timestamp) pairs, as well as a separate table of (url, timestamp) pairs that haven’t been seen yet but are wanted. When one of those “wanted” twts is finally seen, the mail file gets rewritten to include the appropriate In-Reply-To header.

Patch based on jenny commit 73a5ea81.

https://www.falsifian.org/a/oDtr/patch0.txt

Not implemented:

• Composing twts using the (replyto …) format.
  
• Probably other important things I’m forgetting.

@yarn_police@twtxt.net I am noticing crimes around here, but I am too afraid to say anything (points at Lyse with mouth movements, no muttering a single word). Help us, officer!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org matter of fact, earlier you posted:

2024-09-19T20:20:00+02:00	I don't like Australians!

And then deleted it, fearing the Australian Mafia (which, as we know, is very powerful in Bavaria). But I got the hash for it, p5zdahq, and that timestamp has tt written all over it. That’s my proof! 😅😅😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org indeed! There is no “central authority” acting as witness, and notary. The more I think of it… LOL.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I recognise him, but yes, he has aged quite a bit. I mean, I look at myself in the mirror and can’t, often, recognise myself. Ageing is a bitch! 😅

I mean, really, it couldn’t get any better. I love it!

Image

@movq@www.uninformativ.de perfect in every way. Configurable too! Thank you!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de yes, that’s perfect! <3

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club I wanted to ask you, are you running Headscale and WireGuard on the same VPS? I want to test Headscale, but currently run a small container with WireGuard, and I wonder if I need to stop (and eventually get rid of) the container to get Headscale going. Did you use the provided .deb to install Headscale, or some other method?

@prologic@twtxt.net I read it. I understand it. Hopefully a solution can be agreed upon that solves the editing issue, whilst maintaining the cryptographic hash.

@prologic@twtxt.net I know the role of the current hash is to allow referencing (replies and, thus, threads), and it also represents a “unique” way to verify a twtxt hasn’t been tampered with. Is that second so important, if we are trying to allow edits? I know if feels good to be able to verify, but in reality, how often one does it?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de could it be possible to have compressed_subject(msg_singlelined) be configurable, so only a certain number of characters get displayed, ending on ellipses? Right now the entire twtxt is crammed into the Subject:. This request aims to make twtxts display on mutt/neomutt, etc. more like emails do.

@prologic@twtxt.net I don’t trust Google with anything, sorry, pass. Oh, and you need to sign in on your Google Account (or whatever they call it these days).

@prologic@twtxt.net how about hashing a combination of nick/timestamp, or url/timestamp only, and not the twtxt content? On edit those will not change, so no breaking of threads. I know, I know, just adding noise here. :-P

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club there has to be less reliance on a single point of failure. It is not so much about creating jobs in the US (which come with it, anyway), but about the ability to produce what’s needed at home too. What’s the trade off? Is it going to be a little bit more expensive to manufacture, perhaps?

@prologic@twtxt.net That’s definitely a little less depressing, when thinking of it that way 🤣 Be interesting when the hype dies down.

I’m not the biggest Apple fan around, but that is pretty awesome.

@quark@ferengi.one It does not. That is why I’m advocating for not using hashes for treads, but a simpler link-back scheme.

Getting a little sick of AI this, AI that. Yes I’ll be left behind while everyone else jumps on the latest thing, but I’m not sure I care.

Oh. looks like its 4 chars. git show 64bf

@prologic@twtxt.net where was that idea?

i feel like we should isolate a subset of markdown that makes sense and built it into lextwt. it already has support for links and images. maybe basic formatting bold, italic. possibly block quote and bullet lists. no tables or footnotes

the stem matching is the same as how GIT does its branch hashes. i think you can stem it down to 2 or 3 sha bytes.

if a client sees someone in a yarn using a byte longer hash it can lengthen to match since it can assume that maybe the other client has a collision that it doesnt know about.

@prologic@twtxt.net the basic idea was to stem the hash.. so you have a hash abcdef0123456789... any sub string of that hash after the first 6 will match. so abcdef, abcdef012, abcdef0123456 all match the same. on the case of a collision i think we decided on matching the newest since we archive off older threads anyway. the third rule was about growing the minimum hash size after some threshold of collisions were detected.

@prologic@twtxt.net Wikipedia claims sha1 is vulnerable to a “chosen-prefix attack”, which I gather means I can write any two twts I like, and then cause them to have the exact same sha1 hash by appending something. I guess a twt ending in random junk might look suspcious, but perhaps the junk could be worked into an image URL like

Image

git only uses sha1 because they’re stuck with it: migrating is very hard. There was an effort to move git to sha256 but I don’t know its status. I think there is progress being made with Game Of Trees, a git clone that uses the same on-disk format.

I can’t imagine any benefit to using sha1, except that maybe some very old software might support sha1 but not sha256.

@prologic@twtxt.net yes, like they show here: https://ferengi.one/#uebsf7a

@prologic@twtxt.net :-D Thanks! Things can come in cycles, right? This is simply another one. Another cycle, more personal than the other “alter egos”.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com hey, hey! You are my very first reply! 👋🏻 Cheers!

@david@collantes.us “Hello back” from the other corner of the world! 🫡

Incredibly upset—more than you could imagine—because I already made the first mistake, and corrected it (but twtxt.net got it on it’s cache, ugh!) :‘-( . Can’t wait for editing to become a reality!

Alright. My first mentions—which were picked not so randomly, LOL—are @prologic@twtxt.net, @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org, and @movq@www.uninformativ.de. I am also posting my first image too, which you see below. That’s my neighbourhood, in a “winter” day. Hopefully @prologic@twtxt.net will add my domain to his allowed list, so that the image (and any other further) renders.

Image

Alright, announce_me set to true. Now, who do I pick to be my first mention? Decisions, decisions. Next twtxt will have my first mention(s). :-)