Time to catch up with the news

@cuaxolotl@sunshinegardens.org The reason I ask is that I maintain the Twtxt search engine and crawler service that basically does exactly this, so I’m curious what you’re trying to solve by doing this yourself? Not that that’s a bad idea. I just want to understand what you are trying to achieve. 🤗

@cuaxolotl@sunshinegardens.org OK fine to be more specific. The problem I have with both religion and politics is they both often influence people or groups of people to either extremes.

@cuaxolotl@sunshinegardens.org I agree religion in and of itself is about as bad as politics in my view.

@cuaxolotl@sunshinegardens.org This is largely by accident and not on purpose:

Lately I’ve been browsing twtxt.net since they aggregate most of the known network

@cuaxolotl@sunshinegardens.org what problem does building a social graph solve?

@cuaxolotl@sunshinegardens.org Just talking about regular mentions here.

i’m so glad i gave up christianity. i might be a little less glad when i get purged, but at least i won’t be doing the purging. jesus of nazareth has some chill teachings, but the whole thing is poisoned by the actual history of the religion. genocide, book burnings, and ethnic cleansing are not exactly noble teachings.

due to the gemini-centric nature of my setup, I don’t get webmentions. I just scrape the network and grep. maybe my aggregator will produce notifications at some point lol

@codebuzz@www.codebuzz.nl I have some shell scripts that handle some of the log formatting details, but I mostly write my mesages by hand. Lately I’ve been browsing twtxt.net since they aggregate most of the known network. I have a couple of demo aggregators sitting around, but I’m in the middle of some infra rebuilds so a lot of my services are offline rn. They’re both built on a simple social graph analysis that extracts urls for your direct follows the follows listed on each of those feeds (friend-of-a-friend replication). certain formatting operations are awkward with my setup, so I may write an app of some kind in the future. likely gemini-based, but I have a number of projects ahead of that one in the queue.

@Codebuzz@www.codebuzz.nl how did you end up with a broken incomplete mention here? 🤔

Alternatively, if you prefer yarnd to pretty-print all twts nicely, even ones from simpler clients, that’s fine too and you don’t need to change anything. My ¼ -> ¼ thing is nothing more than a minor irritation which probably isn’t worth overthinking.

Yeah I’ve closed the PR, I just wanted to write it up and see what we all thought. Much easier to talk to a concrete spec proposal sometimes. I realised as I was writing it too that it wasn’t really going to achieve much in practise. I think we all agree 👍

What’s wrong with my original suggestion of doing the transformation before the text hits the twtxt.txt file? @prologic, I think it would achieve what you are trying to achieve with this content-type thing: if someone writes ¼ on a yarnd instance or any other client that wants to do this, it would get transformed, and other clients simply wouldn’t do the transformation. Every client that supports displaying unicode characters, including Jenny, would then display ¼ as ¼.

So many clients do client-side transformation already, mostly in the form of @-mentions. e.g: If I @falsifian@www.falsifian.org mention you, that gets transformed into the full proper Twtxt mention syntax. We could in theory transform other things too, but I see little value in doing so? 🤔 – Also it’s probably more a “Client” recommendation anyway at that point right?

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org Only that this rendering behavior comes from yarnd’s Markdown parser library that is used:

What has text/markdown got to do with this? I don’t think Markdown says anything about replacing ¼ with ¼, or other similar transformations. It’s not needed, because ¼ is already a unicode character that can simply be directly inserted into the text file.

Closed

@david@collantes.us On it! 🤣

@david@collantes.us Bahahahahaha 🤣

No apology necessary. I think it brings little to no value.

@david@collantes.us Juat buy it 🤣🧐

Hey, @ I know. Just wondering the kind of apps or software and how you all stay up to date in conversations. Is it through webmentions?

@david@collantes.us How much of a computer does it have to be? Would a ZimaBoard do the trick? I don’t have a wife, so I wouldn’t know any better 😅

@bender@twtxt.net Exactly. :-) My apologies for the confusion.

How about storing the contents of the twtxt.txt file in TXT DNS records? :-P Like so:

dig +short txt poem.netbros.com | sed 's/[\" ]//g' | base64 -d

@prologic@twtxt.net shut that down, man! I’ll give you a nickel for it! 🤭

So, we need a computer for house (that is, wife and I) usage. We have none, we rely on our pocket computers. I would like to fill the void with the recently announced Mac mini. What technique could I use with an already stressed out wife, to accomplish this goal? 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org and for those who were as lost as me, you are referring to this @movq@www.uninformativ.de’s comment: https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/twtxt.dev/pulls/4#issuecomment-18024 :-D

I’m with @movq@www.uninformativ.de here and like to avoid bolting on more alternatives. Sorry @prologic@twtxt.net.

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org ah, Americans, and their backwards dates! LOL. Even using the “American” style, I will never leave out the year (it is way too bogus for me), thus 1/4/2024, or 1/4/24, which “should” format just fine.

I prefer 2024-01-04. :-)

@bender@twtxt.net I try to avoid editing. I guess I would write 5/4, 6/4, etc, and hopefully my audience would be sympathetic to my failing.

Anyway, I don’t think my eccentric decision to number my twts in the style of other social media platforms is the only context where someone might write ¼ not meaning a quarter. E.g. January 4, to Americans.

I’m happy to keep overthinking this for as long as you are :-P

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org and…

My 1/4 -> ¼ thing is nothing more than a minor irritation which probably isn’t worth overthinking.

Yet, here we are still debating it. LOL.

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org what happens if those four things you carefully planned to point out become six? Will you retroactively go and edit all previous twtxts to account for that change, thus breaking any potential replies/forks to them?

@Codebuzz@www.codebuzz.nl we use clients to do that, but some users may want to, or do, manually edit the twtxt.txt file.

@bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net I’m not exactly asking yarnd to change. If you are okay with the way it displayed my twts, then by all means, leave it as is. I hope you won’t mind if I continue to write things like 1/4 to mean “first out of four”.

What has text/markdown got to do with this? I don’t think Markdown says anything about replacing 1/4 with ¼, or other similar transformations. It’s not needed, because ¼ is already a unicode character that can simply be directly inserted into the text file.

What’s wrong with my original suggestion of doing the transformation before the text hits the twtxt.txt file? @prologic@twtxt.net, I think it would achieve what you are trying to achieve with this content-type thing: if someone writes 1/4 on a yarnd instance or any other client that wants to do this, it would get transformed, and other clients simply wouldn’t do the transformation. Every client that supports displaying unicode characters, including Jenny, would then display ¼ as ¼.

Alternatively, if you prefer yarnd to pretty-print all twts nicely, even ones from simpler clients, that’s fine too and you don’t need to change anything. My 1/4 -> ¼ thing is nothing more than a minor irritation which probably isn’t worth overthinking.

So I am really curious, now that I am building upon @sorenpeter@darch.dk’s Timeline app, how other users write/add their twtxt, and how you follow conversations. Comment svp!

@xuu Yep, I’ll be doing it as well. The plan is to use Java 1 on OS/2 Warp 4: https://tilde.zone/@movq/113114730253242098

The private leaderboard from last year should still work.

Spent some time cleaning up my AoC code to get ready for December 1st. Anyone else doing it this year? @prologic@twtxt.net we have to setup a new team each year?

@bender@twtxt.net The only changes I can foresee are really to yarnd. As no other client I’m aware of really cares aall that much. 🤣 It’s only in an attempt to solve this. No I’m not sure about this 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net that means changes will need to be made to Yarn too then, right? Right now Yarn uses markdown rendering for everything, but if someone’s feed states text/plain, then it will have to disabled markdown rendering for it, correct? If that’s the case, are you sure you want that? 😅

@asquare@asquare.srht.site No worries 😌

@asquare@asquare.srht.site I’m not really sure I understand sorry. Can you explain it like I’m 5? 😅

👋 PR to propose Feed Format Extension – Request for comment 🙏

@asquare@asquare.srht.site No it will not, because it needs to find the root twt. Doing so with a O(1) time complexity is far better than the alternative.

@asquare@asquare.srht.site Why “frightening”? And what does “protocol ossification” mean? Hmm 🧐

Oh, wow. That is a frightening level of protocol ossification.

They’re already half way down, @prologic@twtxt.net. Some trees are completely naked by now when I look out the window.

@prologic@twtxt.net There are many other examples, centered around how the “enshitification” of their services, negatively impacts everyone: G-Mail randomly blacklisting small e-mail servers, resulting in e-mails ending in some Google void they can’t be retrieved out of (unlike the spam folder); their proprietary Android phone app, mislabelling phone numbers of legitimate businesses, as spam calls and warning people not to pick up; their incompetence in SEO filtering, enabling AI generated adware websites, to be shown above legitimate results.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Cool! Literally 🥶 When do you expect leaves to be falling from trees? 🤔

I think realistically the only way to resolve this is to formally support and define a specification for feed formats. The available mime types lists two formats that I think are important here. text/plain and text/markdown. I believe a specification that defines and formalizes this so that a feed author can state in their feed that their feed is primarily text/plain or text/markdown or via HTTP headers (not mandatory) will work here. I also think it might be worthwhile niversing this and defaulting to text/plain (by design and by default, spec TBD) and then clients like yanrd can just be updated to declare text/markdown.

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org about this:

but FWIW I’m not especially keen on changing how I format my twts to work around yarnd’s quirks.

Yet, you are asking Yarn to change the format to work around how you want it display. 🤔

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com No need to be sorry 🤗