An alternate idea for supporting (properly) Twt Edits is to denoate as such and extend the meaning of a Twt Subject (which would need to be called something better?); For example, let’s say I produced the following Twt:

2024-09-18T23:08:00+10:00	Hllo World

And my feed’s URI is https://example.com/twtxt.txt. The hash for this Twt is therefore 229d24612a2:

$ echo -n "https://example.com/twtxt.txt\n2024-09-18T23:08:00+10:00\nHllo World" | sha1sum | head -c 11
229d24612a2

You wish to correct your mistake, so you make an amendment to that Twt like so:

2024-09-18T23:10:43+10:00	(edit:#229d24612a2) Hello World

Which would then have a new Twt hash value of 026d77e03fa:

$ echo -n "https://example.com/twtxt.txt\n2024-09-18T23:10:43+10:00\nHello World" | sha1sum | head -c 11
026d77e03fa

Clients would then take this edit:#229d24612a2 to mean, this Twt is an edit of 229d24612a2 and should be replaced in the client’s cache, or indicated as such to the user that this is the intended content.

Likewise we could also support delete:229d24612a2, which would indicate to clients that fetch the feed to delete any cached Twt matching the hash 229d24612a2 if the author wishes to “unpublish” that Twt permanently, rather than just deleting the line from the feed (which does nothing for clients really).

Finally @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org ’s idea of updating metadata changes in a feed “inline” where the change happened (with respect to other Twts in whatever order the file is written in) is used to drive things like “Oh this feed now has a new URI, let’s use that from now on as the feed’s identity for the purposes of computing Twt hashes”. This could extend to # nick = as preferential indicators to clients as well as even other updates such as # description = – Not just # url =

@prologic@twtxt.net So the feed would contain two twts, right?

2024-09-18T23:08:00+10:00	Hllo World
2024-09-18T23:10:43+10:00	(edit:#229d24612a2) Hello World

@prologic@twtxt.net I wouldn’t want my client to honour delete requests. I like my computer’s memory to be better than mine, not worse, so it would bug me if I remember seeing something and my computer can’t find it.

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org what would the difference be between an edit the changes everything on the original twtxt, and a delete?

@quark@ferengi.one None. I like being able to see edit history for the same reason.

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org that would be problematic to do on a fully decentralised system. I am not disagreeing, though. That’s the reason I have stopped editing twtxts. I strive to own mistakes, as minor as they might be. Now, if trail editing can be accomplished, I am all for it!

@quark@ferengi.one I don’t really mind if the twt gets edited before I even fetch it. I think it’s the idea of my computer discarding old versions it’s fetched, especially if it’s shown them to me, that bugs me.

But I do like @movq@www.uninformativ.de’s suggestion on this thread that feeds could contain both the original and the edited twt. I guess it would be up to the author.

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org “I don’t really mind if the twt gets edited before I even fetch it.”, right, that’s never the problem. Editing a twtxt before anyone fetches it isn’t even editing, right? :-P The problem we are trying to fix is the havoc is causes editing twtxts that have already been replied to, often ad nauseam. That’s the real problem.

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org Yeah, delete requests feel very odd.

@quark@ferengi.one Oh, sure, it would be nice if edits didn’t break threads. I was just pondering the circumstances under which I get annoyed about data being irrecoverably deleted or otherwise lost.

So.. basically a rehash of the email “unsend” requests? What if i was to make a (delete: 5vbi2ea) .. would it delete someone elses twt?

There is nothing wrong with how we currently run a diff to see what has been removed. if i build a merkle tree off all the twt hashes in a feed i can use that to verify a twt should be in a feed or not. and gossip that to my peers.

@xuu you mean my original idea of basically just automatically detecting Twt edits from the client side?

@prologic@twtxt.net where was that idea?

@xuu Long while back, I experimented with using similarity algorithms to detect if two Twts were similar enough to be considered an “Edit”.