is there consensus on what characters should(n’t) be allowed in nicks? i remember reading somewhere whitespace should not be allowed, but i don’t see it in the spec on twtxt.dev — in fact, are there any other resources on twtxt extensions outside of twtxt.dev?
@zvava@twtxt.net Good question. This is the spec, I think:
https://twtxt.dev/exts/metadata.html#nick
It doesn’t say much. 🤔
In the wild, I’ve only seen “traditional” nick names, i.e. ASCII 0x21 thru 0x7E.
My client removes anything but r'[a-zA-Z0-9]' from nick names.
@zvava@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de I’m not entirely sure about the spaces, but maybe they were omitted to simplify parsing of mentions in the form of @<nick url>. If the next token after the @<nick does not look like a URL, it’s not a mention but regular text. This is just wild guessing, though.
Looking at the regex and tests in the original twtxt reference implementation seems to confirm that theory in the sense as it relies on whitespace as the delimiter:
https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/screenshot-2025-09-17-21-30-25.png
Another thing about nicks is that the original twtxt reference implementation converts nicks to all lowercase:
https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/screenshot-2025-09-17-21-20-39.png
You probably know this already, the original twtxt file format specification can be found here: https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/twtxtfile.html
As for extensions, I don’t know of anything outside of twtxt.dev that has actually been (partially) implemented. However, there is also the issue tracker of the official reference implementation. You might wanna dig through that. For example, there is an alternative suggestions of multiline messages: https://github.com/buckket/twtxt/issues/157
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @movq@www.uninformativ.de bbycll’s nickname regex is /^([-_\p{N}\p{L}])+$/iu because i don’t like how english-centric only allowing ascii letters/numbers is though this only applies to local users as of now, currently all nicknames are tolerated when parsing remote feeds and i just do mentions how yarn does (just the feed url)
in the wild, i’ve noticed a texedus feed with spaces in the nick (where its spec explicitly disallows whitespace in the nick) and feeds with other symbols in the nick too. honestly, i think we should just tolerate arbitrary nicknames for sake of user expression (while stripping or converting unreasonable characters) and just leave them out of mentions