@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.