So really your argument is just that switching to a location-based addressing “just makes sense”. Why? Without concrete pros/cons of each approach this isn’t really a strong argument I’m afraid. In fact I probably need to just sit down and detail the properties of both approaches and the pros/cons of both.

I also don’t really buy the argument of simplicity either personally, because I don’t technically see it much more difficult to take a echo -e "<url>\t<timestamp>\t<content>" | sha256sum | base64 as the Twt Subject or concatenating the <url> <timestamp> – The “effort” is the same. If we’re going to argue that SHA256 or cryptographic hashes are “too complicated” then I’m not really sure how to support that argument.

@prologic@twtxt.net When I first started using twtxt, I was fascinated by the fact that it’s just a simple text file. This is already undermined a lot today by us using multiline replies and Markdown and what not. Still, I would love to retain this property of it being just a file that needs very few external tools to maintain. (Jenny is quite bloated, one might argue. One of the reasons for even starting the jenny project was the calculation of hashes – I was using a smaller, simpler toolchest before.)

If we were to use (replyto:…), I could just copy and paste the required info into my text editor. With echo … | sha256sum | base64 (+ the truncation step), I have to open a new terminal, make sure the tab gets copied verbatim, make sure that there’s no trailing whitespace in the content, little details like that. It is more effort.

This probably isn’t the best argument for (replyto:…), but it is an argument.

Would people do all this manually? I don’t know. Probably not. But part of the fascination with twtxt is that you could do it.

I’m speaking from a point of extreme minimalism here and all this isn’t strictly only related to (reply:…). It just reflects my general view on twtxt. The more additional things we build on top, the less interesting twtxt becomes (for me). My goal would be to find solutions that require less. Like, don’t solve edits breaking threads by adding another protocol, but by rethinking the whole thing, finding the root cause, and maybe come up with something that doesn’t need another building block on top.

This is all I have to say for now. 😃 I’m gonna let things cool off for a while.

(#2024-09-24T12:39:32Z) @prologic@twtxt.net It might be simple for you to run echo -e "\t\t" | sha256sum | base64, but for people who are not comfortable in a terminal and got their dev env set up, then that is magic, compared to the simplicity of just copy/pasting what you see in a textfile into another textfile – Basically what @movq@www.uninformativ.de also said. I’m also on team extreme minimalism, otherwise we could just use mastodon etc. Replacing line-breaks with a tab would also make it easier to handwrite your twtxt. You don’t have to hardwrite it, but at least you should have the option to. Just as i do with all my HTML and CSS.

@sorenpeter@darch.dk This is an argument for better clients really and less worry about the “transport” – the raw Twtxt feed file.

why can we both have a format that you can write by hand and better clients?

@sorenpeter@darch.dk i’m just saying that your argument, better support better clients and worrying less about the actual underlying raw Twtxt feed. so the simplicity argument is a bit weaker here.