I hate to be the one that instigates and continues to make true the saying “the few spoil it for the many”, but off the back of this thread; I have to ask…

Should we as a community make a decision here and hard fork Twtxt and no longer actively use it? In other words, break compatibility in such a way that Yarn.social no longer uses or is compatible with Twtxt.

As much as I really don’t want to do this, and never intended for this to happens, the question has to be asked. This isn’t the first time the “few” that exist in the Twtxt community have been hostile, and this likely won’t be the last either 😢

What say y’all? 🤗

Do we have a need to break the compatibility?

@tkanos@twtxt.net That’s a really good question. We probably need to evaluate the reasons why we would… Currently Yarn.social is really a landing page for a community of Twtxt clients, Specifications and Extensions that all work together nicely. There are numerous implementations and more being discovered all the time. – However if the hostility from (shall we call) “Twtxt” purists continues, I see no other choice but to pack up everything we’ve done and hard fork and break away.

Or is there a 3rd option I don’t see? 🤔 – I think the hardest part of all this is the amount of work, energy and effort we have all poured into this project and community only to have it thrown back in our face 😢 – Work/Energy/Effort (btw) that is completely FREE (as in freedom of choice) and free as in voluntarily created, maintained and costs $0.00 to anyone.

@prologic@twtxt.net You know that haters gonna hate. I don’t see any valuable discussion or thinking from @lucidiot@tilde.town explaining his statement, waiting for that I won’t give much value on a non explaining post.
And above of that which extension didn’t he like :

• metadata (not specific to yarn) and he also uses
  
• subject (sorry not specific to yarn either)
  
• Hashtag (not specific to yarn)
  
• Hash (ok makes one, and he may not like (I don’t either), but it’s practical)

@tkanos@twtxt.net You raise very good points 👌 And thank you for the support 🙏 Could not agree more! 💯

@mckinley@twtxt.net Thank you 🙏

@prologic@twtxt.net I would’t stay sleepless over this either.

@darch@neotxt.dk 🙏

@prologic@twtxt.net This might be a bit of a stretch, but anyway:

You could compare the situation to Git and GitHub. Git itself is free software and all that, just like twtxt. GitHub is not.

There are many incentives to use GitHub over plain Git on your own server. Once critical mass is reached, you are basically required to have a GitHub account, just so you can work with people who host their stuff there. And boom, you have a “monopoly”. It’s not a “strict” monopoly, but for mere practical reasons it basically is. You’ll be having a very hard time if you wanted to fully avoid GitHub.

Note that this isn’t the same as “making Git proprietary” (or twtxt, for that matter). The point is (I’m quoting from a Google translation of his blogpost): “… then close the protocol to force users to stay on the proprietary platform.” It doesn’t matter if Git/twtxt itself is free if users are effectively forced to use a proprietary service.

Yarn.social and twtxt are a looooooong way away from this. But I have to admit that I can somewhat understand what @lucidiot@tilde.town is thinking. To be honest, I had similar doubts in the beginning (didn’t we have a discussion about that? 😅). Those doubts are long gone, because I now believe that you’re a good guy – but they were there.

I think it’s normal, at least for purists/minimalists/nerds, to have these kinds of doubts. I don’t take that as hostility from @lucidiot@tilde.town.

Regarding “should we fork”: It could be beneficial to Yarn.social to fork. Get rid of some historical baggage and end discussions like these once and for all. But I reaaaaaally hope that you don’t fork. 😅 For the reasons outlined in this old posting on nixers.net, I will not run yarnd myself. twtxt’s simplicity of just hosting a text file is a killer feature for me.

To end on a more positive note: If it weren’t for the threading extensions of Yarn.social, I doubt that I’d still be an active user. Automatic threading is super important, for me at least. 🥳

@movq@www.uninformativ.de yeah, valid and worthy points. I personally agree on most.

Yarn.social at this moment is 3 things.

1. The convenience of the software, a web site, their front-end, the ‘invisible backend’, an incomplete mobile app. If I’d manage the twtxt file with any other software, for me at this moment I couldn’t have conversations with you.
   
2. The interoperability with older txtwt files. For instance I can read here my twtxt.txt hand made raw file to see if it works. Almost no one replies there but I know it works.
   
3. The community, the stupid discussions, the learning, the meaningful experiences, Gitea. People behind a simple text file and micobrogging protocol.
   

So yeah, as projects grow they start to be attached to a brand, they create organizations, institutions, knowledge bases, rituals, and intangible things we don’t feel attached to. There are a few anarchist people (as in skeptical of authority and seeking to abolish institutions) not wanting to follow rules, groups and such.

@eaplmx@twtxt.net Good points. I personally like to call Yarn.social (and have been for a while now) an “ecosystem’. I’m pretty sure it says this on the Landing Page too somewhere… At some point (also) in the near future (when funds are available, because apparently its both complex and expensive to setup a not-for-profit / foundation 🤦‍♂️), there will also be a foundation (maybe be a different name?)

None of this however will have any effect on anything as long as we continue to:

• listen to the community
  
• adhere to the Twtxt specifications and Extensions
  
• keep specifications and client up-to-date[^1]

  

[^1]: There is some contention over the use of Markdown in Twts (the Unicode newline literal is documented), however there is no agreement on this. It’s a bit of a tough one. Really there are some useful parts of Markdown we all like to use, and other parts that we don’t use nor need.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Clearly I don’t know how to do footnotes 🤯

@prologic@twtxt.net I think one of the biggest issues I faced before joining Yarn.social was the confusion with twtxt and twtxt.net, I asked myself “Why? Which is which? Why a plain text file have a site like that?”

I think some people can see it as “stealing” for the sake of “overriding” a project with it’s own, I know it’s not like that, but I stayed away from twtxt and yarn.social for some years just because I was confused about where to go.

Of course, once I dug in it a bit more I came to understand what and why, but I guess others can see this as a threat, maybe?

@justamoment@twtxt.net Well, it’s a two-edged blade for me.
I knew of twtxt.net thanks to the twtxt spec (coming from Gemini). But I see how people could think “it’s not the original spec, shouldn’t be named twtxt”

@eaplmx@twtxt.net that’s what I think too.

That must be the reason for such hostility on the project, of course it’s not really an issue since we know it’s been renamed to “Yarn.social” now, but I guess the domain “twtxt.net” might still be a problem for some people. 🤔

@justamoment@twtxt.net @eaplmx@twtxt.net You might. be bit right here… But you have to understand the history of how this happened in the first place… When I first came across Twtxt I t started out by building a “web” client. I called it at that time github.com/prologic/twtxt (I no longer use Github) because “naming is hard”. – The project quickly picked up some interest and traction and so things kind of stuck for a while (naming wise), I’d already by this stage purchased the domain twtxt.net and hosted my “web” client by then….

Anyway… playing devil’s advocate here this is also a double-edge sword, on one hand its helped promote Twtxt itself, on the other yeah, things have gotten a it confusing (but less so as we continue to improve documentation and communications).

@prologic@twtxt.net @lucidiot@tilde.town @movq@www.uninformativ.de unlike the comment on the twtxt feed, this blog post is really extensive, interesting and provides insightful and useful comments. I’m not sure I can agree to all of it, but I certainly can understand the point of view. Curiously, what appears to have been the tipping point is also something I believe we can and should fix: hashtags. ½

@prologic@twtxt.net @lucidiot@tilde.town @movq@www.uninformativ.de So, apparently yarn is transforming hashtags into search urls, ob the feed. This makes things unreadable and seems totally unnecessary. Shouldn’t this be a client feature? Why should my feed have a link to a search engine instead of a hashtag? And why can’t the client (when it is a visual client like goryon or the web) react to hashtags (all of them) by linking to a search interface? Am I missing something?

@prologic@twtxt.net Well, we are all on twtxt, if any problems like these arises we can talk to each other and fix them as its been done so far. ✌️