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?

@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)

As you’ve said, @prologic@twtxt.net, it’s impossible to monopolize twtxt because it’s just a text file format. Also, Yarnd is under the AGPL, so anyone is free to fork it if they don’t like where the project is going. Fortunately, it’s under great leadership and development is steered more by the community than the owner of the repository.

Don’t let it get to you, man. Interoperability with vanilla twtxt is the best feature of Yarn, and it’s not worth breaking that because of one person. Besides, you won’t win him over even if you do.

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

@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.

@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. 🤔

@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. ✌️