no my fault your client can’t handle a little editing ;)

@sorenpeter@darch.dk hmm, how does your client handles “a little editing”? I am sure threads would break just as well. 😉

@quark@ferengi.one It does not. That is why I’m advocating for not using hashes for treads, but a simpler link-back scheme.

@sorenpeter@darch.dk I really don’t think we can ignore the last ~3 years and a bit of this threading model working quite well for us as a community across a very diverse set of clients and platforms. We cannot just drop something that “mostly works just fine” for the sake of “simplicity”. We have to weight up all the options. There are very real benefits to using content addressing here that really IMO shouldn’t be disregarded so lightly that actually provide a lot of implicit value that users of various clients just don’t get to see. I’d recommend reading up on the ideas behind content addressing before simply dismissing the Twt Hash spec entirely, it wasn’t even written or formalised by me, but I understand how it works quite well 😅 The guy that wrote the spec was (is?) way smarter than I was back then, probably still is now 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net how about hashing a combination of nick/timestamp, or url/timestamp only, and not the twtxt content? On edit those will not change, so no breaking of threads. I know, I know, just adding noise here. :-P

@david@collantes.us Witout including the content, it’s no longer really “content addressing” now is it? You’re essentially only addressing say nick+timestamp or url+timestamp.

@prologic@twtxt.net I know the role of the current hash is to allow referencing (replies and, thus, threads), and it also represents a “unique” way to verify a twtxt hasn’t been tampered with. Is that second so important, if we are trying to allow edits? I know if feels good to be able to verify, but in reality, how often one does it?

@david@collantes.us I really thinks articles like this explain the benefits far better than I can.

For example, without content-addressing, you’d never have been able to find let alone pull up that ~3yr old Twt of me (my very first), hell I’d even though I lost my first feed file or it became corrupted or something 🤣 – If that were the case, it would actually be possible to reconstruct the feed and verify every single Twt against the caches of all of you 🤣

What is being proposed as a counter to content-addressing is called location-addressing. Two very different approaches, both with pros/cons of course. But a local cannot be verified, the content cannot be be guaranteed to be authenticate in any way, you just have to implicitly trust that the location points to the right thing.

Location Addressing is fine in smaller or single systems. But when you’re talking about large decentralised systems with no single point of control (kind of the point) things like independable variable integrity become quite important.

@prologic@twtxt.net I read it. I understand it. Hopefully a solution can be agreed upon that solves the editing issue, whilst maintaining the cryptographic hash.

@david@collantes.us I think we can!