eapl.me

eapl.me

Human Level 37, Engineer 🔧, scientist 🔬 y co-creator of organizations đŸŒ±, living in Mexico 🌎, and working with people across the world đŸ—ș y, learning to enjoy life! Texts and links on https://eapl.me

Recent twts from eapl.me
In-reply-to » Hi, So i made a little MVP registry crawler tool for twtxt. It now has a basic UI to play with. It has a somewhat full history back to about 2018-ish. Plus some interesting bits that were timestamped to earlier.

yep, it looks nice! How could add my URL?
Is it following the same endpoints than https://registry.twtxt.org/swagger-ui/#/users/addUser ?

BTW, I think that the usage section has a wrong base URL or something.

For example if you enter here: https://watcher.sour.is/conv/4rx5iyq
It says to look for this URL: https://watcher.sour.is/conv/4rx5iyq/api/plain/users

Which seems to return the content from https://watcher.sour.is

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In-reply-to » An interesting episode about naming stuff, and some implications of the "Trademarks"

In Mexico you couldn’t register the word Sonora (state), nor Taqueria (kind of restaurant) as there are two common words, but perhaps the combination of both is trademarkable, I’m not sure, so many ‘taquerias’ here don’t file a trademark request. It’s usually “Taquería [LAST_NAME]” or “Taquería [PLACE]”.

At the same time, the word “taqueria” was trademarked in UK, like it would be “Paris” or “Pub” I guess, so basically Sonora Taqueria didn’t reply to the cease and desist, based on:

[Lizbeth GarcĂ­a]: A brand may not use a word that is generic or descriptive of the products or services it is putting into circulation on the market.

Since he (Ismael, Taqueria’s representative) didn’t get any response, he decided to leave it in the hands of his law firm.

In early 2023, after all the noise on the internet and the mobilization caused by this case, an agreement was finally reached with TaquerĂ­a to settle the matter peaceably.

In March 2023, Michelle and Sam decided to register the Sonora TaquerĂ­a brand and logo with the UK Intellectual Property Office.

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In-reply-to » I have just received the royalties for the last book: 98 euros for the four-month period, about 24 euros a month on average. Not even enough for the gym membership. If you have to keep some knowledge: don't write for money, the paper (or ebook) industry is in a very bad way, the margins for the author are very small and piracy is devastating.

well, there is a whole book about piracy, DRM and selling stuff on the internet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Doesn%27t_Want_to_Be_Free

So I won’t add much to the topic, what I can say is that this is about being pragmatic. There is some people who’s gonna spend their money on books but it requires publicity (polemic topic) and subsidizing creativity with our own money (another controversial one).

Otherwise it’s a difficult discipline /profession /industry

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In-reply-to » Let me introduce you to the much superior version 4 instead: https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/twxm4.xml

definitely 1e100 superiorer

Now I’m looking forward to see the next version using MessagePack

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In-reply-to » Hello, i want to present my new revolution twtxt v3 format - twjson That's why you should use it: 1. It's easy to to parse 2. It's easy to read (in formatted mode :D) 3. It used actually \n for newlines, you don't need unprintable symbols 4. Forget about hash collisions because using full hash Here is my twjson feed: https://doesnm.p.psf.lt/twjson.json And twtxt2json converter: https://doesnm.p.psf.lt/twjson.js

that’s certainty an interesting idea.

Building on top of that, I’m thinking of https://eapl.me/yatwt.yaml

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In-reply-to » I have just received the royalties for the last book: 98 euros for the four-month period, about 24 euros a month on average. Not even enough for the gym membership. If you have to keep some knowledge: don't write for money, the paper (or ebook) industry is in a very bad way, the margins for the author are very small and piracy is devastating.

well, that leads to a long conversation.

Piracy is a difficult topic which is very personal, so I won’t say much about it.

On writing books, I’ve tried along with other digital products such as courses and videogames, and I got to confess that it has been hard for me.

If it helps, I think it all reaches our expectations on the activity and the result. If royalties is the expectation, it’s going to be slow. By 5% of royalties, for a rough example, a huge amount of sales will be required to get a decent “wage”, so I’ve understood of doing it by the side of a normal employment although it has been discouraging and a bit sad.

I have reflected about it in Spanish here: https://sembrandojuegos.substack.com/p/sobre-expectativas-al-crear-juegos

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In-reply-to » Hello, i want to present my new revolution twtxt v3 format - twjson That's why you should use it: 1. It's easy to to parse 2. It's easy to read (in formatted mode :D) 3. It used actually \n for newlines, you don't need unprintable symbols 4. Forget about hash collisions because using full hash Here is my twjson feed: https://doesnm.p.psf.lt/twjson.json And twtxt2json converter: https://doesnm.p.psf.lt/twjson.js

nice!

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In-reply-to » Twtxt was made for nerds, by nerds. I'd like to change that. It's by nerds/hackers, for nerds/hackers and friends of these. It doesn't have to be hacky all the time, as you don't need to be a nerd to have a blog. But, for that to happen, someone has to build the tools to improve UX.

thanks for sharing @xuu@txt.sour.is!

Checking for example https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/twt or https://registry.twtxt.org/api/plain/tweets, I don’t know whether this syntax is being used by clients or by people. Is it integrated on Yarn in any way? Genuinely asking to know more about it.

If I might throw a quick thought to those working on the registries, it would be nice to have an endpoint with a valid twtxt output (perhaps cached or dumped to a static file) which a client could point to, helping to discover it’s content in a way which is compatible with the twtxt spec.

Taking the first twt I found in https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/twt as an example:
reddit_world_news https://feeds.twtxt.net/Reddit_World_News/twtxt.txt 2025-03-28T00:29:25Z **China bans US logs. 3 billion dollar[...])
it would be something like
TIME <@NICK URL> TWT
2025-03-28T00:29:25Z <@reddit_world_news https://feeds.twtxt.net/Reddit_World_News/twtxt.txt> **China bans US logs. 3 billion dollar[...])

That way you could watch the latest twts with your client, something similar to what we find on Mastodon: https://mastodon.online/public/local

Some support from the clients to separate these ‘discovery’ content, from your following timeline might be required. đŸ€”

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In-reply-to » thanks @prologic! @bender the idea of the RFC was to reach an agreement on a difficult problem, receiving proposals, and the voting is a simple count to gauge the sentiment of "is this a problem worth to be fixed?, are we committed to implement a change in our clients?"

sorry @prologic@twtxt.net, timeline doesn’t autocomplete the mentions yet, and it was ‘difficult’ to look for your URL from the phone.

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In-reply-to » Twtxt was made for nerds, by nerds. I'd like to change that. It's by nerds/hackers, for nerds/hackers and friends of these. It doesn't have to be hacky all the time, as you don't need to be a nerd to have a blog. But, for that to happen, someone has to build the tools to improve UX.

somehow I forgot that existed.

Perhaps it was its mention of being a demo implementation here:
https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/registry.html#registry
So I though it wasn’t really active.

Anyway, I think that’s a good idea.

Is there something similar available on Yarn? Sorry for for asking if that was mentioned recently.

I think that the clients may help you to submit your URL to these directories, and also to get a view of the twts in them.

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In-reply-to » For anyone following the proposals to improve replies and threads in twtxt, the voting period has started and will be open for a week. https://eapl.me/rfc0001/

thanks @prologic!
@bender the idea of the RFC was to reach an agreement on a difficult problem, receiving proposals, and the voting is a simple count to gauge the sentiment of “is this a problem worth to be fixed?, are we committed to implement a change in our clients?”

But that’s a fair point. What do the community expect? What do y’all expect?

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For anyone following the proposals to improve replies and threads in twtxt, the voting period has started and will be open for a week.
https://eapl.me/rfc0001/

Please share the link with the twtxt community, and leave your vote on your preferred proposals, which will be used to gauge the perceived benefits.

Also, the conversation is open to discuss implementation concerns or anything aimed at making twtxt better.

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In-reply-to » @bender I taught the whole ecosystem 😁 @prologic @eapl.me The question I was asked the most was: How do I discover people? Someone came up with a fantastic idea, instead of adding the new twt at the end of the feed, do it at the beginning. So you can paginate by cutting the request every few lines.

thanks? 😆

Now I need the non-hacker friends đŸ„Č

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In-reply-to » @bender I taught the whole ecosystem 😁 @prologic @eapl.me The question I was asked the most was: How do I discover people? Someone came up with a fantastic idea, instead of adding the new twt at the end of the feed, do it at the beginning. So you can paginate by cutting the request every few lines.

it seems I don’t know how to do Markdown 😅

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In-reply-to » @bender I taught the whole ecosystem 😁 @prologic @eapl.me The question I was asked the most was: How do I discover people? Someone came up with a fantastic idea, instead of adding the new twt at the end of the feed, do it at the beginning. So you can paginate by cutting the request every few lines.

Twtxt was made for nerds, by nerds.
I’d like to change that. It’s by nerds/hackers, for nerds/hackers and friends of these. It doesn’t have to be hacky all the time, as you don’t need to be a nerd to have a blog.
But, for that to happen, someone has to build the tools to improve UX.

by design there really is no way to easily discovers others
Yeah, I agree, and although there are directories of email addresses, usually you don’t want that, unless you are a ‘public figure’.
I couldn’t say that a microblogging is a “social network” by default, as a blog is not either. At the same time, people would expect to find new people and conversations, as you’d do in a forum.

I think of two features on top of the current spec:

  • Clients showing a few posts of what your following are watching but you don’t, so perhaps you find something interesting to follow next. Or that feature of “Your ‘followings’ are following these accounts/people”. (Hard to explain in english, but I hope you get the idea)
  • Sharing your .txt into some directory, saying “Hey, I have this twtxt URL, I want to be discovered”. I’m thinking of something like the Federated tab on Mastodon.

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In-reply-to » Thank you @python_valencia for letting me show you the secrets of a decentralised plain text social network like twtxt. I hope you enjoyed the talk! â€ïžđŸ Media Media #python #twtxt

thanks andros!

instead of adding the new twt at the end of the feed, do it at the beginning
The PHP client did that originally, although I didn’t see a real benefit if you use
 a client.
It could help if you read the .txt file through a browser or something. Also, not many clients are prepared to cut the request, and you can’t rely on the file being organized that way, so finally we dropped that feature.

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In-reply-to » Wow, phishing is just around the corner 👀

2 is a great idea, you should suggest it in that blog post.

About 1, well, I think anyone has an email address and only about 5% use a Feed, so it makes sense to offer what most people use đŸ€”

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In-reply-to » I am working on this: https://dm-echo.andros.dev/ More news coming soon. #twtxt

“it is very easy to filter or ignore it” This is the interesting part for legacy clients, hehe

Joking aside, let’s see how it works in the wild!

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In-reply-to » Wow, this is a nice way to practice internationalization for our systems https://i18n-puzzles.com

I have finished 1-9 on Python. If anyone is interested, I could share the code, or in Reddit many people have shared theirs.

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In-reply-to » I am working on this: https://dm-echo.andros.dev/ More news coming soon. #twtxt

👀

Is it working now?
I’d say again that perhaps the DMs could be stored in another .txt, but anyway I’d like to try it.

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I always find the ‘Adven of code’ challenges difficult to follow.
i18n-puzzles.com has been a blast, but I don’t like having to think about puzzles on weekends. Like with exercise, doing it every day without rest doesn’t sound healthy.

I’d rater have a weekly challenge, at most three.

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In-reply-to » Hi! For anyone following the Request for Comments on an improved syntax for replies and threads, I've made a comparative spreadsheet with the 4 proposals so far. It shows a syntax example, and top pros and cons I've found: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KOUqJ2rNl_jZ4KBVTsR-4QmG1zAdKNo7QXJS1uogQVo/edit?gid=0#gid=0

yeah, it worked, thanks! :)

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In-reply-to » My twtxt feed is now also available at gemini://roccodrom.de/twtxt.txt

well, I assume by syntax you mean Gemtext (which I like a lot, my personal blog is built on top of it), so I think it might work for twtxt clients


I knew of twtxt in Gemini Antenna, so at least the 2017 spec might work on that protocol. I think the main issue with extensions is that they weren’t designed with many URLs and protocols in mind.

Also I have to admit that the Gemini community significantly reduced in the last few years. I don’t know how worth it is to add support for Gemini now.

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In-reply-to » Hi! For anyone following the Request for Comments on an improved syntax for replies and threads, I've made a comparative spreadsheet with the 4 proposals so far. It shows a syntax example, and top pros and cons I've found: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KOUqJ2rNl_jZ4KBVTsR-4QmG1zAdKNo7QXJS1uogQVo/edit?gid=0#gid=0

also I’ve made a draft of a voting page to receive preferences on each proposal
https://eapl.me/rfc0001/

Help me to play with it a bit and report any vulnerability or bug. Also any idea is welcome.

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In-reply-to » Hi! For anyone following the Request for Comments on an improved syntax for replies and threads, I've made a comparative spreadsheet with the 4 proposals so far. It shows a syntax example, and top pros and cons I've found: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KOUqJ2rNl_jZ4KBVTsR-4QmG1zAdKNo7QXJS1uogQVo/edit?gid=0#gid=0

I have applied your comments, and I tried to add you as an editor but couldn’t find your email address. Please request editing access if you wish.

Also, could you elaborate on how you envision migrating with a script? You mean that the client of the file owner could massively update URLs in old twts ?

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Hi! For anyone following the Request for Comments on an improved syntax for replies and threads, I’ve made a comparative spreadsheet with the 4 proposals so far. It shows a syntax example, and top pros and cons I’ve found:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KOUqJ2rNl_jZ4KBVTsR-4QmG1zAdKNo7QXJS1uogQVo/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Feel free to propose another collaborative platform (for those without a G account), and also share your comments and analysis in the spreadsheet or in Gitea.

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In-reply-to » My twtxt feed is now also available at gemini://roccodrom.de/twtxt.txt

Timeline and twtxt-php, don’t support Gemini, only HTTP/S, as a design choice (although originally it was intended to work on Gemtext, it was a niche inside a niche, so it was discarded very soon).

At the moment of building the engine there weren’t many Gemini URLs supporting twtxt 1.1 (with twtxt.dev extensions).
Also User-Agent won’t work there, and many Gemini URLs are a mirror of the HTTP one, so I think is not strictly necessary.

my 2c

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In-reply-to » What is twtxt for me? It is a community of users sharing plain text following a specification that can be readable by both humans and machines.

well
 it has been an opportunity to build an artisanal microblogging client on top of a minimalist protocol. I agree on the hacker toy part.

And of course it’s about being part of a niche community which is (mostly) amazing, and nurturing. As there is almost no one writing in my native spanish, it has been an interesting challenge to share my thoughts in english, as well.

I couldn’t say it’s a ‘social network’ per se, I think it lack many engagement things usually associated with social networks, although it has a social part of igniting discussions, learnings and behavioral changes, which is the meaning of social for me.

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In-reply-to » @xuu Yeah looks like an edge case. Because of the way he announces his preferred nick in the feed the "Reply" button spits out @eapl.me@eapl.me@eapl.me for me, which then gets eaten as two mentions, probably matching twice against my following list?

it seems like yarn still points my nick to both my older URL (404 now) along with the current one.

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In-reply-to » I got a small desk calendar as advertising gift. It shows three months at once. I'm using this thing since the beginning of this year and I have to say that it turned out to be super useful. I'm happily surprised.

ah! those german calendars. Somehow I was thinking of something like mine, with spaces to write inside each day.

I worked for a german company and they gave away these calendars to our clients and team every year, but the model you can hang on the wall. Memory unlocked!

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In-reply-to » I got a small desk calendar as advertising gift. It shows three months at once. I'm using this thing since the beginning of this year and I have to say that it turned out to be super useful. I'm happily surprised.

do you mind sharing a picture ?

I can’t find something similar here, but my wife gave this one last year, and I’ve been using it a bit. I’d say it’s useful as you’ve shared.

Image

We also have a shared calendar in the kitchen for family events, and it’s working great.

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In-reply-to » twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers.

well (insert stubborn emoji here) 😛, word blog comes from weblog, and microblogging could derivate from ‘smaller weblog’. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Microblogging

I’d differentiate it from sharing status updates as it was done with ‘finger’ or even a BBS. For example, being able to reply; create new threads and sharing them on a URL is something we could expect from ‘Twitter’, the most popular microbloging model (citation needed)

I like to discuss it, since conversations usually are improved if we sync on what we understand for the same words.

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In-reply-to » What does the #twtxt community think about having a p2p database to store all history? This will be managed by Registries.

pls elaborate on a ‘p2p database’, ‘all story’ and ‘Registries’.

My first thought takes me to something like secure-scuttlebutt which it’s painful to sync data using clients, and too slow compared to downloading a text file.

Also I’d like for twtxt to avoid becoming an ActivityPub. Works well but it’s uses too many resources IMO.
https://kingant.net/2025/02/mastodon-the-cost-of-running-my-own-server/

I’m defending being able to self-host your Web client (like you’d do with a Wordpress, twtxt is a micrologging, at the end), instead of federated instances, so in a first thought I’d say Registries have many disadvantages being the first one that someone has to maintain them active.

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In-reply-to » I watched two squirrels this morning for about half an hour: https://lyse.isobeef.org/eichhoernchen-2025-03-11/ They were super crazy fast. Also, they bit off plenty of twigs and carried them around, not sure where they put them. I've never seen them do that before. Once more I realized that I need a better zoom.

đŸżïž squirrels!

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In-reply-to » twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers.

I’d need to think about it deeply, but at a first sight, nanoblogging would be a simple text (like the original twtxt spec, aimed for TUIs), and microblogging (like Twitter was a few years ago), would be about sharing texts, images, videos, GIFs, links, and perhaps Markdown styling.

Why? You have shorter messages than in a blog, but you may add almost anything you could do in a blog.
Buuut
 who knows?

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In-reply-to » @prologic We can't agree on this idea because that makes things even more complicated than it already is today. The beauty of twtxt is, you put one file on your server, done. One. Not five million. Granted, there might be archive feeds, so it might be already a bit more, but still faaaaaaar less than one file per message.

@prologic@twtxt.net oops, I’m sorry to see disagreement leading to draining emotions.

It remind me a bit of the Conclave movie where every part wanted to defend their vision and there is only a winner. If one wins the other loses. Like the political side of many leaders and volunteers representing a broad community. I don’t think that’s the case here. Most of us (in not all) should ‘win’.

I can only add that isn’t nice to listen that ‘my idea and effort’ is not what the rest of the people expect. I personally have a kind of issue with public rejection, but I also like to argue, discuss and even fight a bit. “A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials,” they say.
This exercise and belonging to this community also brings me good feelings of smart people trying to solve a human and technical problem, which is insanely difficult to get ‘right’.

I genuinely hope we can understand each other, and even with our different and respectful thoughts on the same thing, we might reach an agreement on what’s the best for most people.

Good vibes to everyone!

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In-reply-to » Hacer software cĂłdigo opensource es desafiante y paulatinamente desgasta a su autor. Todo comienza con pasiĂłn y entusiasmo, por supuesto. Si logras repercusiĂłn, te enfrentas a una carrera de fondo que muchos terminan abandonando por las demandas constantes de usuarios que, a menudo, no valoran el trabajo ni contribuyen de manera significativa. Por mencionar un caso reciente: Hector Martin. LĂ­der del proyecto Asahi Linux, quien dedicĂł años a adaptar Linux para los procesadores Apple Silicon, un logro tĂ©cnico impresionante. Sin embargo, terminĂł renunciando debido a la presiĂłn de usuarios que exigĂ­an soporte y mejoras como si fueran clientes pagos.

[lang=es] definitivamente es una buena llamada de atención para promover más donaciones a proyectos opensource. La verdad apoyo menos proyectos de los que ‘debería’, por el valor que me ofrecen.

Una opiniĂłn pragmĂĄtica es que hay la libertad de no pagar, pero tambiĂ©n esto nos deberĂ­a llevar a que tenemos la libertad de SÍ reconocer los proyectos que nos dan valor, por medio de un donativo puntual o constante. Adaptarnos al contexto de lo que estamos ofreciendo.

Mi chava trabaja en Asociaciones Civiles (tipo OSALs/ONGs) y es un reto pedir donativos, por lo que es comĂșn pedir ‘Cuotas de recuperaciĂłn’ pues ayudan a valorar mĂĄs el servicio, y a que fluya el donativo. Creo que se puede hacer algo asĂ­ en el cĂłdigo libre, apelando a diferentes motivadores en los usuarios.

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lang=en @xuu gotcha!
From that PR #17 I think it was reverted? We could discuss about metadata later this month, as it seems that I’m the only person using it.

I’ve added a [lang=en] to this twt to see current yarn behaviour.

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In-reply-to » @eapl.me There are several points that I like, but I want to highlight number 7. https://text.eapl.mx/a-few-ideas-for-a-next-twtxt-version #twtxt

a few async ideas for later

The editing process needs a lot of consideration and compromises.

From one side, editing and deleting it’s necessary IMO. People will do it anyway, and personally I like to edit my texts, so I’d put some effort on make it work.
Should we keep a history of edits? Should we hash every edit to avoid abuse? Should we mark internally a twt as deleted, but keeping the replies?

I think that’s part of a more complete ‘thread’ extension, although I’d say it’s worth to agree on something reflecting the real usage in the wild, along with what people usually do on other platforms.

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In-reply-to » @eapl.me There are several points that I like, but I want to highlight number 7. https://text.eapl.mx/a-few-ideas-for-a-next-twtxt-version #twtxt

looks good to me!

About alice’s hash, using SHA256, I get 96473b4f or 96473B4F for the last 8 characters. I’ll add it as an implementation example.
The idea of including it besides the follow URL is to avoid calculating it every time we load the file (assuming the client did that correctly), and helps to track replies across the file with a simple search.

Also, watching your example I’m thinking now that instead of {url=96473B4F,id=1} which is ambiguous of which URL we are referring to, it could be something like:
{reply_to=[URL_HASH]_[TWT_ID]} / {reply_to=96473B4F_1}
That way, the ‘full twt ID’ could be 96473B4F_1.

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Hey everyone!

About the idea of improving the “thread” extension, what if we set aside March 2025 to gather proposals and thoughts from everyone? We could then vote on them at the end of the month to see if the change and migration are worth it.

The voting could include client maintainers (and maybe even users too). That way, we get a good mix of perspectives before taking a decision in a decent timelapse.

What do you think? If this sounds good, we can start agreeing on this. Let me know your thoughts!

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In-reply-to » @lyse What do you think about this? https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/twtxt.dev/issues/14

I like this syntax, you have my vote, although I’d change it a bit like
#<Alice https://example.com/twtxt.com#2024-12-18T14:18:26+01:00>

Hashes are not a problem on PHP, I dont know why it’s slow to calculate them from your side, but I agree with your points.

BTW, did you have the chance to read my proposal on twtxt 2.0? I shared a few ideas about possible improvements to discuss:
https://text.eapl.mx/a-few-ideas-for-a-next-twtxt-version
https://text.eapl.mx/reply-to-lyse-about-twtxt

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In-reply-to » @andros, I am getting:

also @Andros, I see that if I open that URL on my browser, I see weird characters in the .txt file:
description = ðƾ—
Perhaps your nginx server is missing a Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 header?
https://serverfault.com/a/975289

In timeline it looks OK however, I think it’s relying on

The file must be encoded with UTF-8
of the original spec:
https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/twtxtfile.html

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In-reply-to » @eapl.me Here is what I've got so far: https://github.com/upputter/testing-twtxt-dm

here is my progress so far: https://github.com/eapl-gemugami/twtxt-direct-message-php
The encryption part seems to work, if I decrypt it the message with OpenSSL.
I think it can help you for some key parts not well explained in OpenSSL documentation.

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev reading your spec I wrote a few notes here: https://github.com/eapl-gemugami/twtxt-direct-message-php/blob/main/direct_message_spec.md

@arne@uplegger.eu I haven’t check your repo yet, although you are using sodium, right?

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In-reply-to » Today is an important day. We have a new extension: Direct message đŸȘ‡đŸ—šïžđŸš€đŸ„łâ€ïž https://twtxt.dev/exts/direct-message.html #twtxt

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Could you share (perhaps in the extension document) the private key for alice?

I want to compare that I can read the encrypted message both from OpenSSL CLI and from the PHP OpenSSL library, following the spec.

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In-reply-to » @arne Well, just for my understanding. The command: echo "Lorem ipsum" | openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -pbkdf2 -iter 100000 -out message.enc -pass file:shared_key.bin will take the input string from echo to openssl. It then will

trying to implement it quickly, I get the same questions than you

# https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.openssl-pbkdf2.php
    $password = $sharedKey;
    $salt = openssl_random_pseudo_bytes(16);  # What's the salt length ?
    $keyLength = 20;  # What's the key length here ?
    $iterations = 100000;
    $generatedKey = openssl_pbkdf2($password, $salt, $keyLength, $iterations, 'sha256');
    echo bin2hex($generatedKey)."\n";
    echo base64_encode($generatedKey)."\n";

    $iv = openssl_random_pseudo_bytes(16); // AES-256-CBC requires 16-byte IV
    $cipherText = openssl_encrypt($message, 'aes-256-cbc', $generatedKey, OPENSSL_RAW_DATA, $iv);
    return base64_encode($iv . $cipherText);

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In-reply-to » You have a microwave oven at home, right?

I’m surprised, here you can’t find dial controls anymore. How old are your ovens? The last one my parents had was from the 90s.

I was amazed experimenting with different combinations, for instance instead of 100, using 60 for a minute, 90 for 1:30, and stupid stuff like heating with 11, 22, 55 seconds and so, to make it quicker to type any time.

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In-reply-to » What would you like the new twtxt logo to be? Comments: https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/twtxt.dev/issues/9#issuecomment-18960 Media

among these options, 3

Although I like it more “twt”, without the dot and with a t at the end

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In-reply-to » (I keep thinking that going back go Gopher or Gemini might be a good idea at this point. They don’t care about that, probably. đŸ«Ł)

well, Gemini clients like Lagrange allow to show inline images when you click on an image link. Text based clients, like Amfora, usually allow to watch the image in another ‘window’.

For example here: gemini://text.eapl.mx/en-making-a-tic-tac-toe-variant and there https://text.eapl.mx/en-making-a-tic-tac-toe-variant

I agree that some topics require images to make it easier to explain.

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You have a microwave oven at home, right?

You can type 3 and 0 for 30 seconds, 100 for a minute (shown as 1:00), or 200 for two minutes (2:00).

What would happen if you type 777 and Start?
A) Nothing
B) Self-destruction
C) Will run for 7 minutes and 77 seconds (boring!)

What about 7777 ?

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In-reply-to » Have you ever had to refactor a project that was not documented? Any suggestions?

ok, sounds like a ‘large’ project to me.
Is it more an API (more oriented to developers), more oriented to UI/UX/Frontend? Perhaps both?

I’d go with prologic’s advice of measuring and prioritizing. Perhaps you have a budget or at least something like “let’s see how far can we reach in 6 months”, and possibly you won’t finish in the time you have (just guessing).

Something that has helped me was defining “Why do you we want to refactor this project?”.
Could it be to make it compile on newer versions, or making it easier to grow and scale, or perhaps they are trying to sell that product to another company. Every reason has a different path, IMO.

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In-reply-to » @eapl.me Read flags are so simple, yet powerful in my opinion. I really don't understand why this is not a thing in most twtxt clients. It's completely natural in e-mail programs and feed readers, but it hasn't made the jump over to this domain.

that’s a fair point.

Perhaps, since Twitter in 2006 never implemented read flags, every derivative microblogging system never saw that as an expected feature. This is curious because Twitter started with SMS, where on our phones we can mark messages as read or unread.
I think it all comes from the difference between reading an email (directed to you) vs. reading public posts (like a blog or a ‘wall,’ where you don’t mark posts as read). It’s not necessary to mark it as ‘read’, you just jump over it.

Reading microblogging posts in an email program is not common, I think, and I haven’t really used it, so I cannot say how it works, and whether it would be better for me or not.
However, I’ve used Thunderbird as a feed reader, and I understand the advantages when reading blog posts.

About read flags being simple, well
 we just had a discussion this morning about how tracking read messages would require a lot of rethinking for clients such as timeline where no state is stored. Even considering some kind of ‘notification of unread messages or mentions’ is not expected for those minimalist client, so it’s an interesting compromise to think about.

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In-reply-to » my first thought is that encrypting messages with Elliptic keys is not as easy as with RSA, although I tried doing something similar a few months ago with ECIES https://github.com/eapl-gemugami/owl/blob/main/src/app/controller/ecies_demo.php

a year ago I had a struggle to find documentation about it and now it seems there are more examples, cool!

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In-reply-to » interesting idea. I'm not personally interested on having DM conversations on twtxt (for now), although I see the community could be interested in.

I agree 🙂, although it’s easy to lose comments over time and are not so grouped by topic, it’s not so easy to vote or make a survey about it


I prefer a forum for that 😊

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In-reply-to » It's ok for most encrypted protocols (In salty you can fetch other messages but can't decrypt). Btw i think recipient can be removed so if someone seen message they tried to decypt, if can't - its not message to you

here are a few ideas you might take into consideration when designing a secure IM https://developer.virgilsecurity.com/docs/e3kit/fundamentals/secure-instant-messaging/

Obviously if you’ve worked on something similar, you already know it, he

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In-reply-to » It's ok for most encrypted protocols (In salty you can fetch other messages but can't decrypt). Btw i think recipient can be removed so if someone seen message they tried to decypt, if can't - its not message to you

I made a draft of an “encrypted public messenger”, which was basically a Feed for an address derivate from the public ket, let’s say ‘abcd..eaea’

Anyone could check, “are there any messages for my address?” and you get a whole list of timestamps and encrypted stuff.

Inside the encrypted message is a signature from the sender. That way you ‘could’ block spam.

Only the owner of the private key could see who sent what, and so


And even with that my concussion was that users expectations for a private IM might be far away from my experiment.

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In-reply-to » I want to share a little idea for a new extension with the goal of adding direct messages in #twtxt https://github.com/tanrax/twtxt-direct-message-extension

another one would be to allow changing public keys over time (as it may be a good practice [0]). A syntax like the following could help to know what public key you used to encrypt the message, and which private key the client should use to decrypt it:

!<nick url> <encrypted_message> <public_key_hash_7_chars>

Also I’d remove support for storing the message as hex, only allowing base64 (more compact, aiming for a minimalistic spec, etc.)

[0] https://www.brandonchecketts.com/archives/its-2023-you-should-be-using-an-ed25519-ssh-key-and-other-current-best-practices

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In-reply-to » I want to share a little idea for a new extension with the goal of adding direct messages in #twtxt https://github.com/tanrax/twtxt-direct-message-extension

interesting idea. I’m not personally interested on having DM conversations on twtxt (for now), although I see the community could be interested in.

I’d suggest to enable the Discussion section in your Github repo to receive comments, as we did for timeline https://github.com/sorenpeter/timeline/discussions

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In-reply-to » What say you @movq @lyse @eapl.mx / @darch @andros (new client author)? đŸ€” Shall I PR this up?

although I agree that it helps, I don’t see completely correct to leave the nick definition to the source .txt. It could be wrong from the start or outdated with the time.

I’d rather prefer to get it from the mentioned .txt nick metadata (could be cached for performance).
So my vote would to make it mandatory to follow @<name url> but only using that name/nick if the URL doesn’t contain another nick.
A main advantage is that when the destination URL changes the nick, it’ll be automagically updated in the thread view (as happens with some other microblogging platforms, following the Jakob’s Law)

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In-reply-to » đŸ€” Prosoal: Disallowed the @<url> form of mentions. Strictly require that all mentions include a nickname/name; i.e: @<name url>.

word of the thay, prosoal
Is it a typo of Proposal right? =P (Genuinely asking)

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In-reply-to » My side project explains very well https://django-liveview.andros.dev/ 😁

Django channels are cool! I had the chance to make a online gaming framework with Channels and Django Rest and was a great experience.

I’m looking forward to doing something in Django LiveView soon.

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In-reply-to » For Example:

and going back to a handle you could input in your client to look for the user/file, like @nick@domain.tls I think Webfinger is the way to go. It has enough information to know where to find that nick’s URL.

@prologic@twtxt.net does that webfinger fork made by darch work OK with yarn as it is now? (I’ve never used it, so I’m researching about it)
https://darch.dk/.well-known/webfinger/

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In-reply-to » Grocery shopping in the day of Christmas Eve is nuts, and wife is dragging me through it. đŸ˜©

Oh no!
Wife and I agreed on hibernate until January, just visiting relatives but avoiding any kind of shopping. I tried buying something like 2 or 3 days ago and it’s insane :o

Good luck! :)

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In-reply-to » @eapl.me A way to have a more bluesky'ish handles in twtxt could be to take inspiration from Bridgy Fed and say: If NICK = DOMAIN then only show @DOMAIN So instead of @eapl.me@eapl.me it will just be @eapl.me

I’m just having a similar issue with a podcast I just uploaded on Castopod (which supports ActivityPub).

My first thought was creating a subdomain with the name of the podcast mordiscos.eapl.me

Then I watched that the software allows many podcasts in the same domain, so I had to pick a handle:
https://mordiscos.eapl.me/@podcast

So now I have @podcast@mordiscos.eapl.me when this one is ‘more correct’ @mordiscos@podcast.eapl.me or it could even be @mordiscos.eapl.me
I wasn’t aware of all that when I setup Castopod (documentation might improve a lot, IMO)

My point here is that it’s something important to think from the start, otherwise is painful to change if it’s already being used like that.

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In-reply-to » For Example:

my 2 cents here

I agree on displaying a short @nick.

We could hover on the nick to see the full detail which could be @nick@domain.tls or the full URL
Also it could be a display option in Preferences in case your account starts showing many collisions.

The disambiguation for collisions is the .txt URL and the nick inside it, right ?

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In-reply-to » For Example:

I think we could discuss on implementation details like URLs and Handles.

@nick@nick (Masto/Yarn style)
vs
@nick.eapl.me and @eapl.me (Bsky style)

I see, for example, that yarn shows my account as @eapl.me@eapl.me which looks ‘weird’ although it’s not wrong since my domain and my nick are the same. Honestly I like more the Bsky approach as in https://bsky.app/profile/eapl.me for @eapl.me, as when you look for https://eapl.me, it’s my home page.

Also, I didn’t get it completely if you are also proposing a URL standard using subdomains, like https://nick.domain.tls. I only want to point out that these are more difficult to handle from shared hostings, so I’d prefer to also allow https://domain.tls/nick/

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