Simplified twtxt - I want to suggest some dogmas or commandments for twtxt, from where we can work our way back to how to implement different feature like replies/treads:

1. It’s a text file, so you must be able to write it by hand (ie. no app logic) and read by eye. If you edit a post you change the content not the timestamp. Otherwise it will be considered a new post.

2. The order of lines in a twtxt.txt must not hold any significant. The file is a container and each line an atomic piece of information. You should be able to run sort on a twtxt.txt and it should still work.

3. Transport protocol should not matter, as long as the file served is the same. Http and https are preferred, so it is suggested that feed served via Gopher or Gemini also provide http(s).

4. Do we need more commandments?

@prologic@twtxt.net Why does twtxt.net still show my old avatar?

@Codebuzz@www.codebuzz.nl Welcome to the twt’verse 👋

@doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt finally someone read my blogpost ;)

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Thank you, and yes I got more on my websites https://darch.dk/vj/ and https://algorave.dk/videos/

Video of my latest #livecoding show using #punctual for #visuals
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsM39SpRik8

I know no client support it (yet) - but it could be the future 😅

@2024-10-09T08:11:00Z@twtxt.net It an easy way of twt-adressing by using the timestamp instead of a nick, which is arbitrary anyhow. Just my suggestion for a new reply-model ;)

@2024-10-08T19:36:38-07:00@a.9srv.net Thanks for the followup. I agrees with most of it - especially:

Please nobody suggest sticking the content type in more metadata. 🙄

Yes, URL can be considered ugly, but they work and are understandable by both humans and machines. And its trivial for any client to hide the URLs used as reference in replies/treading.

Webfinger can be an add-on to help lookup people, and it can be made independent of the nick by just serving the same json regardless of the nick as people do with static sites and a as I implemented it on darch.dk (wf endpoint). Try RANDOMSTRING@darch.dk on http://darch.dk/wf-lookup.php (wf lookup) or RANDOMSTRING@garrido.io on https://webfinger.net

Thanks @david@collantes.us, good to know, but we need to agree on what character we use, otherwise the hashes will not be the same:)

@prologic@twtxt.net Regarding the new way of generating twt-hashes, to me it makes more sense to use tabs as separator instead of spaces, since the you can just copy/past a line directly from a twtxt-file that already go a tab between timestamp and message. But tabs might be hard to “type” when you are in a terminal, since it will activate autocomplete…🤔

Another thing, it seems that you sugget we only use the domain in the hash-creation and not the full path to the twtxt.txt

$ echo -e "https://example.com 2024-09-29T13:30:00Z Hello World!" | sha256sum - | awk '{ print $1 }' | base64 | head -c 12

@prologic@twtxt.net YES James, it should be up to the client to deal with changes like edits and deletions. And putting this load on the clients, location-addressing with make this a lot easier since what is says it: Look in this file at this timestamp, did anything change or went missing? (And then threading will not break;)

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

yes that works

(#2024-09-24T12:53:35Z) What does this screenshot show? The resolution it too low for reading the text…

(#2024-09-24T12:45:54Z) @prologic@twtxt.net I’m not really buying this one about readability. It’s easy to recognize that this is a URL and a date, so you skim over it like you would we mentions and markdown links and images. If you are not suppose to read the raw file, then we might a well jam everything into JSON like mastodon

(#2024-09-24T12:44:35Z) There is a increase in space/memory for sure. But calculating the hashes also takes up CPU. I’m not good with that kind of math, but it’s a tradeoff either way.

(#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.

(#2024-09-24T12:34:31Z) WebMentions does would work if we agreed to implement it correctly. I never figured out how yarnd’s WebMentions work, so I decide to make my own, which I’m the only one using…

I had a look at WebSub, witch looks way more complex than WebMentions, and seem to need a lot more overhead. We don’t need near realtime. We just need a way to notify someone that someone they don’t know about mentioned or replied to their post.

Some more arguments for a local-based treading model over a content-based one:

1. The format: (#<DATE URL>) or (@<DATE URL>) both makes sense: # as prefix is for a hashtag like we allredy got with the (#twthash) and @ as prefix denotes that this is mention of a specific post in a feed, and not just the feed in general. Using either can make implementation easier, since most clients already got this kind of filtering.

2. Having something like (#<DATE URL>) will also make mentions via webmetions for twtxt easier to implement, since there is no need for looking up the #twthash. This will also make it possible to make 3th part twt-mentions services.

3. Supporting twt/webmentions will also increase discoverability as a way to know about both replies and feed mentions from feeds that you don’t follow.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I cases of these kind of “abuse” of social trust. Then I think people should just delete their replies, unfollow the troll and leave them to shouting in the void. This is a inter-social issue, not a technical issue. Anything can be spoofed. We are not building a banking app, we are just having conversation and if trust are broken then communication breaks down. These edge-cases are all very hypothetical and not something I think we need to solve with technology.

Been thinking about it for the last couple of days and I would say we can make do with the shorter (#<DATETIME URL>)since it mirrors the twt-mention syntax and simply points to the OP as the topic identified by the time of posting it. Do we really need and (edit:...)and (delete:...) also?

@prologic@twtxt.net what time in UTC?

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

@prologic@twtxt.net you will always be replying to OP - that is what the twthash is a shorthand for, it it not?!

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

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I’m glad you like it. A mention (@<movq https://www.uninformativ.de/twtxt.txt>) is also long, but we live with it anyway. In a way a replyto: is just a mention of a twt instead of a feed/person. Maybe we chould even model the syntax for replies on mentions: (#<2024-09-17T08:39:18Z https://www.eksempel.dk/twtxt.txt>) ?!

@mckinley@twtxt.net Thanks for the feedback.

1. Yeah I agrees that nick sound not be part of syntax. Any valid URL to a twtxt.txt-file should be enough and is more clear, so it is not confused with a email (one of the the issues with webfinger and fedivese handles)
   
2. I think any valid URL would work, since we are not bound to look for exact matches. Accepting both http and https as well as a gemni and gophe could all work as long as the path to the twtxt.txt is the same.
   
3. My idea is that you quote the timestamp as it is in the original twtxt.txt that you are referring to, so you can do it by simply copy/pasting. Also what are the change that the same human will make two different posts within the same second?!
   

Regarding the whole cryptographic keys for identity, to me it seems like an unnecessary layer of complexity. If you move to a new house or city you tell people that you moved - you can do the same in a twtxt.txt. Just post something like “I move to this new URL, please follow me there!” I did that with my feeds at least twice, and you guys still seem to read my posts:)

The tag URI scheme looks interesting. I like that it human read- and writable. And since we already got the timestamp in the twtxt.txt it would be somewhat trivial to parse. But there are still the issue with what the name/id should be… Maybe it doesn’t have to bee that stick?

Instead of using tag: as the prefix/protocol, it would more it clear what we are talking about by using in-reply-to: (https://indieweb.org/in-reply-to) or replyto: similar to mailto:

1. (reply:sorenpeter@darch.dk,2024-09-15T12:06:27Z)
   
2. (in-reply-to:darch.dk/twtxt.txt,2024-09-15T12:06:27Z)
   
3. (replyto:http://darch.dk/twtxt.txt,2024-09-15T12:06:27Z)
   

I know it’s longer that 7-11 characters, but it’s self-explaining when looking at the twtxt.txt in the raw, and the cases above can all be caught with this regex: \([\w-]*reply[\w-]*\:

Is this something that would work?

Thank you @aelaraji@aelaraji.com, I’m glad you like it. I use PHP because it’s everywhere on cheap hosting and no need for the user to log into a terminal to setup it up. Timeline is not mean to be use locally. For that I think something like twtxt2html is a better fit. (and happy to see you using simple.css on you new log page;)

I was not suggesting to that everyone need to setup a working webfinger endpoint, but that we take the format of nick+(sub)domain as base for generating the hashed together with the message date and content.

If we omit the protocol prefix from the way we do things now will that not solve most of the problems? In the case of gemini://gemini.ctrl-c.club/~nristen/twtxt.txt they also have a working twtxt.txt at https://ctrl-c.club/~nristen/twtxt.txt … damn I just notice the gemini. subdomain.

Okay what about defining a prefers protocol as part of the hash schema? so 1: https , 2: http 3: gemini 4: gopher ?

@prologic@twtxt.net do that mean that for every new post (not replies) the client will have to generate a UUID or similar when posting and add that to to the twt?

how little data is needed for generating the hashes? Instead of the full URL, can we makedo with just the domain (example.net) so we avoid the conflicts with gemini://, https:// and only http:// (like in my own twtxt.txt) or construct something like like a webfinger id nick@domain (also used by mastodon etc.) from the domain and nick if there, else use domain as nick as well

For following notifications I would say use webmetion refering to the the line in your twtxt.txt as per: https://darch.dk/mentions-twtxt
Or send them an email, so it would be an idea to add a # contact = mailto:me@domain.net to ones twtxt.txt

This reminds me of this video: The Biggest Gap in Science: Complexity
However you might end up with more questions (complexity?) than answers (simplicity?)

Have not tried any of them, but some of these seem to fit the bill:

• https://chromewebstore.google.com/search/Redirector
  
• https://libredirect.github.io/
  
• https://requestly.com/products/web-debugger/

ok != perfect

It looks okay on my timeline: http://darch.dk/timeline/conv/omu7e4q

@prologic@twtxt.net The old options are still valid, so “Show latest post per feed” should just be added as a 3th.

I think it is a good addition. Similar to how the Fraidycat RSS reader works. Fraidyc.at also support twtxt, but have not seen any updates since 2021…

Here now too

echo chambers?

I fixed it by adding (?<!\S) to the regex filter. But what is going on with the ?nick=dbucklin anyhow?

@Prologic@twtxt.net can you pleas fix this line in your twtxt.txt:
# follow = dbucklin@www.davebucklin.com https://www.davebucklin.com/twtxt.txt?nick=dbucklin

It is cause this weird effect on my timeline, where you are now called dbucklin
http://darch.dk/timeline/?profile=https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Maybe something for you: 7.css - A CSS framework for recreating Windows 7 UI

@prologic@twtxt.net Haha, that sh!t is pure (net)art!

@dfaria@twtxt.net the difference is that these other servers does not post several times a day with content that are not informative/interesting to people outside your academic context, which can be perceived as noise.

What @prologic@twtxt.net have done is what I would call curation of the service he offers to the world for free (as in beer). It’s no one right to have their posts syndicated to the frontpage of twtxt.net, it’s simply a gift he gives to the world and he is free (as in speak) to wrap is anyway he sees fit.

@dfaria.eu@dfaria.eu I hope you stay around 🌞

@prologic@twtxt.net and @bender@twtxt.net for a start a single user twtxt/yarn pod could look like this 😉

Image

Image

I just “published” a #draft on my blog about “How I’ve implemented #webmentions for twtxt” (http://darch.dk/mentions-twtxt), so I wanted to know from you guys if you see yourself doing a similar thing with yarnd @prologic@twtxt.net or others with custom setups?

The wording can be more subtle like “This feed have not seen much activity within the last year” and maybe adding a UI like I did in timeline showing time ago for all feeds

Image

I agree that it good to clean up the Mastodon re-feeds, but it should also be okay for anyone to spin up a twtxt.txt just for syndicating they stuff from blog or what ever.

The “not receiving replies” could partly be fixed by implementing a working webmentions for twtxt.txt