@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Zulu said:

what is twtxt for you?

For me Twtxt is just the underlying format that Yarn.social builds upon 😅

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Ahh cool! I’ll try following it again 🤣 Mind @-mentioning/linking@twtxt.net the feed again? 🙏

Also what’s a, who’s the Pope? 😅

@quark@ferengi.one I know! I saw three Hacker News posts on it in a row 🤣

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Haha 🤣 We’ve explored this idea in the past and we decided that it’s actually a good idea to have an “append-only” feed for various reasons. We’ve also explored the idea of using Range requests, but opted instead to just archive/rotate our feeds periodically 😅 There really isn’t much point in having a feed in reverse chronological order, except (maybe?) so a human read view the new twts at the top of the file?! 🤣

@bender@twtxt.net This is just a website that cycles through random Youtube channels? 🤔

I guess mentions with .(s) / dot(s) like @eapl.me@eapl.me are valid? 🤔 Or nicks even? 🤔

Fark Youtube is so utterly boring 🥱

@bender@twtxt.net Ahh yes you caught me 🤣

@bender@twtxt.net Not copy/paste 🤣 Hand on heart! ❤️ However it was a pretty nice article 😅

Getting Forked by Microsoft • Philip Laine 👈 Yet another pretty sad story of a megacorp (Microsoft) being total assholes 😢

Regex Isn’t Hard - Tim Kellogg 👈 this is a pretty good conscience article on regexes, and I agree, regex isn’t that hard™ – However I think I can make the TL;DR even shorter 😅

Regex core subset (portable across languages):

Character sets
• a matches “a”
• [a-z] any lowercase
• [a-zA-Z0-9] alphanumeric
• [^ab] any char but a or b

Repetition (applies to the preceding atom)
• ? zero or one
• * zero or more
• + one or more

Groups
• (ab)+ matches “ab”, “abab”, …
• Capture for extract/substitute via $1 or \1

Operators
• foo|bar = foo or bar
• ^ start anchor
• $ end anchor

Ignore non‑portable shortcuts: \w, ., {n}, *?, lookarounds.

#regex101

@bender@twtxt.net No worries 😉

There we go. Restored all the old settings 👌

@bender@twtxt.net Lemme look at the old backup…

@bender@twtxt.net

I am up to increase the length of a twtxt, though.

Recall what we had this set to for this pod? 🧐

@bender@twtxt.net Really? Wow! 😂

@bender@twtxt.net Hah 🤣

Just had a freak storm ⛈️ with lots of horizontal rain ☔️ that took out and tripped our internal RCD (again) 😱 Took out our Fibre too (servers were fine, good ‘ol UPS). Need to get a UPS for the Fibre box 📦 Haha 🤣

@movq@www.uninformativ.de So cool! 😎 Where’s the time lapse video you used to have of this tree? 🌳 Hmm 🧐

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah I know 🤣 I found another bug in lextwt 🤦‍♂️ This whole DM / bang-mention thingy has thrown a spanner in the works 🔧 – Even if I wanted to implement it, I’m not even ready to try at the moment 😢

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz (as I was trying to say…), Glad you think so👌 My goal with Yarn.social has always been to provide the best (best that I can anyway) truly decentralised (slow) social experience that uses the Twtxt format under the hood 😅

@xuu@txt.sour.is As I also mentioend on IRC I think this is a. bug?

Holy hell?! When I post this:

@<kate https://yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz/user/kat/twtxt.txt> Glad you think so! 👌 My goal with Yarn.social has always been to provide the best (_best that I can anyway!_) truly decentralised (_slow_) social experience that uses the Twtxt format under the hood 😅

Something is swallowing it.

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Glad you think so! 👌 My goal with Yarn.social has always been to provide the best (best that I can anyway!) truly decentralised (slow) social experience that uses the Twtxt format under the hood 😅

What if I do this…

Nope hmmm

What about here?

Okay they’re not here…

Why are my replies getting swallowed?! 🤔

Glad you think so! 👌 My goal with Yarn.social has always been to provide the best (best that I can anyway!) truly decentralised (slow) social experience that uses the Twtxt format under the hood 😅

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Glad you think so! 👌 My goal with Yarn.social has always been to provide the best (best that I can anyway!) truly decentralised (slow) social experience that uses the Twtxt format under the hood 😅

Hmmm?

Hmmm?

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Glad you think so! 👌 My goal with Yarn.social has always been to provide the best (best that I can anyway!) truly decentralised (slow) social experience that uses the Twtxt format under the hood 😅

This expands the usefulness of Twtxt / Yarn.social to:

• Sharing small posts
  
• Sharing links
  
• Sharing media
  
• Having long conversations
  
• Voting on topics, opinions or decisions
  
• RSVPing to virtual or physical events

The nice thing here is that any Ui/UX rendering for a “good user experience” is similar to what yarnd does for Youtube/Spotify/whatever embedding. Plus anyone can participate, even if they don’t really have a client that understand it, it’s just text with some “syntax” afterall.

#event:abc123 RSVP: yes +1

#event:abc123 Go Meetup – Sat Apr 27, 3pm @ Darling Harbour

#poll:xyz123 Vote: None

#poll:xyz123 Favorite Go framework?

• Gin
  
• Echo
  
• Chi

I’d have to write i up in full, but essentially looks a bit like this (contribived examples follow)…

💡 I had this crazy idea (or is it?) last night while thinking about Twtxt and Yarn.social 😅 There are two things I think that could be really useful additions to the yarnd UI/UX experience (for those that use it) and as “client” features (not spec changes). The two ideas are quite simple:

• Voting – a way to cast, collect a vote on a decision, topic or opinion.
  
• RSVP – a way to “rsvp” to a virtual (pr physical) event.
  

Both would use “plain text” on top of the way we already use Twtxt today and clients would render an appropriate UI/UX.

@bender@twtxt.net I think I could, but I haven’t bothered to do so yet… I’ll try that out later…

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz You’re welcome 😇

@bender@twtxt.net Hehe, thanks for fixing this (was) broken thread 🧵 Haha 🤣

@sorenpeter@darch.dk I really think you should fix the # url in your feed to be https:// 😅

@bender@twtxt.net Sure! 👍

{
    ...
   # Layer 4 Reverse Proxy
   layer4 {
      # Gopher
      0.0.0.0:70 {
         route {
            proxy <internal_ip>:70
         }
      }

      # IRC (TLS)
      0.0.0.0:6697 {
         route {
            proxy <internal_ip>:6697
         }
      }
   }
}

Am I the only one that’s confused by the discussions, and then the voting we had on the whole threading model? 🤔 I’m not even sure what I voted for, but I know it wasn’t the one that won haha 🤣 (which I’m still very much against for based on an intuition, experience and lots of code writing lately).

@xuu@txt.sour.is Good point! 🤣

OH nevermind. Ignore me. I think @sorenpeter@darch.dk’s feed is a bit weird. Because his url is http:// but he actually hosts a https:// feed with redirects. so things get a bit weird 😢

e.g: @sorenpeter@darch.dk

@bender@twtxt.net I noticed that although the Discover view (and your own Timeline) is much improved with a MaxAgeDays configuration at the pod level, that now some profiles are rather empty. This is only because well, they’re a bit “inactive” so to speak 🗣️ Not sure what to do about this at the moment… Open to ideas? 💡

@bender@twtxt.net According to his @buckket Github profile, I belive so.

There are other tasks LLM(s) are far better suited for, which are also its downsides, and gawd so expensive and unrealistic to run yourself 🤦‍♂️ Do you know what one of these NVIDIA H100’s cost? 💲 That’s right! 🤣 > $50k USD 😱 And many of the models out there require 8 of these suckers 🤣 Each one consumes around ~400W of power each (not including the machine that houses them!)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah I couldn’t agree more. The utility of using it in any way to form “truths” or to do anything that require a high degree of “accuracy” is utterly pointless.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Very nice! 😊 You must love those yellow dandelions? 🤔

But it is still a giant inefficient use of resources and energy 🤣

AI isn’t a shortcut for thinking. In her guide for skeptics, Hilary Gridley reframes AI as a collaborator—not a replacement. Use it like spellcheck for your thoughts. Don’t fear it—iterate with it. Insight improves, speed follows. Full post: https://hils.substack.com/p/the-ai-skeptics-guide-to-ai-collaboration

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Haha 🤣 Figures 🤦‍♂️ Also no need to be concerned with that here, I’ve personally blocked the ASN(s) of Microsoft, OpenAI, Claude and Google 😂

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah 👍 Haha 🤣 Does your own cache go back this far? 🤔

Ahh so I was partially right 🤣

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Apparently that is @buckket@twtxt.net’s name? 🤔

Hmmm there’s a bug somewhere in the way I’m ingesting archived feeds 🤔

sqlite> select * from twts where content like 'The web is such garbage these days%';
      hash = 37sjhla
  feed_url = https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt/1
   content = The web is such garbage these days 😔 Or is it the garbage search engines? 🤔
   created = 2024-11-14T01:53:46Z
created_dt = 2024-11-14 01:53:46
   subject = #37sjhla
  mentions = []
      tags = []
     links = []
sqlite>

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’s nice to see shit like this still works 🤣 Even years later 😂

@bender@twtxt.net Yup 👍

I do want to improve the feeds.twtxt.net service one day (soon™) with features like this. But first I’ll have to prevent spammers from abusing it by introducing IndieAuth as an authentication layer.

Btw @andros@twtxt.andros.dev ; The automated feed you put together for Hacker News… Does it at any point rewrite parts of the feed as it goes along? 🤔 I’ve had to unfollow it because I’ve found in practise it makes a twt, then seems to modify that same twt (observed by content manually) at least twice. This ends up becoming effectively an “Edit” and essentially duplicate (looking) posts 😢

@bender@twtxt.net Shall we remove this primary/secondary color sttting? 🧐

@bender@twtxt.net Btw, do we want to nuke this compact feature? 🧐

@bender@twtxt.net How do you mean? 🧐 Caddy doesn’t do L4 by default.

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I think it’s totally fine. I mean self-hosting costs money too. Power, Hardware, Time/effort, etc.

@bender@twtxt.net I recommend this also 👌 My eris was based off of a much much older version of ergo.

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I already have my IRC server irc.mills.io running behind Caddy Layer 4. However I don’t terminate TLS at the edge in this case.

it is infininately simpler to run/operate 🤣

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz @movq@www.uninformativ.de You could also have a play with eris which I use to power my little tiny server (that almost no-one uses 🤣)

@bender@twtxt.net Ahh okay, I must have misread the website 🤔

Seem like it’s a server-client thingy? 🤔 I much prefer tools in this case and defer the responsibility of storage to something else. I really like restic for that reason and the fact that it’s pretty rock solid. I have zero complaints 😅

@bender@twtxt.net Hahahahaha 🤣🤣🤣

Timeline of Evolution of Twtxt/Yarn.social:

• 2016 – Twtxt created by John Downey: plain text + HTTP = minimalist microblogging
  
• 2017–2019 – Community builds CLI tools, but adoption remains niche
  
• 2020 – Yarn.social launched by @prologic@twtxt.net with federation, threading, UI
  
• 2021–2023 – Pods sync, user mentions, blocking, search, and media support added
  
• 2024+ – Yarn.social becomes the reference Twtxt platform, with active federated pods

I asked ChatGPT what it knows about Twtxt 😂 And surprisingly it’s rather accurate:

Twtxt is a minimalist, decentralized microblogging format introduced by John Downey in 2016. It uses plain text files served over HTTP—no accounts, databases, or APIs.
In 2020, James Mills (@prologic@twtxt.net) launched Yarn.social, an extended, federated implementation with user discovery, threads, mentions, and a full web UI.
Both share the same .twtxt.txt format but differ in complexity and social features.

@bender@twtxt.net LOL 🤣

Oh hey @rrraksamam@twtxt.net 👋 Welcome back! 🙌 Sorry about the data loss 🤯

@movq@www.uninformativ.de From what I can tell, they use strict semantic versioning and backwards compatibility. There are two versions of the storage, v1 and v2, but it doesn’t look like v2 is enabled yet.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de LOL 😂

B

A

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Haha 🤣 I’d say it’s just yet-another-bad-bot 🤖 I’ve blocked a lot of such bots and often their entire networks (ASN) 🤦‍♂️

I use restic and Backblaze B2 for offline backup storage at a cost of $6/TB/month. I don’t backup my entire ~20TB NAS and its datasets however, so I’m only paying about ~$2/month right now. I only backup the most important things I cannot afford to lose or annot re-created.

Yes

@javivf@adn.org.es merged in to the repo of specs:

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I’ll cut a release soon™, but still a few more things to iron out 🤣 One of the new challenges is figuring out what to do with the “Discover” view now that is has an unconfined limit, on my pod (at least) it’s now basically just “noise” 🤦‍♂️

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Been missing your jovial posts too and your friends 🤣

@quark@ferengi.one No editing old Twts that are the root of a thread with replies in the ecosystem. Just results in a fork. Unless the client has an implementation that does not store Twts keyed by Hash.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh dear 😂

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz The re-fetch should work just fine 🤞

@david@collantes.us Thanks I’ll fix.

@bender@twtxt.net Sure 👻👻👻

@bender@twtxt.net That’s what I’m trying to figure out 🤔

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Curious where this root twt is?! 🤣 Apparently my pod doesn’t have it and I can’t find it anywhere. It’s suppose to be #l4doaxa