@prologic@twtxt.net good to see you are warming up to our over…, err, AI. 😅

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 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net class action! Class action! 😤😂

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz ngircd is nice: https://ngircd.barton.de/ You can absolutely host this on your server for you and your friends (I’ve been doing that for a very long time). Actually peering with something like libera is hard, though, because they have strict requirements and a lot of traffic. Then again, there’s no real benefit in peering, actually. IRC is pretty “decentralized” anyway and people are usually used to connecting to several networks, so joining another one isn’t a big deal, imho. 🙃

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz is there anything i can even run or is this like email where you should just use libera and shut up

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz well gamja works fine and all with other people’s networks but I WANT MY OWN LITTLE NETWORK. FOR FUN

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com THANK YOU :D

@movq@www.uninformativ.de no clue! i’ve never had issues setting up websockets and the gamja client itself seems to work fine when connecting to other servers, but my bouncer doesn’t work right so it’s soju T__T i THINK there’s a problem with the websockets but it seems to be working right so i’m just confused

@gallowsgryph@prismdragon.net Welcome back. 😅

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I skimmed through the gamja docs and they say you need an “IRC WebSocket server” – no idea what that is. Does gamja not speak IRC directly but essentially “IRC over HTTP”? Curious. 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net @bmallred@staystrong.run Ah, I just found this, didn’t see it before:

https://restic.net/#compatibility

So, yeah, they do use semver and, yes, they’re not at 1.0.0 yet, so things might break on the next restic update … but they “promise” to not break things too lightheartedly. Hm, well. 😅 Probably doesn’t make a big difference (they don’t say “don’t use this software until we reach 1.0.0”).

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Sounds like a lot of fun ! 😁 GOOD LUCK!

@prologic@twtxt.net This shi_ is as fun as it is frustrating! 😆 the bot is poking at me from a different ASN now, Alibaba’s.

1. Short term solution: I’ve geo-locked my Timeline instance since I’m the only one using it (and I only do so for reading twts when I’m away from terminal).
   
2. Long term: I took a look at your Caddy WAF but couldn’t figure things out on my own; until then, I’ll be poking at Caddy-Defender, maybe throw in a Crowdsec for lols… #FUN

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 😂

@prologic@twtxt.net @bmallred@staystrong.run So is restic considered stable by now? “Stable” as in “stable data format”, like a future version will still be able to retrieve my current backups. I mean, it’s at version “0.18”, but they don’t specify which versioning scheme they use.

@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) 🤦‍♂️

Some A hole has been trying to pull every single Twtxt feed that existed/still exists since forever. How do I know? Welp’ They’ve been querying my Timeline™ instance for all of it, every single twtxt file and twt Hash they can find. 😆🤦 It must have been going on for days and I have just noticed… + it’s all coming from the same ASN AS136907 HWCLOUDS-AS-AP HUAWEI CLOUDS

Thank you Huawei for the DDos you sons of Glitches!!!

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz oh and the logs say “failed to write msg: use of closed network connection” WHAT DOES THAT MEAN

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz i can’t send any messages it complains about the server buffer I DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz i JUST want my own IRC server for fun. that is all i want

@bender@twtxt.net REALLLLL

@bender@twtxt.net super old ass CPU lol it’s probably ancient in computer years! GTS needs a CPU thing that came after 2010 so that explains it (2008 machine) lmao

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz lack of RAM, or weak CPU? I run GoToSocial too, on a 1GiB RAM VPS. 😅

@thecanine@twtxt.net I signed, reluctantly. Not because I don’t care about The Internet Archive, but because Change pesters quite a bit for a while afterwards asking, of course, for money.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz pandoc is a joy! I haven’t used any Microsoft word processing tools since forever. They want a Word document? Pandoc to the rescue!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de it seems you got plenty of choices. That’s the cheapest of their products, and you are quite right, amazing pricing! I pay Apple $10/month for a shared-amongst-family 2TiB storage space.

@bender@twtxt.net My choices might be a bit limited, at least going by this list: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box (That would be some incredibly cheap storage.) I’ll probably have to order such a box and then play with it a little bit to see what’s possible.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de there are many other similar backup tools. I would love to hear what will make you pick Borg above the rest.

@bender@twtxt.net Exactly. I suspect it was because of sqlitebrowser also accessing the database in parallel to debug the original issue.

So far, I have not found the exact reason why some replies don’t show up. When I do not filter for unread messages and show all, though, I actually see them. So, there’s that.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org 😱😱😱 I am assuming that’s happening with tt2, right?

@javivf@adn.org.es having the extension listed means that it has been discussed and, usually implemented. Now, number 6 and 7 on the list as its stands today are not supported by any of the known clients. I believe their (again, 6 and 7) inclusion on the list has been precipitated, and lax.

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

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz It’s more like a cache, it stores things like “timestamp of the most recent twt we’ve seen per feed” or “last modification date” (to be used with HTTP’s if-modified-since header). You can nuke these files at any time, it might just result in more traffic (e.g., always getting a full response instead of just “HTTP 304 nope, didn’t change”).

@quark@ferengi.one Yes, I often write a couple of twts, don’t publish them, then sometimes notice a mistake and want to edit it. You’re right, as soon as stuff is published, threads are going to break/fork by edits.

@prologic@twtxt.net best of luck!!! discover view having no limit sounds scary oh god lol

@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” 🤦‍♂️

@prologic@twtxt.net alright! i can try that… whenever i am capable of upgrading and figure out how to lol

@prologic@twtxt.net :D

@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.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de wouldn’t editing your own twtxts cause the same issue Yarnd (or any other client) has, which is breaking any replies to it? Under which conditions would this work the best? When copying the twtxt.txt file asynchronously? In my case I copy the twtxt.txt file to its web root right away, but I figure I could not do that, which would give me a set period of time to edit without worries.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de json and database put together sounds terrifying. i must try jenny

@bender@twtxt.net very true in both regards!!! <333 happy to see you too, i missed your silly bender icon hahha. my times could be better but things will improve i am sure of it

@bender@twtxt.net awww thank you :‘))) you all are too nice!!! i really wanted to share how i did this because i think i’m the first person to publicly attempt a production instance of dreamwidth code in docker, so i’m glad i did a good job at documenting it!!!!!!!

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz woah! That’s something else, kat! Heck, I document pretty much everything (more at work than anywhere else), and I have got to tell you, you put my “documentation” to shame. LOL. Very well done!

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz hard times are best shared! Of course, I understand there are times they are best not shared. Either way, I wish the hard time you have been having fades away! And, of course, happy to “see” you! 🥰

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It wasn’t our building, yeah, luckily. But I’m pretty scared it might happen some day. I think I’ll put more effort into preparing for that. But whatever I do, it would be horrific to lose all your stuff and the memories attached to it …

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz You’re welcome. 😅 (From a hiring perspective, it’s not even important if every detail/step is correct or not. We all make mistakes, all the time; we don’t/can’t know everything.)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de HELP THIS IS GENUINELY SO SWEET THANK YOU ;_; omg i felt so nervous posting this because i was like what if i get something wrong but then i did it anyway and i felt so free… like woah i did all of this

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz As someone who has a say in hiring decisions (every now and then – I’m not an executive nor an HR person 😆): This is gold. Writeups like these tell me/us so much about job applicants. It’s much more valuable than “a CV without gaps” or “know your algorithms” or whatever. Instead, it shows how you work and that you understand what you’re doing, and that’s the most important part. 🥇

@bender@twtxt.net NOOOO i self host an XMPP server and also revolt but as much as i love XMPP (gajim client reminds me of using skype as a kid highkey) i don’t use it much and revolt is a bitch to maintain. like i broke revolt file uploads and it stayed that way for months until literally last week lmao. i never bothered with matrix tbh maybe i should’ve but it seems not worth it

@prologic@twtxt.net hm would there be any loss with the re-fetch option? i wouldn’t mind either but i’d like to hold onto what i got if possible! but if it IS possible but also really annoying to do i’ll just do the re-fetch of feeds because i’m lazy af LMAO

@bender@twtxt.net been having a hard time! but i am trying to be more active <3

@movq@www.uninformativ.de that is a great quote god damn

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz i did this in september but it took me this long to do the write up part lmfao

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hopefully at your neighbors and not your building. :-S Keep your pecker up!

I just heard the fire brigade respond here with their compressed air sirens, too.

If you let fire take effect properly, it helps to reduce density.

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev I give you not creating another file, but then I’d vote for commenting out DMs. See https://eapl.me/timeline/post/z5e2bna

It’s easier to find the DM in comments from your side, than asking all the client maintainers to add the regex =P
You can even use a Modified comment, such as
#! <DM content>
Or something like that

This approach is retro-compatible with current and older clients.

just a note that we are doing that on PHP: https://github.com/eapl-gemugami/twtxt-php/blob/master/docs/03-hash-extension.md#php-72

That PHP snippet could be merged into https://twtxt.dev/exts/twt-hash.html

@hacker-news@feeds.twtxt.net this is the 4th one in the row - I think. Loosing count of them.

@klaxzy@klaxzy.net Jellyfin FTW … I guess!

@david@collantes.us @andros@twtxt.andros.dev The correct hash would be si4er3q. See https://twtxt.dev/exts/twt-hash.html, a timezone offset of +00:00 or -00:00 must be replaced by Z.

(That said, there’s a bug in jenny as well. It only replaces +00:00, not -00:00. 🤡)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Lol! Yeah, nobody wants to see you bring your coal-powered forklift into the gym. :-D

@david@collantes.us If I run

printf '%s\n%s\n%s' 'https://aelaraji.com/twtxt.txt' '2025-04-16T22:49:11+00:00' "Am I tripping or `rsync` is actually THIS effing faster than `scp`!!? 🫨" | b2sum -l 256 | awk '{ print $1 }' | xxd -r -p | base32 | tr -d '=' | tr 'A-Z' 'a-z' | tail -c 8

I have xqfsv6a. It is raw text

But… If I change de date to 2025-04-16T22:49:11Z I have si4er3q.

@prologic@twtxt.net @bender@twtxt.net

What is the hash of the last message from?: https://aelaraji.com/twtxt.txt

@bender@twtxt.net For example:

If you can see this twt in any feed…

xxxx-xx-xxTxx:xx:xxZ	!<bender https://twtxt.net/user/bender/twtxt.txt> U2FsdGVkX1+QmwBNmk9Yu9jvazVRFPS2TGJRGle/BDDzFult6zCtxNhJrV0g+sx0EIKbjL2a9QpCT5C0Z2qWvw==

It is for you. Any other possibility must be ignore (hidden in your timeline).

If your client doesn’t have the posibility to decrypt the twt, hide all direct message. It is all :)

I miss @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz. Just sayin’.

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev define “compatible” 😅. On the “not addressed to me”, if I follow you, I will see your twtxts, whether they are addressed to me, or not.

@bender@twtxt.net Sure 👻👻👻

@prologic@twtxt.net please reply to this one. I want to make sure I am not seeing a ghost here. 😅

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

@prologic@twtxt.net what did you replied to? I am seeing disconnected twtxts, specifically from and/or replies to, Andros.

@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

@bender@twtxt.net @aelaraji@aelaraji.com The client should ignore twts if it’s not compatible or not addressed to me. it’s a simple regex to add! It’s similar to Twt Hash Extension, should they be in another file? They are child messages, not flat twt. Not of course!

@prologic@twtxt.net @aelaraji@aelaraji.com It depends! If you are working with rsync and scp with the same protocol… I want to know! 😁

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev For what purpose? 🤔

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com What protocol do you use?

@xuu@txt.sour.is Yeah @-mentioning@twtxt.net someone you don’t have a local alias for is broken somehow :( I haven’t looked into it yet…

@xuu@txt.sour.is Seems to be fine here?

$ bat https://twtxt.net/twt/yfv5kfq | jq '.text'
"!<dm-echo https://dm-echo.andros.dev/twtxt.txt> U2FsdGVkX1+QmwBNmk9Yu9jvazVRFPS2TGJRGle/BDDzFult6zCtxNhJrV0g+sx0EIKbjL2a9QpCT5C0Z2qWvw=="

@fastidious@tilde.town Haha 🤣

@bender@twtxt.net Oooofff, I’m panting for breath when just thinking about that! I’ll immediately stop complaining. :-) I already forgot that a jacket over my jumper would have been nice. I’m happy to be cold.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I walked under 25°C during my lunch hour today, but with a sunshine that could fry an egg if dropped on the asphalt. I told a friend in Manila about it, and she told me that 25°C is Winter/Christmas temperatures for them. I felt cooler right away. :-)

@xuu@txt.sour.is like, badly broken. I mean, the guy doesn’t even use twtxt (it is more like an RSS feed for him). So, yeah, even if it was the correct mention it would never reach the intended ears. 😂

@fastidious@tilde.town I see you, and your useless twtxt. :-P

@<@marado@ciberlandia.pt https://tilde.pt/~marado/twtxt.txt> Hey! do you see this? 🧐

@prologic@twtxt.net yes, same here.

@bender@twtxt.net I don’t no. I mostly just use whole themes. And my facourite it AMOLED

@prologic@twtxt.net I am just going over things. I don’t use it, do you?

@doesnm.p.psf.lt@doesnm.p.psf.lt It was always intended to have both Yarn.social and Salty.im integrate together. Yes. This includes having a set of specifications that anyone can write clients to.

@javivf@adn.org.es Generally speaking if it has been reviewed, discussed and merged, then we accept it as a standard to the set of specs we support. However we might want to document this process and set some guidelines about this to be clear 🤣 We’ve been fairly lax/lose here and I think that’s okay given teh size of our community 👌

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev @bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net @eapl.me@eapl.me btw does twtxt dm and salty can be bridged together? iirc you planned this

New version release of twtxt-el!

• Fixed many bugs.
  
• New back buttons.
  
• Updated documentation.
  

I am currently fixing an important bug that break the timeline in some cases and I am working around direct messages.

#twtxt #twtxt-el

@bender@twtxt.net Ahhh ha!!! 🤣 I’m too dumb to have thought of that 🤣

@bender@twtxt.net Do we still want this feature? 🧐

@bender@twtxt.net Would they even accept a server from me? 🧐😂