@movq@www.uninformativ.de ✅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Commercial forest, I guess? (Are there any other forests?)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I had that as my avatar/userprofile pic at work for a few years. 😆

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Luckily, yeah. Happens every now and then. It’s usually not even worth reporting, they often fix it in 30-90 minutes anyway.

(Is this how we do “reactions” here on twtxt? 🤪)

@xuu@txt.sour.is @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org 💚

@xuu@txt.sour.is Yeah, it will be delayed. Oh well. That’s just the way it is. :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hahaha, that filename! :-D 100 times better than I could ever play.

@xuu@txt.sour.is If the unread counter becomes negative, wouldn’t that mean I have that many more read messages? :-D

@bender@twtxt.net You’re spot on, it’s important to not introduce classical bugs!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh dear. :-( Have they fixed it?

@prologic@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de I had a t-shirt with this one or the other decade ago. :-)

@prologic@twtxt.net 🍴💣

@eapl.me@eapl.me this “directory” is actually named registry. You can see users at https://registry.twtxt.org/api/plain/users and his twts at https://registry.twtxt.org/api/plain/tweets

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.

Hmm so looking at the swagger of the registry spec client it seems to just take a “page”.. That seems worse than doing an offset. Lol.

https://github.com/DracoBlue/twtxt-registry/blob/master/src/swagger.json

@bender@twtxt.net thinked about Gemini protocol. Why corporations shit this name with cryptocurrency and LLMs?

@xuu@txt.sour.is like feeds+bridgy.fed? Will be happy anyway

@bender@twtxt.net I taught the whole ecosystem 😁
@prologic@twtxt.net @eapl.me@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.

@doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt haha its not coming back. he talked of a stand alone thing like feeds. but not in yarnd

hmm @prologic@twtxt.net how did replying to lyse double up here?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s not very retrocomputing!

@bender@twtxt.net 🙈🙈🙈

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I remember WebKit having a similar list, but I can’t find it right now … 🙈

@prologic@twtxt.net In all seriousness: Don’t worry, I’m not going to host some Fediverse thingy at the moment, probably never will. 😅

But I do use it quite a lot. Although, I don’t really use it as a social network (as in: following people). I follow some tags like #retrocomputing, which fills my timeline with interesting content. If there was a traditional web forum or mailing list or even a usenet group that covered this topic, I’d use that instead. But that’s all (mostly) dead by now. ☹️

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I see, fair point, yeah.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yikes! I didn’t know about about:compat. Crazy!

@xuu@txt.sour.is Wow, that’s a giant graveyard. In my new database I have 16,428 messages as of now. Archive feed support is not yet available, so it’s just the sum of all the 36 main feeds.

@david@collantes.us Ah shit, sorry, you’re right! :-D

Thank you @python_valencia@twtxt.python-valencia.es for letting me show you the secrets of a decentralised plain text social network like twtxt.
I hope you enjoyed the talk! ❤️🐍

Image

Image

I want to present the twtxt feed from Python Valencia: https://twtxt.python-valencia.es/
Technical curiosity: It is generated using n8n, using the official rss.
#welcome

@bender@twtxt.net That … was better than expected. 😂

The Mastodon admins say that it’s probably because of the size of my account (~600 MB), so the export process times out. And I understand that. Here on twtxt, I always use auto-expiring links when I post images or videos. It just gets too much data otherwise. I think I’ll just set my Mastodon account to auto-delete posts after ~180 days or something like that. Nobody cares about old posts anyway.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @bender@twtxt.net It already is a tiling window manager, but some windows can’t be tiled in a meaningful way. I admit that I’m mostly thinking about QEMU or Wine here: They run at a fixed size and can’t be tiled, but I still want to put them in “full screen” mode (i.e., hide anything else).

@movq@www.uninformativ.de let’s host yarnd! Or maybe wait until @prologic@twtxt.net return activitypub support which deleted in this commit

Thanks, @movq@www.uninformativ.de!

My backing SQLite database with indices is 8.7 MiB in size right now.

The twtxt cache is 7.6 MiB, it uses Python’s pickle module. And next to it there is a 16.0 MiB second database with all the read statuses for the old tt. Wow, super inefficient, it shouldn’t contain anything else, it’s a giant, pickled {"$hash": {"read": True/False}, …}. What the heck, why is it so big?! O_o

@movq@www.uninformativ.de You could also just use a tiling window manager. :-) As a bonus, it doesn’t waste dead space, the window utilizes the entire screen. To also get rid of panels and stuff, put the window in fullscreen mode.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I have just opened the GIMP bug tracker (hosted at gitlab.gnome.org) and, I kid you not, they have deployed Anubis in front of it:

Image

Oof.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’m glad to hear that! Yay for more clients. 😊

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Interesting, thanks for that list. 🤔

@david@collantes.us @prologic@twtxt.net Sorry! https://cascii.app/

… yeah, okay, I don’t think I’ll do that. 😅 Anything but twtxt is just too much effort.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Bad boy! 😂 Remember, it is an extension

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, most of the graphical applications are actually KDE programs:

• KMail – e-mail client
  
• Okular – PDF viewer
  
• Gwenview – image viewer
  
• Dolphin – file browser
  
• KWallet – password manager (I want to check out pass one day. The most annoying thing is that when I copy a password, it says that the password has been modified and asks me whether I want to save the changes. I never do, because the password is still the same. I don’t get it.)
  
• KPatience – card game
  
• Kdenlive – video editor
  
• Kleopatra – certificate manager
  

Qt:

• VLC – video player
  
• Psi – Jabber client (I happily used Kopete in the past, but that is not supported anymore or so. I don’t remember.)
  
• sqlitebrowser – SQLite browser
  

Gtk:

• Firefox – web browser
  
• Quod Libet – music player (I should look for a better alternative. Can’t remember why I had to move away from Amarok, was it dead? There was a fork Clementine or so, but I had to drop that for some unknown reason, too.)
  
• Audacity – audio editor
  
• GIMP – image editor
  

These are the things that are open right now or that I could think of. Most other stuff I actually do in the terminal.

In the past™, I used the Python KDE4 bindings. That was really nice. I could pass most stuff directly in the constructor and didn’t have to call gazillions of setters improving the experience significantly. If I ever wanted to do GUI programming again, I’d definitely go that route. There are also great Qt bindings for Python if one wanted to avoid the KDE stuff on top. The vast majority I do for myself, though, is either CLI or maybe TUI. A few web shit things, but no GUIs anymore. :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Although, most software I use is decentish in that regard.

Is that because you mostly use Qt programs? 🤔

I wish Qt had a C API. Programming in C++ is pain. 😢

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, right, a type would be good to have! :-D

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Where can I join your club? Although, most software I use is decentish in that regard.

I just noted today that JetBrains improv^Wcompletely fucked up their new commit dialog. There’s no diff anymore where I would also be able to select which changes to stage. I guess from now on I’m going to exclusively commit from only the shell. No bloody git integration anymore. >:-( This is so useless now, unbelievable.

@doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt 💯 👏👏👏👏👏👏

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org (I think of pointers as “memory location + type”, but I have done so much C and Assembler by now that the whole thing feels almost trivial to me. And I would have trouble explaining these concepts, I guess. 😅 Maybe I’ll cover this topic with our new Azubis/trainees some day …)

@prologic@twtxt.net What is “ciwtuau”? I don’t understand, sorry haha

@prologic@twtxt.net So it seems!

yes @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org 😅

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

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Pointers can be a bit tricky. I know it took me also quite some time to wrap my head around them. Let my try to explain. It’s a pretty simple, yet very powerful concept with many facets to it.

A pointer is an indirection. At a lower level, when you have some chunk of memory, you can have some actual values sitting in there, ready for direct use. A pointer, on the other hand, points to some other location where to look for the values one’s actually after. Following that pointer is also called dereferencing the pointer.

I can’t come up with a good real-world example, so this poor comparison has to do. It’s a bit like you have a book (the real value that is being pointed to) and an ISBN referencing that book (the pointer). So, instead of sending you all these many pages from that book, I could give you just a small tag containing the ISBN. With that small piece of information, you’re able to locate the book. Probably a copy of that book and that’s where this analogy falls apart.

In contrast to that flawed comparision, it’s actually the other way around. Many different pointers can point to the same value. But there are many books (values) and just one ISBN (pointer).

The pointer’s target might actually be another pointer. You typically then would follow both of them. There are no limits on how long your pointer chains can become.

One important property of pointers is that they can also point into nothingness, signalling a dead end. This is typically called a null pointer. Following such a null pointer calls for big trouble, it typically crashes your program. Hence, you must never follow any null pointer.

Pointers are important for example in linked lists, trees or graphs. Let’s look at a doubly linked list. One entry could be a triple consisting of (actual value, pointer to next entry, pointer to previous entry).

  _______________________
 /               ________\_______________
↓               ↓         |              \
+---+---+---+   +---+---+-|-+   +---+---+-|-+
| 7 | n | x |   | 23| n | p |   | 42| x | p |
+---+-|-+---+   +---+-|-+---+   +---+---+---+
      |         ↑     |         ↑
       \_______/       \_______/

The “x” indicates a null pointer. So, the first element of the doubly linked list with value 7 does not have any reference to a previous element. The same is true for the next element pointer in the last element with value 42.

In the middle element with value 23, both pointers to the next (labeled “n”) and previous (labeled “p”) elements are pointing to the respective elements.

You can also see that the middle element is pointed to by two pointers. By the “next” pointer in the first element and the “previous” pointer in the last element.

That’s it for now. There are heaps ;-) more things to tell about pointers. But it might help you a tiny bit.

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev @prologic@twtxt.net Exactly. The screenshots of the last few days show it in action. But I do not consider it ready for the world yet. @doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt appears to have a high pain tolerance, though. :-)

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev You use your real name as login name, too?

@prologic@twtxt.net I see this with the scouts. Luckily, not at work. But at work, I’m surrounded by techies.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh my goodness! I’m so glad that I don’t have to deal with that in my family. But yeah, I guess you’re onto something with your theory. This article is also quite horrific. O_o

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Wooaah, that is cool! \o/

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Maybe it’s a lyrebird. 😏

@prologic@twtxt.net Yes, it was one of those. 95, 98, and Me were all built on top of DOS, as far as I know.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I guess the thing is that usernames are no longer needed for many popular things, like WhatsApp. “Just install the app”, done. When I ran my Matrix server for our family, this was the first thing that people were bummed out about: “Oh, this needs a username and a password? Why doesn’t it just work? That’s annoying.”

People are less and less exposed to “low-level” details like this. There was also this story in 2021 about the concept of a “file”: https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z

In a couple of days I’ll be giving a talk about #twtxt https://www.meetup.com/es-ES/python-valencia-meetup/events/306769708/

@doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt What is tt2?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I had no idea. However, I think we’re losing our sense of anonymity. I even started using my real name!

@doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt Heck yeah! Worky, worky! \o/

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hahaha, that name is certainly fitting! :-D

Yeah, I should revert that and try to figure out which programs misbehaved. But that’s something for future Lyse. 8-) Right now, I just redefine TERM in my Makefile when the USER happens to be me.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah and I don’t get why … There’s no copyrighted music in it, no ads (at least I don’t see any) … Just weird. 🥴

@prologic@twtxt.net Lol, I give up. 🥴

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org There’s a reason it’s called “(n)curses”. 😏 The only advice I can give is to never fiddle with reassigning control sequences and $TERM variables. Leave $TERM at whatever value the terminal itself sets and use an appropriate terminfo file for it. If there are programs misbehaving, they probably blindly assume XTerm and should be fixed (or have XTerm as a hard requirement). If you try to fix this on your end, it’ll likely just break other programs. 🥴

@david@collantes.us Ah, I just went to bed, great to see you figured it out. 😅 I probably would have ended up with something similar (but I’m not a Vimscript guru). 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net

Chapter 14:

Epilogue:

@prologic@twtxt.net

Chapter 12:

Chapter 13:

@david@collantes.us Tada, the reply context is now also shown above. It’s slowly coming together and reaching a state where I can actually use this as my daily driver I think. :-)

Image

@david@collantes.us Thanks, yes, absolutely! ;-)

I now notice that I should also show the original message(s) to which I reply. That was super useful in the original tt. But one after the other. The mentions are now automatically filled in. \o/

@david@collantes.us While you’re typing? I guess this could be used as a starting point (doesn’t work on the very first line):

inoremap <CR> <Esc>:r!date +"\%F \%T"<CR>A 

What’s the end goal here? 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de hahahah i for one hate sleeping and need to be busy 24/7 or else i go insane so server stuff is awesome for my ADHD ass!!!

IaaS does seem kinda interesting to me, i think i could vibe with that more than full on cloud stuff

i hope i can be one of those people who does the barebones stuff bc i am a rare sicko who finds it fun and cloud stuff scares me LMAOOOO

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org oh yeah i use the CLI sometimes it’s fun af

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Allegedly, there’s at least a CLI for that, yarnc. I neither used nor looked at it, though.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh for sure, I fully agree!

@eapl.me@eapl.me Cool!

Proposal 3 (https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/twtxt.dev/issues/18#issuecomment-19215) has the “advantage”, that you do not have to “mention” the original author if the thread slightly diverges. It seems to be a thing here that conversations are typically very flat instead of trees. Hence, and despite being a tree hugger, I voted for 3 being my favorite one, then 2, 1 and finally 4.

All proposals still need more work to clarify the details and edge cases in my opinion before they can be implemented.

@arne@uplegger.eu I AM THE KING OF AGE OF EMPIRES!!1elf 👑

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Using full-blown Cloud services is good for old people like me who don’t want to do on-call duty when a disk fails. 😂 I like sleep! 😂

Jokes aside, I like IaaS as a middle ground. There are IaaS hosters who allow you to spin up VMs as you wish and connect them in a network as you wish. You get direct access to all those Linux boxes and to a layer 2 network, so you can do all the fun networking stuff like BGP, VRRP, IPSec/Wireguard, whatever. And you never have to worry about failing disks, server racks getting full, cable management, all that. 😅

I’m confident that we will always need people who do bare-bones or “low-level” stuff instead of just click some Cloud service. I guess that smaller companies don’t use Cloud services very often (because it’s way too expensive for them).

@prologic@twtxt.net yesss ty for listening and engaging with my kpop nonsense it’s really beautiful!

@prologic@twtxt.net i have seen some posts on this! that’s definitely reassuring. i don’t know cloud stuff at all and don’t want to. servers forever….

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz UPDATE I DID IT!!!!!!! you will now see a cute anime girl that is behind the scenes testing if you are a bot or not in a matter of seconds before being redirected to the site :) https://superlove.sayitditto.net/

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz think i’ll wait and see if the caddy module proposal gets anywhere bc that sounds like it’d make my life easier lol

https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/issues/16

@prologic@twtxt.net oh yeah it’s absolutely epic i love how fast it is. it would be extra peak if it sent a message to every bot that it denies access to that just says “get fucked” or something idk

@david@collantes.us You are right! I need to check this problem. Thank you very much!

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.

@bender@twtxt.net Yeah, as you mentioned in the other thread, @andros@twtxt.andros.dev’s hashes appear to be not quite right. 🤔

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I guess we all whish we were jobless. Not moneyless, just jobless. 😅

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Can you reproduce any of this outside of your client? I can’t spot a mistake here:

$ curl -sI 'http://movq.de/v/8684c7d264/.html%2Dindex%2Dthumb%2Dgimp11%2D1.png.jpg'
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 2615
Content-Type: image/jpeg
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2025 19:53:17 GMT
Last-Modified: Wed, 19 Mar 2025 17:34:08 GMT
Server: OpenBSD httpd

$ curl -sI 'https://movq.de/v/8684c7d264/gimp11%2D1.png'
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 131798
Content-Type: image/png
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2025 19:53:19 GMT
Last-Modified: Wed, 19 Mar 2025 17:18:07 GMT
Server: OpenBSD httpd

$ telnet movq.de 80
Trying 185.162.249.140...
Connected to movq.de.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD /v/8684c7d264/.html%2Dindex%2Dthumb%2Dgimp11%2D1.png.jpg HTTP/1.1
Host: movq.de
Connection: close

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: close
Content-Length: 2615
Content-Type: image/jpeg
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2025 19:53:31 GMT
Last-Modified: Wed, 19 Mar 2025 17:34:08 GMT
Server: OpenBSD httpd

Connection closed by foreign host.
$ 

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz i could build that myself but also i can’t because i don’t know code!!!!!!!!! her ass only knows ruby on rails!!!!!!!!!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I have no doubt that you’re not seeing the images correctly 😀. It’s just that it’s broken when viewing them, in my case, and analyzing the URLs, I’ve seen everything I mentioned.
Regarding the hash, you’re right. I’ll have to investigate what’s going on. I’m having a hard time getting the hash generation to work properly.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de ancient……. i love old linux it’s so janky

@movq@www.uninformativ.de me being the one jobless bitch on here is not helping my case LOL

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Hm, looks correct to me. The image to be displayed is a thumbnail and this links to the full-sized image. The thumbnail (JPG) is auto-generated from the full image (PNG), hence the two extensions.

What does look strange, though, is that your client came up with the hash pqsmcka, while it should have been te5quba. 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net Can we add a table in twtxt.dev with features of each client?

• Is active?
  
• Extensions compatibility
  
• Language
  
• Multiaccount.
  
• Mutiuser
  And so on…

@movq@www.uninformativ.de The urls of the images are strange! My client crashes to display them, and when I tried some urls, I found a redirect. Ah! And the images had two extensions.

@eapl.me@eapl.me I agree. The syntax is weird inside Gemini and twtxt is made with the http protocol in mind and Gemini doesn’t work with some extensions.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Asleep or at work, I guess. 😅

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

@prologic@twtxt.net NO