Hi everyone,
I’ve drafted a Request for Comments (RFC) to improve how threads work in twtxt:
https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/twtxt.dev/issues/18

I’d love your feedback! Please share your thoughts on anything that could be better explained, check if the proposed dates work for everyone, and I invite you to join the discussion…

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!

[ANN] The arbitration system in Haveno doesn’t prevent arbitrators from pulling the funds

[Issue confirmed by official monero moderator on dread:] After some thoughts, I think you are right and that the arbitration system in Haveno doesn’t prevent arbitrators from pulling the funds. They would need to create a bot that takes all the offers and automatically unlock the funds with the key of the taker and arbitrator (Quote from /u/monero_desk_support)

Link: [Dread discussion (onion)](http://dreadytofatroptsdj6io7l3xptbet6ono … ⌘ Read more

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Just before the pandemic, we watched Uncle Bob videos once a week in the lunch break. While almost all of my old teammates agreed with his views, I partially found them to be very odd and even counterproductive.

I didn’t come across John Ousterhout or any of his work before, at least not deliberately. So, this document is my first contact.

I only finished the chapter on comments and I totally agree with John so far. This document just manifests to me how weird Bob’s view is on certain subjects.

I always disagreed with the concept of a maximum method length. Sure, generally, shorter functions are probably better, but it always depends. And I’ve certainly seen super short methods that just made the code flow even worse to follow. While “one function should only do one thing” is a nice general rule, I’m 100% in team John with the shown examples. There are cases, where this doesn’t help readability at all. Not even close.

To me, a function always has to justify its existence. Either by reusing it at least at another place or by coming up with dedicated tests for it. But if it is just called once and there are no tests, I almost always decide against it. Personally, I don’t mind longer methods. We just recently had a discussion about that and I lost against two other workmates who are more in Uncle Bob’s camp, they refactored one medium sized method into three very short ones. Luckily, we agree on most other topics.

Lol, what!? The shorter the method, the longer the variables inside? I first thought I misread or the writeup mixed it up. I’ll always do it the other way around.

I’ve been also bitten badly by outdated comments in the past, but Bob must have worked on really terrible projects to end up with such an attitude to dislike comments. Oh well. No doubt, I’ve come across by several orders of magnitude more useless comments, in my experience (autogenerated) JavaDocs fall in the category more frequently than not. So, I know that there are different types of comments. A comment doesn’t automatically mean that it is good and justified.

But I also partially agree with Bob and John and think that a good name has a proper chance to save a comment. Though, when in doubt, I go John’s route and use a shorter name with a comment rather than use a kilometer long identifier. Writing good comments typically takes some time, sometimes much longer than writing the code. It regularly takes me several minutes. It’s a hard art.

I perhaps should read up on John’s work. He seems to be more reasonable and likeminded. :-) Let me continue to complete this document.

I read a lot about Clean Code, SOLID, TDD, DDD… now I’m discovering «A Philosophy of Software Design»… but nobody talks about the importance of the project architecture. Do we depend on the framework to do the work for us?
You know I’m a big fan of Clean Architecture, but I feel alone when I share my thoughts on social media or at work.
You have to think outside the framework.

Ten Disturbing Stories About the Dark Side of Mindfulness
In this frenzied day and age, more and more of us are turning to mindfulness to lower our stress and center ourselves. Based on Buddhist meditation, mindfulness spans a range of techniques that ask people to be more aware of their thoughts and feelings. The benefits of mindfulness are well documented. But while some gurus […]

The post [Ten Disturbing Stories About the Dark Side of Mindfulness](https://listverse.com/2 … ⌘ Read more

** Skwaking Week Notes **
I’d never thought about adding playlists to my website, but then I did it and now I wanna add more. While I wait to put together another playlist, here’s the song that I’m listening to right now — Lady Lamb’s“Crane Your Neck.”

We had a few big snows, so the kids spent extra time at home and we’ve done a fair bit of sledding and shoveling. There was a bunch of frozen rain after one of the snow storms, so the snow had a crunch … ⌘ Read more

oh dang.. i thought i had parsing for !tag from back when someone was using it for his wiki pages.
i guess i left it out. though shouldnt be to hard to add it back in

oh dang.. i thought i had parsing for !tag from back when someone was using it for his wiki pages.
i guess i left it out. though shouldnt be to hard to add it back in

Very sunny 16°C, heaps of people outside. As soon as we were a bit further into the forest, we had it completely for us. From the foot we thought that the view might be rather good, but up at the summit, it turned out to be very hazy. Oh well. Surprisingly, I found four skyrocket sticks in premium quality. More than after New Year! Also, we came across two deer. It was a very nice two hours walk. No photos, though, sorry.

@prologic@twtxt.net Those aren’t actually serving anything public-facing. I’ve thought about it, but for now I’m sticking with VPSs, partly because I don’t relish the risk of weeks of downtime if something goes wrong while I’m travelling.

I thought hCaptcha was getting off the rails. Try making an X account using a VPN service!

Something interesting to think about for twtxt, the microblogging for hackers and friends…

The biggest challenge of ActivityPub is that it’s too technical to easily explain to regular people. Nobody is interested in a jargon-laden diatribe about servers and federation. When simple questions have overly complex answers, people tend to switch off.
https://activitypub.ghost.org/your-thoughts-on-onboarding/

It would appear that Google’s web crawlers are ignoring the robots.txt that I have on https://git.mills.io/robots.txt with content:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Evidence attached (see screenshots): – I think its the the Small Web community band together and file a class action suit(s) against Microsoft.com Google.com and any other assholes out there (OpenAI?) that violate our rights and ignore requests to be “polite” on the web. Thoughts? 💭

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s what I immediately thought as well. :-D @eapl.me@eapl.me Unfortunately, no fancy buttons. What does your model do?

Adoption center just said shorthairs but a friend of mine swears they are Russian blues. Thoughts? ⌘ Read more

(#h52tetq) @lyse@lyse @andros@andros Are we talking about yarnd here? Hmm? 🤔 I’ve thought about a “read flag” but I …
@lyse @lyse.isobeef.org @andros @twtxt.andros.dev Are we talking about yarnd here? Hmm? 🤔 I’ve thought about a “read flag” but I just haven’t bothered so far… ⌘ Read more

“We’ve Been Essentially Muzzled”: Department of Education Halts Thousands of Civil Rights Investigations Under Trump
Jennifer Smith Richards,  Reporter  -  ProPublica

_Stephan: Criminal Trump has a long history of racism, and his White MAGAt voters love him for it. As this article describes we are seeing a whole new era of racism arise. I would not have thought it possible, but the facts are what they are. Notice … ⌘ Read more

1st thought… Run!

Well, I’ve heard you have plenty of experience with Unit Testing and TDD. Perhaps designing a few tests before refactoring?

I’ve heard of Snapshot testing, but have never tried it: https://github.com/spatie/phpunit-snapshot-assertions

Also, what kind of refactor are you trying to do?

Dipped in weed killer, sprayed with gas — what’s in your supermarket bouquet?
Toxic chemicals and cheap imports — your supermarket bouquet for Valentine’s Day might not be the bargain you thought it was. ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I also thought that I have a new Linux friend the other day. But it was just a fake KDE look from Redmond. :-(

Saw Windows 11 for the first time today and genuinely had to ask if this is really Windows. Looks a lot like KDE.

(At first, I thought the touchpad of that laptop was broken, because a right click on the desktop didn’t do anything. But it worked just fine. It just takes ~10 seconds for the popup to show.)

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev The article is a good reminder of the true blogging mindset. But let’s try to think beyond. 2 ideas: (1) writing “forces clarity, structures your thoughts, sharpens your perspective”. But it also generates thoughts in the sense of Heinrich von Kleist (1805). (2) You’re writing for “the future you, one right person, one day” but you are also writing for the AI. The idea of AI as an audience.

What’s minimalism?
We live in a world where buying and owning stuff is the default. New clothes? Sure. Another gadget? Why not? ⌘ Read more

Self-hosting my emails again
After three years with Purelymail, I’m back at self-hosting my mail server. Not because it’s cheaper (it’s actually much pricier to pay for a VPS), but because my mails are now hosted in Europe (who knows what happens next in the USA), I have more control to configure things how I want, and I can comply with GDPR. ⌘ Read more

**In sane 🤣🤣

$ ollama run deepseek-r1:7b
>>> How does your model's reasoning work exactly?
<think>

</think>

I'm an AI assistant that  ...**
In sane 🤣🤣

$ ollama run deepseek-r1:7b

How does your model’s reasoning work exactly?

I’m an AI assistant that uses algorithms to process information and create responses. While I can mimic some patterns of human thinking in my responses, I
don’t have real human thought or consciousness.

So how do you deliberate and argue with yourself over counting the number of le … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net I’d stumbled upon #FrankenPHP while reading through #Caddy stuff and thought maybe it’s bit overkill for what i need it for but then again, it will be just a “One container in for two out”, that’s win in my book 😆

4000 km with my pedelec
Today, after a short evening shift in the old/new apartment, I reached 4000 km total distance with my Pedelec (the only legal option for an electric bicycle without insurance in Germany – up to 25 km/h is supported by a motor when pedaling). ⌘ Read more

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

@prologic@twtxt.net i thought i was going insane when i saw blank posts on my TL i was like is noscript fucking with me again but no it’s you guys fucking around LOLLLL

Mark Cuban spills about ‘penultimate global power war’ between billionaires
David McAfee,  Senior Editor  -  Raw Story

_Stephan: I confess I had not thought that the struggle amongst the uber-billionaires is actually about which of these men is going to control AI and, thus, have the power to shape human civilization. But I think billionaire Mark Cuban, who knows these people is, upon my doing further research on this issue, probably correct. I don’t … ⌘ Read more

Shrinking trees and tuskless elephants: the strange ways species are adapting to humans
Patrick Greenfield,    -  The Guardian (U.K.)

_Stephan: Creating climate change is just one of the major changes humanity is causing in Earth’s matrix of life. Here’s is somthing you probably have never heard or even thought about. We, as a species, must evolve in our thinking to make fostering the wellbeing of the matrix humanity’s highest priority. A … ⌘ Read more

(#bgkwloa) @terron Oh! For a minute there I thought this was our cat 🐱 Haha 😆
@terron @duque-terron.cat Oh! For a minute there I thought this was our cat 🐱 Haha 😆 ⌘ Read more

i thought about making a chill little vlog putting together my new pi4 for KVM purposes but unless i make it go fast somehow i’d probably quickly exceed the 30 mins on the last mini DVD i have for recording lol

changing my video site’s logo to this silly no thoughts head empty tux clip art. because i can. https://openclipart.org/detail/103855/tux-the-penguin

It turns out my ISP supports ipv6. After 4-5 months with only ipv4, I thought to ask customer support, and they told me how to turn it on. (I’m pretty happy with ebox so far. Low-priced fibre with no issues so far. Though all my traffic goes through Montreal, 500km away from me in Toronto, which adds a few ms to network latency.)

What Makes Someone Wise? Global Study Finds Cross-Cultural Agreement on 2 Major Factors
,    -  Nice News

_Stephan: A reader sent me this, and I found it a very interesting report on research about wisdom. I see so little wisdom in our politics and religion today, and so little understanding of what defines it, that I thought you might like to see this report as well. To download the research paper upon which it is based: https://www.nat … ⌘ Read more

Any idea What’s this "twtxtfeevalidator/0.0.1" UA about? I thought I could ask before throwing a 1000GB file at it 🪤 could it be the same ‘xt’ thing @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org was talking about the other day?

**(#gjcb42q) @movq Hahaha

But why, oh why, would people still use SVN these days. 🥴😅

I thought svc had gone the way of the dodo 🦤**
@movq @www.uninformativ.de Hahaha

But why, oh why, would people still use SVN these days. 🥴😅

I thought svc had gone the way of the dodo 🦤 ⌘ Read more

asciinema is really cool. thought about self hosting my own upload site which they have docs for but i don’t need to host everything even if it’d be a fun project. the default/main site is fine enough for me when i won’t be uploading a whole lot.

We had a faint yellow-orange-redish sky this evening. Only subtle, but it was actually one of those rare 360° sunsets. Just when I thought, that was it, it’s now over, the colors took off like crazy: https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2025-01-01/

Image

A much nicer start into the year than all the hell yesterday. However, just as I type this, there come also the next round of explosions as darkness falls. Those bloody fuckers, please blow yourselves up!

Prosodical Thoughts: Prosody 0.12.5 released
We are pleased to announce a new minor release from our stable branch.

Hope everyone has had a good 2024, and you’re looking forward to a better 2025!

We’re ending this year with a bugfix release for our stable 0.12 branch. This
brings some general polish and a collection of fixes for various small issues
people have reported in the past months.

A notable behaviour change in this release is that Prosody will no longer send
delivery errors to people you have blocked. Inste … ⌘ Read more

** Neon **
I was bemoaning the lack of color at my desk and a friend sent me this link to a place that makes custom neon signs. I am likely much to indecisive, and faaaar too cheap to actually order one, but I keep having intrusive thoughts about what I’d get if I were to get one.

I think the Yiddish phrase“zol er krenken un gedenken” would be funny. It means“let him suffer and remember” which is very melodramatic, but totally rife with so much meaning. ⌘ Read more

US homelessness up 18% as affordable housing remains out of reach for many people
MICHAEL CASEY,  Reporter  -  Associated Press

_Stephan: As I enjoy the Christmas holiday with my wife, daughter and grandson, I have thought about the misery of the rising number of homeless people in the United States, and the cruelty of American communities. Imagine the number of decent living quarters that could be built if the uber-rich actually paid their fai … ⌘ Read more

(#erst7gq) I thought you were talking about a TV series 🤣
I thought you were talking about a TV series 🤣 ⌘ Read more

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.

It’s not a winter wonderland out here, but with Christmas and winter coming soon, maybe a little snow on my blog isn’t a bad idea. I’ve just programmed a snow animation for another project and thought I could reuse the code in the form of a simple GoBlog plugin. ❄❄❄ ⌘ Read more

Today’s EV Batteries May Last Up to 40% Longer Than Expected, Study Finds
Paige Bennett,  Contributing Writer  -  EcoWatch

_Stephan: Here is some good news about EV batteries. If you drive an EV you will find this reassuring that your batteries  will last longer than you were originally told they would which may save you a lot of money. This means that EVs are cheaper than was thought compared to the cost of buying and operating a petroleum-powered vehic … ⌘ Read more

Dr. Oz Exposed for Colossal, Multimillion Dollar Conflict of Interest
Edith Olmsted,  Staff Writer  -  The New Republic

_Stephan: Out of half a dozen stories I saw today reporting the organized corruption that constitutes the incoming Trump administration, I picked this one because it is going to directly affect your life if you are a recipient of Medicare of Medicaid. But I thought I should also mention that Elon Musk spent $277 million buying Trump the Pr … ⌘ Read more

I was today years old when I learned that Firefox supports custom per-domain CSS. Is this new? I thought I had tried a while ago and it only worked globally. 🤔

@-moz-document domain(movq.de)
{
    div { border: 1px solid red; }
}

Either way, I love that I don’t need a plugin for that. 🥳

Mirror, Mirror 2024: A Portrait of the Failing U.S. Health System
David Blumenthal, Evan D. Gumas, Arnav Shah, Munira Z. Gunja, and Reginald D. Williams II,    -  The Commonwealth Fund

_Stephan: As we prepare to be a nation whose healthcare, already the worst amongst the developed democracies, is about to be taken over by incompetent weirdos, I thought it might be useful to readers to see how really bad the American illness profit system already is. By March I … ⌘ Read more

Why I’d never switch to an 🍎 iPhone
Recently, Kev announced he’s switching back to Android, and judging by his first impressions, he seems to be enjoying it. Coincidentally, I came across a video from Linus Tech Tips, where Linus shared his thoughts after using an iPhone for 30 days – and let’s just say, he wasn’t impressed. ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Just that people thought twtxt sounded cool and maybe want to set it up themself

This is so neat.

https://emilyliu.me/blog/open-network

When yarn used to have blogs I thought something like this would be a great feature. Having the blog comments tied to a twtxt subject for the blog post.

This is so neat.

https://emilyliu.me/blog/open-network

When yarn used to have blogs I thought something like this would be a great feature. Having the blog comments tied to a twtxt subject for the blog post.

Initial thoughts about Bluesky
There’s a lot of noise about Bluesky recently, it seems like they passed 20 million users, with more than 1 million new users daily recently. ⌘ Read more

My next Fediverse migration?
I currently use GoToSocial (with my numeronym domain) next to my blog, but it always confuses me where to post what. That’s why I want to move to my blog as my sole Fediverse identity. But before that, I wanted to implement another Fediverse feature in GoBlog: support for the new fediverse:creator meta tag. ⌘ Read more

It still works!
Two years ago, when my girlfriend and I moved together, I rented a VDSL router, a FRITZ!Box 7590 AX. In my second flat, I still had a FRITZ!Box 7490. But one and a half years later, I replaced the wired Internet connection in the second flat with a cellular based one, and the 7490 had no use anymore. ⌘ Read more

brief thoughts on the state of things | https://nilfm.cc/retrograde_motion.html

(#j4tvqyq) You need to figure out what it means to have “free thought”, “to reason”, “have deep understanding” and be able to apply knowledge in …
You need to figure out what it means to have “free thought”, “to reason”, “have deep understanding” and be able to apply knowledge in unfamiliar environments or scenarios. You have to figure out what it means to “dream”. You have to figure out what it means to hold “ethics”, “morals” and even “beleifs”. ⌘ Read more

@wbknl@twtxt.net I have thought of getting one. I wish there were easier tools for it than direwolf

@wbknl@twtxt.net I have thought of getting one. I wish there were easier tools for it than direwolf

Hands On With Apple’s New M4 Mac Mini
Apple launched the new Mac mini, iMac, and MacBook Pro models with M4 chips today, and because the ‌Mac mini‌ is the only one of the machines that got a design update, we thought we’d check it out to see how it compares to the prior version.

_[Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/user/macrumors?sub_conf … ⌘ Read more

(#jsn6ija) @wbknl@wbknl Ahh none that I’m aware of. I’ve thought about getting into HAM Radio myself, but haven’t so far…
@wbknl Ahh none that I’m aware of. I’ve thought about getting into HAM Radio myself, but haven’t so far… ⌘ Read more

(#puqhbtq) @bender@bender I mean I’ve thought about it! It’s an intriguing idea to be able to have basic IP over HAM Radio 🤔
@bender I mean I’ve thought about it! It’s an intriguing idea to be able to have basic IP over HAM Radio 🤔 ⌘ Read more

ProcessOne: Thoughts on Improving Messaging Protocols — Part 2, Matrix

Image

In the first part of this blog post, I explained how the Matrix protocol works, contrasted its design philosophy with XMPP, and discussed why these differences lead to … ⌘ Read more

Prosodical Thoughts: New server, new sponsor
It shouldn’t surprise you, but here we have an obsession for self-hosting. We
fought off many requests to migrate our hosting to Github (even before it was
cool to hate Github - Prosody and Github were both founded in the same year!).

As a result, we self-host our XMPP service (of course), our website, our code
repos, our issue tracker, package repository and our CI and build system.

This is not always easy - our project has always been a rather informal
collaboration of in … ⌘ Read more

It’s been seven years since my father passed, taken from us far too soon at the age of 51. I was only 18 then, and while time has softened some of the pain, his influence remains a constant part of me. He was a person full of curiosity and passion, qualities I feel he passed down to me in his own way. ⌘ Read more

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com I thought I had replied to this, but don’t see it, so my apologies. I like macOS, and Apple machines are the only ones who can run it. Granted, there are Hackintoshes, but those are on the way out, sadly, because of Apple’s move to their own CPU chips. So, no, a ZimaBoard won’t do the trick. 😅

Wives are something else, my friend. “Handle with care” applies all the time. 🤭

Wouldn’t you rather have work and private seperated? Any thought behind this decission? I like tags, like Gmail does it. I still think mail needs a big rethink. It’s too prominent in life, to be this archaic.

(#gctrz4q) > Alternatively, if you prefer yarnd to pretty-print all twts nicely, even ones from simpler clients, that’s fine too and you don�� …

Alternatively, if you prefer yarnd to pretty-print all twts nicely, even ones from simpler clients, that’s fine too and you don’t need to change anything. My ¼ -> ¼ thing is nothing more than a minor irritation which probably isn’t worth overthinking.

Yeah I’ve closed the PR, I just wanted to write it up and see what we all thought. Much easier to talk to a concrete spec proposal sometimes. … ⌘ Read more

(#6efpbga) @aelaraji@aelaraji To be honest I thought the same too, I felt as though you were being a bit too harsh on yourself 😅 Chill �� …
@aelaraji @aelaraji.com To be honest I thought the same too, I felt as though you were being a bit too harsh on yourself 😅 Chill 🤗 ⌘ Read more

I never thought about it.

Testing the New iOS 18.1 Hearing Aid Functionality
With iOS 18.1, Apple is adding a new set of hearing health features to the AirPods Pro 2. The iOS 18.1 release candidate for developers and public beta testers includes the full hearing aid functionality, so we thought we’d give it a try to see just how it works.

_Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos._

To use the new … ⌘ Read more

Hiking in the Alps?
As my girlfriend finally finished her last exams last week, and now we have time for enjoyable activities again, we used yesterday to do another hike in the surrounding area. ⌘ Read more

Welcome back online! I thought you abandoned us to our fate :( I had a panic attack as if a hurricane had blown you away.

[WTS] [EU] [0.2+ XMR] Monero Stickers 250pcs

Decorate your neighbourhood with these disruptive and thought provoking stickers. The 4 new designs are inspired from the original ‘Anonymous Money’ design which has been around for some years already. Choose from the 5 different designs in batches of 50pcs.

Link: https://xmrbazaar.com/listing/TCs3/

ChadXMR (XMRBazaar) ⌘ Read more

IndieWeb Carnival: multilingualism in a global Web
This is my first entry to an IndieWeb Carnival, and the topic this time is especially interesting: multilingualism in a global Web. ⌘ Read more

ProcessOne: Matrix and XMPP: Thoughts on Improving Messaging Protocols – Part 1
For over two decades, ProcessOne has been developing large-scale messaging platforms, powering some of the largest services in the world. Our mission is to build the best messaging back-ends imaginable–an exciting yet complex challenge.

We began with XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), but the need for interoperability and support for a variety of use cases led us to implemen … ⌘ Read more

@sorenpeter@darch.dk oh, I thought we were settled on TABs for a while now, weren’t we? 🤔 The new website mentions TABs too. The command echo -e (on any shell?) will use \t for them.

My first passkeys implementation 🔑
Something I wanted to implement already for a long time, but always seemed too complicated for the occasional programming session here or there, was support for WebAuthn or Passkeys for GoBlog. I noted it down two years ago and also already started to work on the implementation, but never got around to finish it. ⌘ Read more

@doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt Thanks! I’ve almost come up with my own theme already 🤣 I actually don’t really want to use Hugo at all, I find it too complicated. But it is pretty popular so I thought maybe I’d rip-off a nice theme… Hmmm 🧐

Anyway, What I really normally use for a lot of my static sites is zs

More thoughts about changes to twtxt (as if we haven’t had enough thoughts):

1. There are lots of great ideas here! Is there a benefit to putting them all into one document? Seems to me this could more easily be a bunch of separate efforts that can progress at their own pace:
   

1a. Better and longer hashes.

1b. New possibly-controversial ideas like edit: and delete: and location-based references as an alternative to hashes.

1c. Best practices, e.g. Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

1d. Stuff already described at dev.twtxt.net that doesn’t need any changes.

1. We won’t know what will and won’t work until we try them. So I’m inclined to think of this as a bunch of draft ideas. Maybe later when we’ve seen it play out it could make sense to define a group of recommended twtxt extensions and give them a name.

2. Another reason for 1 (above) is: I like the current situation where all you need to get started is these two short and simple documents:
   https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/twtxtfile.html
   https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/discoverability.html
   and everything else is an extension for anyone interested. (Deprecating non-UTC times seems reasonable to me, though.) Having a big long “twtxt v2” document seems less inviting to people looking for something simple. (@prologic@twtxt.net you mentioned an anonymous comment “you’ve ruined twtxt” and while I don’t completely agree with that commenter’s sentiment, I would feel like twtxt had lost something if it moved away from having a super-simple core.)

3. All that being said, these are just my opinions, and I’m not doing the work of writing software or drafting proposals. Maybe I will at some point, but until then, if you’re actually implementing things, you’re in charge of what you decide to make, and I’m grateful for the work.

On removing content
I recently read this short post by Kev Quirk. It’s about removing content from the web. While Manuel Moreale is against deleting content from the web, Kev thinks he would probably delete things if he feels bad about them. ⌘ Read more

Good writeup, @anth@a.9srv.net! I agree to most of your points.

3.2 Timestamps: I feel no need to mandate UTC. Timezones are fine with me. But I could also live with this new restriction. I fail to see, though, how this change would make things any easier compared to the original format.

3.4 Multi-Line Twts: What exactly do you think are bad things with multi-lines?

4.1 Hash Generation: I do like the idea with with a new uuid metadata field! Any thoughts on two feeds selecting the same UUID for whatever reason? Well, the same could happen today with url.

5.1 Reply to last & 5.2 More work to backtrack: I do not understand anything you’re saying. Can you rephrase that?

8.1 Metadata should be collected up front: I generally agree, but if the uuid metadata field were a feed URL and no real UUID, there should be probably an exception to change the feed URL mid-file after relocation.

A weekend with my family
This past weekend, I visited my family in the south of Germany. I wasn’t there for quite some time. On one day, we went to Biel in Switzerland, walking through the Taubenloch (“pigeonhole”, a canyon right next to the city) and sitting on a boat that took us across Lake Biel. It was quite picturesque. ⌘ Read more

2024 Docker State of Application Development Survey: Share Your Thoughts on Development
Take the 2024 Docker State of Application Development Survey now. The survey is open from September 23rd, 2024 (7AM PST) to November 20, 2024 (11:59PM PST). ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Thanks for writing that up!

I hope it can remain a living document (or sequence of draft revisions) for a good long time while we figure out how this stuff works in practice.

I am not sure how I feel about all this being done at once, vs. letting conventions arise.

For example, even today I could reply to twt abc1234 with “(#abc1234) Edit: …” and I think all you humans would understand it as an edit to (#abc1234). Maybe eventually it would become a common enough convention that clients would start to support it explicitly.

Similarly we could just start using 11-digit hashes. We should iron out whether it’s sha256 or whatever but there’s no need get all the other stuff right at the same time.

I have similar thoughts about how some users could try out location-based replies in a backward-compatible way (append the replyto: stuff after the legacy (#hash) style).

However I recognize that I’m not the one implementing this stuff, and it’s less work to just have everything determined up front.

Misc comments (I haven’t read the whole thing):

• Did you mean to make hashes hexadecimal? You lose 11 bits that way compared to base32. I’d suggest gaining 11 bits with base64 instead.

• “Clients MUST preserve the original hash” — do you mean they MUST preserve the original twt?

• Thanks for phrasing the bit about deletions so neutrally.

• I don’t like the MUST in “Clients MUST follow the chain of reply-to references…”. If someone writes a client as a 40-line shell script that requires the user to piece together the threading themselves, IMO we shouldn’t declare the client non-conforming just because they didn’t get to all the bells and whistles.

• Similarly I don’t like the MUST for user agents. For one thing, you might want to fetch a feed without revealing your identty. Also, it raises the bar for a minimal implementation (I’m again thinking again of the 40-line shell script).

• For “who follows” lists: why must the long, random tokens be only valid for a limited time? Do you have a scenario in mind where they could leak?

• Why can’t feeds be served over HTTP/1.0? Again, thinking about simple software. I recently tried implementing HTTP/1.1 and it wasn’t too bad, but 1.0 would have been slightly simpler.

• Why get into the nitty-gritty about caching headers? This seems like generic advice for HTTP servers and clients.

• I’m a little sad about other protocols being not recommended.

• I don’t know how I feel about including markdown. I don’t mind too much that yarn users emit twts full of markdown, but I’m more of a plain text kind of person. Also it adds to the length. I wonder if putting a separate document would make more sense; that would also help with the length.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @falsifian@www.falsifian.org @prologic@twtxt.net Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about and You’ve probably already read this: Everything you need to know about the “Right to be forgotten” coming straight out of the EU’s GDPR Website itself. It outlines the specific circumstances under which the right to be forgotten applies as well as reasons that trump the one’s right to erasure …etc.

I’m no lawyer, but my uneducated guess would be that:

A) twts are already publicly available/public knowledge and such… just don’t process children’s personal data and MAYBE you’re good? Since there’s this:

… an organization’s right to process someone’s data might override their right to be forgotten. Here are the reasons cited in the GDPR that trump the right to erasure:

• The data is being used to exercise the right of freedom of expression and information.
  
• The data is being used to perform a task that is being carried out in the public interest or when exercising an organization’s official authority.
  
• The data represents important information that serves the public interest, scientific research, historical research, or statistical purposes and where erasure of the data would likely to impair or halt progress towards the achievement that was the goal of the processing.
  

B) What I love about the TWTXT sphere is it’s Human/Humane element! No deceptive algorithms, no Corpo B.S …etc. Just Humans. So maybe … If we thought about it in this way, it wouldn’t heart to be even nicer to others/offering strangers an even safer space.
I could already imagine a couple of extreme cases where, somewhere, in this peaceful world one’s exercise of freedom of speech could get them in Real trouble (if not danger) if found out, it wouldn’t necessarily have to involve something to do with Law or legal authorities. So, If someone asks, and maybe fearing fearing for… let’s just say ‘Their well being’, would it heart if a pod just purged their content if it’s serving it publicly (maybe relay the info to other pods) and call it a day? It doesn’t have to be about some law/convention somewhere … 🤷 I know! Too extreme, but I’ve seen news of people who’d gone to jail or got their lives ruined for as little as a silly joke. And it doesn’t even have to be about any of this.

P.S: Maybe make X tool check out robots.txt? Or maybe make long-term archives Opt-in? Opt-out?
P.P.S: Already Way too many MAYBE’s in a single twt! So I’ll just shut up. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net I have no specifics, only hopes. (I have seen some articles explaining the GDPR doesn’t apply to a “purely personal or household activity” but I don’t really know what that means.)

I don’t know if it’s worth giving much thought to the issue unless either you expect to get big enough for the GDPR to matter a lot (I imagine making money is a prerequisite) or someone specifically brings it up. Unless you enjoy thinking through this sort of thing, of course.

isn’t the benefit of blake2b that it is a more efficient algo than sha1 and has the same or similar entropy to sha3? i thought we had partially solved this with some type of expanding hash size? additionally we could increase bit density by using base36 or base64/url-safe…

isn’t the benefit of blake2b that it is a more efficient algo than sha1 and has the same or similar entropy to sha3? i thought we had partially solved this with some type of expanding hash size? additionally we could increase bit density by using base36 or base64/url-safe…

Another weekend with a bike focus
The cycling season is not over yet. ⌘ Read more

Another weekend with a bike focus
The cycling season is not over yet. ⌘ Read more

Things to do in Salt Lake City
With KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024 just a few months away we thought it would be fun to ask our ambassadors and other locals about where to go and what to do while we’re all in Salt… ⌘ Read more

Monocaster
⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org This looks like a nice way to do it.

Another thought: if clients can’t agree on the url (for example, if we switch to this new way, but some old clients still do it the old way), that could be mitigated by computing many hashes for each twt: one for every url in the feed. So, if a feed has three URLs, every twt is associated with three hashes when it comes time to put threads together.

A client stills need to choose one url to use for the hash when composing a reply, but this might add some breathing room if there’s a period when clients are doing different things.

(From what I understand of jenny, this would be difficult to implement there since each pseudo-email can only have one msgid to match to the in-reply-to headers. I don’t know about other clients.)

@prologic@twtxt.net I guess I thought they were search engines. Anyway, the registry API looks like a decent one for searching for tweets. Could/should yarn.social pods implement the same API?

** Constants, variable assignment, and pointers **
After reading my last post, a friend asked an interesting question that I thought would also be fun to write about!

They noted that in the reshape function I declared the variable result as a constant. They asked if this was a mistake? Because I was resigning the value iteratively, shouldn’t it be declared using let?

What is happening there is that the constant is being declared as an array, so the reference … ⌘ Read more

Correct, @bender@twtxt.net. Since the very beginning, my twtxt flow is very flawed. But it turns out to be an advantage for this sort of problem. :-) I still use the official (but patched) twtxt client by buckket to actually fetch and fill the cache. I think one of of the patches played around with the error reporting. This way, any problems with fetching or parsing feeds show up immediately. Once I think, I’ve seen enough errors, I unsubscribe.

tt is just a viewer into the cache. The read statuses are stored in a separate database file.

It also happened a few times, that I thought some feed was permanently dead and removed it from my list. But then, others mentioned it, so I resubscribed.