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
hello friends i spent a couple hours today using a random string generator by charm CLI called hotdiva2000 to make a script that 1) generates a static index.html page 2) the page is a prompt generator where all the prompts are from hotdiva2000!!!!!
this makes more sense if you look at it check it out
@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 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.
you know i’m posting from CLI right now and i still haven’t figured out how to reply to my own post via yarnc
@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Could you share (perhaps in the extension document) the private key for alice?
I want to compare that I can read the encrypted message both from OpenSSL CLI and from the PHP OpenSSL library, following the spec.
i self hosted the soft serve git server cuz i felt like it. it’s sooo cute i love everything charm CLI does
ssh -p 24010 soft.git.girlonthemoon.xyz
I’m sitting in official cabal.club with nicknames doesnm and doesnm-seed from vps because can’t install cli in Termux
been playing with making fun scripts using charm CLI’s gum library :P
one that gets lyrics from an open lyrics database’s API and accepts input for artist & song names: https://asciinema.org/a/697860
and one that uses a user-provided last.fm API key to pull what’s currently playing or what last played on your account :) https://asciinema.org/a/697874
can i still post from here on cli or do i need to re-auth hmm
GUYS HELP I LOCKED MYSELF OUT OF MY ACCOUNT ON WEB AND I COULDN’T GET EMAILS WORKING I’M STUCK POSTING FROM CLI LOLLLL
i’ve been transitioning CLI text editors from nano (godforsaken editor) to micro (normal and not overly opinionated to the point where i feel like i’m defusing a bomb trying to learn its keybindings) and the only weird thing is that i can’t get it to persist an alias from nano to micro when i run sudo despite me configuring that. well at least on my servers, it persists on this machine. idk i’ll look at it later
posting from CLI just cuz i can lalalala i have nothing to talk about
i like this little ideas utility i’ve been using like i keep pulling up the idea table to see what i’ve added and it makes me wanna start one of them like the CLI app i wanna write in golang with charmbracelet’s bubbletea even though i only have a vague idea of what i want in a CLI app
i’ve transitioned text editors from nano (yeah i know) to micro and god micro is just so much better i did not know there was a CLI text editor i could use with sensible keyboard shortcuts that did not leave me feeling like i’m typing nuclear codes to do simple tasks like saving and editing
wanna play with CLI stuff or host something new… maybe play with that charmbracelet git server but i don’t need that lol
another cli test for icons this time
cli test 3
cli test 2
cli test
I think it’s centralized shit with lying about decentralization. All network is worked by two centralized things: plc.directory (did storage?) and network relay (bsky.network). You can host your relay but this require TOO MUCH resources (2TB storage and 32GB RAM read more ). Also i try running PDS and: 1. I can’t register account via app,only via cli 2. It leaked on 2GB virtual machine then killed by oom after trying to register account via cli
@eapl.me@eapl.me here are my replies (somewhat similar to Lyse’s and James’)
Metadata in twts: Key=value is too complicated for non-hackers and hard to write by hand. So if there is a need then we should just use #NSFS or the alt-text file in markdown image syntax

if something is NSFWIDs besides datetime. When you edit a twt then you should preserve the datetime if location-based addressing should have any advantages over content-based addressing. If you change the timestamp the its a new post. Just like any other blog cms.
Caching, Yes all good ideas, but that is more a task for the clients not the serving of the twtxt.txt files.
Discovery: User-agent for discovery can become better. I’m working on a wrapper script in PHP, so you don’t need to go to Apaches log-files to see who fetches your feed. But for other Gemini and gopher you need to relay on something else. That could be using my webmentions for twtxt suggestion, or simply defining an email metadata field for letting a person know you follow their feed. Interesting read about why WebMetions might be a bad idea. Twtxt being much simple that a full featured IndieWeb sites, then a lot of the concerns does not apply here. But that’s the issue with any open inbox. This is hard to solve without some form of (centralized or community) spam moderation.
Support more protocols besides http/s. Yes why not, if we can make clients that merge or diffident between the same feed server by multiples URLs
Languages: If the need is big then make a separate feed. I don’t mind seeing stuff in other langues as it is low. You got translating tool if you need to know whats going on. And again when there is a need for easier switching between posting to several feeds, then it’s about building clients with a UI that makes it easy. No something that should takes up space in the format/protocol.
Emojis: I’m not sure what this is about. Do you want to use emojis as avatar in CLI clients or it just about rendering emojis?
I think salty.im is simplest than simplex. But attempt to implement this i have problems than salty cli cant decrypt messages from another saltpack realization (and reverse) . Also simplex is more decentralized (like nostr?)
.deb
to install Headscale, or some other method?
I ended up installing Headscale on my little VPS. Just in case the collide, I turned off WireGuard. Turning that one off (which ran on a container) also frees some memory. Headscale is running quite well! Indeed, I have struggled getting any web management console to work, but it really isn’t needed. Everything needed to commandeer the server is available through the CLI.
Could someone knowledgable reply with the steps a grandpa will take to calculate the hash of a twtxt from the CLI, using out-of-the-box tools? I swear I read about it somewhere, but can’t find it.
@mckinley@twtxt.net agevault
uses age
, allegedly very secure (aiming to replace pgp
/gpg
). Comparing it with gocryptfs
, from the user perspective, agevault
seems simpler, though CLI exclusive. As the repository states, “Like age, it features no config options, allowing for a straightforward secure flow”. It would also run in all major OS platforms out of the box.
But agevault
is also very new. Though age
has been around for a while now, I don’t see an “audited” link (neither on agevault
, nor age
).
I just revisited my first script which posts to Mastodon and twtxt from CLI
Found a new CLI timetracker assistant named Watson. Works really well.
My cli work-apps: note, plan, dlog (daily log), status and twt.
@prologic@twtxt.net I’ve even added the twthash message hash to my Twtxt bash CLI script so I can properly answer here.
Using the CLI to be in-dis-tractable
Ratchet CLI now supports salty or ratchet comms!
Back to twtxt from the cli with twet https://github.com/jdtron/twet
fake english word generation for Go and CLI: [[https://github.com/nwtgck/go-fakelish]] #links
Upgrading the MacPorts packages on my 2009 Mac Mini via ‘port upgrade outdated’, mostly to get Python 3 > 3.6 and be able to run the current jrnl program #cli #macos
reworked the CLI argument parsing in !weewiki today. running weewiki with no arguments now prints all available subcommands. #weewiki
Discovering TOIlet (and libcaca :-) ) http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/toilet #figlet #AsciiArt #CLI
so glad USB phone tethering exists. no way am I going to stumble through wpa_supplicant and wpa_cli to connect to coffeeshop wifi
/meta @ckipp@chronica.xyz About images, sure, I understand it’s useless for CLI-only use. But if we added our own format, maybe something like Markdown
would work?@freemor@freemor.homelinux.net I’m cheating geting @mekon@sdf.org file by using my own kitbashed php CLI client I am playing around with
@tfurrows@grex.org just saw your one reply. Yes the client does have a way to sync with the we_are_twtxt list. So far the biggest issue with the PHP CLI client is that it takes a long time to poll all the sites
@tfurrows@grex.org It is certainly not polished but I have made a good start on that php CLI
A msg from a PHP CLI program
I think this week I’ll look at a bare bone PHP CLI for a twtxt client. Just for fun mind you