@bender@twtxt.net Yeah, well, it’s a bit like twtxt. There is a Gopher community, but it’s small. I actually don’t like that HTTP is so easily accessible. I don’t like it that much when people post links to my site on HackerNews or something like that. Too much exposure.

Gopher is a small world. It’s slow and cozy.

And much like twtxt, the protocol is simple®, so it’s easier to tinker with it.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de why Gopher to babble, and not just HTTP? I mean, may as well just write plain text files on your machine, and leave them there, right?

Gopher and Mastodon are two completely different things. That’s where my confusion comes from.

@bender@twtxt.net Both Gopher and Mastodon are a way for me to “babble”. 😅 I basically shut down Gopher in favor of Mastodon/Fedi last year. But the Fediverse doesn’t really work for me. It’s too focused on people (I prefer topics) and I dislike the addictive nature of likes and boosts (I’m not disciplined enough to ignore them). Self-hosting some Fedi thing is also out of the question (the minimalistic daemons don’t really support following hashtags, which is a must-have for me).

I’ll probably keep reading Fedi stuff, I just won’t post that much, I think.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de how does Gopher relates to Mastodon? Are you getting off the Fedi completely?

Gopher server is back online and I’ll be phasing out Mastodon.

gopher://uninformativ.de

(No, I won’t do multi-protocol twtxt again. 😅)

When I chose the MIT license for all of my software, I thought:

“Should I use GPL, which I don’t really understand? Is that worth it? Yeah, there is a theoretical possibility that some company might use my code in their proprietary product … and then what? Should I sue them to enforce the GPL? I’m not going to do that anyway, so I’ll just use the MIT license.”

And now we have those LLM scrapers and now it’s suddenly a reality that these companies (ab)use my code. I can see it in my logs. I didn’t expect that back then.

GPL wouldn’t help, either, of course. (Regardless, I now think that GPL would have been the better choice anyway.)

I’m honestly considering taking my code and website offline. Maybe make it accessible through some obscure protocol like Gopher or Gemini, but no more HTTP.

(Yes, Anubis might help. Temporarily.)

I’m just tired.

@prologic@twtxt.net OH SHIT using this for a protocol like gopher is smart! might have to try that for gemini so i don’t have to keep a port open for that

@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
         }
      }
   }
}

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Broke on me for having alt-urls I think 🥲

twtxt---profile-layout: Wrong type argument: char-or-string-p, ("https://aelaraji.com/twtxt.txt" "gemini://box.aelaraji.com/twtxt.txt" "gopher://box.aelaraji.com/0/twtxt.txt")

@eapl.me@eapl.me here are my replies (somewhat similar to Lyse’s and James’)

1. 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 ![NSFW](url.to/image.jpg) if something is NSFW

2. IDs 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.

3. Caching, Yes all good ideas, but that is more a task for the clients not the serving of the twtxt.txt files.

4. 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.

5. 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

6. 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.

7. 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?

Simplified twtxt - I want to suggest some dogmas or commandments for twtxt, from where we can work our way back to how to implement different feature like replies/treads:

1. It’s a text file, so you must be able to write it by hand (ie. no app logic) and read by eye. If you edit a post you change the content not the timestamp. Otherwise it will be considered a new post.

2. The order of lines in a twtxt.txt must not hold any significant. The file is a container and each line an atomic piece of information. You should be able to run sort on a twtxt.txt and it should still work.

3. Transport protocol should not matter, as long as the file served is the same. Http and https are preferred, so it is suggested that feed served via Gopher or Gemini also provide http(s).

4. Do we need more commandments?

I was not suggesting to that everyone need to setup a working webfinger endpoint, but that we take the format of nick+(sub)domain as base for generating the hashed together with the message date and content.

If we omit the protocol prefix from the way we do things now will that not solve most of the problems? In the case of gemini://gemini.ctrl-c.club/~nristen/twtxt.txt they also have a working twtxt.txt at https://ctrl-c.club/~nristen/twtxt.txt … damn I just notice the gemini. subdomain.

Okay what about defining a prefers protocol as part of the hash schema? so 1: https , 2: http 3: gemini 4: gopher ?

I would love to see a world where ones twtxt feed is defined by webfinger. So @xuu@txt.sour.is => https://text.sour.is/user/xuu/twtxt.txt

Then my identity can exist independent of the feed location. And I can host multiple protocol types for my feed. Ie. http/gopher/Gemini/irc DCC/etc

@fastidious@arrakis.netbros.com the things Gemini has going for it are mutual TLS and lack of JavaScript. Which makes for a secure albeit boring experience (much like gopher). The fake markdown is a bit of a drag.

A render mode for Gemini probably wouldnt be too hard. There are markdown to Gemini libs out there.

With Web3 the whole trust a 3rd party browser ext + high fees + env impact for compute and storage are serious no gos for me.. I have heard one too many horror stories about clicking the wrong link and some script draining your metamask wallet.

@prologic@twtxt.net that seems to match my numbers. are you picking up the few gophers out there?

kinda makes me wonder about the ~300k you have cached. y’all got the library of alexandria over there.

@prologic@twtxt.net yeah it reads a seed file. I’m using mine. it scans for any mention links and then scans them recursively. it reads from http/s or gopher. i don’t have much of a db yet.. it just writes to disk the feed and checks modified dates.. but I will add a db that has hashs/mentions/subjects and such.

@lyxal@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net yah. the service can have a flag for allowing non-TLS for development. but by default ignores.

are there some users that use alternative protos for twtxt? like ftp/gopher/dnsfs 🤔

Can I interest you in the latest edition of Tales From The Dork Web when it’s about Gopher, Gemini and The Smol Internet? https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/gopher-gemini-and-the-smol-internet

New post on my Gopher site. Back to updating it once a month.

@kas@enotty.dk I like your gopher server’s formatting, nice and clean and how did you implement the TLS certificate?

@kas@enotty.dk [re: gopher client] If you happen to be on Windows, then Gopher Browser for Windows by Matt Owen is pretty nice, otherwise I use Lynx indeed for gopher.

Enjoying the constraints of the Gopher protocol as a minimalistic zen-mode kind of online publishing revival.

@mdom@domgoergen.com The news site at gopher://taz.de:70/ is really cool. How did you make it?

My gopher site is about 38K big - still plenty of space left on the 1.24MB floppy disk

Updated my daily journal at gopher://gopher.johanbove.info:70/notes

Mirrored on gopher://gopher.johanbove.info/0/twtxt.txt

@davebucklin@davebucklin.com Welcome to the IndieWeb! Thanks also for introducing me to #twtxt. Gophering this for sure.

I am also thinking about using a gopher url for that…

@sdk@codevoid.de Well I’ve added the special datetime to my kitbashed client. I store the URL it gets but I’m not doing anything with it right now.

@sdk@codevoid.de as for the 140 character limit. I swear I read somewhere that the limit was really more of a suggestion than anything else. I don’t think any of the clients I’ve looked out enforce it. As long as it’s on a single line, no one seems to care too much.

@sdk@codevoid.de A comment might not be in the spec, but I know several of the twtxt files I’ve looked at have them. I know my kit bashed twtxt client ignores those lines and I’m sure other clients do too.

@sdk@codevoid.de you know the more I think about it, it might make sense to have it the twtxt file. It would just need to be a comment line something like “#follows sdk gopher://codevoid.de/0/tw.txt” on a single line. That way it would be easy to parse out those follows by finding the #follows.

@sdk@codevoid.de a random mix into the the twtxt file seems less clean to me. The former would be easier to implement and simpler for another program to get and parse.

@sdk@codevoid.de That’s an interesting thought. I Know most are text files but at one time there was someone that used a python CGI Script. That person would have had to make a script for the follows.

@sdk@codevoid.de I have to admit that’s true. While I don’t call myself an expert, I almost always wore several hats at places I’ve worked. Programmer, Server Admin, Network Admin, Cable Puller, Telephone Admin, PBX installer, Database Admin, etc

I now have a gopher setup at gopher://vernunftzentrum.de

@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

Had to update my client to use CURL so I could get @mekon@sdf.org twtxt file via gopher

Also using curl with txtnish means I can pull from tons of protocols, #gopher #onion…