My next try with twtxt - because it’s the closest to my idea of microblogging.

@bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net meanwhile i want to try microblog but can’t because not able to pay for it. They have trial but…

@movq@www.uninformativ.de this is so real… i think we need to bring back topic focused groups but like with a little off topic side of things just in case people wanna go off topic. so the option’s there but the intent is the topic! microblogging isn’t best for this yeah. i think this is part of why IRC still goes strong for many tech people

Confession:

I’ve never found microblogging like twtxt or the Fediverse or any other “modern” social media to be truly fulfilling/satisfying.

The reason is that it is focused so much on people. You follow this or that person, everybody spends time making a nice profile page, the posts are all very “ego-centric”. Seriously, it feels like everybody is on an ego-trip all the time (this is much worse on the Fediverse, not so much here on twtxt).

I miss the days of topic-based forums/groups. A Linux forum here, a forum about programming there, another one about a certain game. Stuff like that. That was really great – and it didn’t even suffer from the need to federate.

Sadly, most of these forums are dead now. Especially the nerds spend a lot of time on the Fediverse now and have abandoned forums almost completely.

On Mastodon, you can follow hashtags, which somewhat emulates a topic-based experience. But it’s not that great and the protocol isn’t meant to be used that way (just read the snac2 docs on this issue). And the concept of “likes” has eliminated lots of the actual user interaction. ☹️

@bender@twtxt.net I use it. It’s not the feature I use the most in the fediverse, but I communicate this way with several friends. For example, it’s the main way I talk to the original creator of the twtxt-el repository, the way people greet me for the first time or the way they notify me of some bugs in the software I maintain. I can even tell you that it’s the main way I talk to some maintainers of the Emacs community. If there are any of you reading my words, speak up!
Why not have the same? There are things I want to say to @prologic@twtxt.net in private, why should I have to send him an email or private IRC? Or an public twt.
Of course, here’s a topic we’ve already talked about: what is twtxt for you? For me it will always be a social network, in microblogging format, but an asynchronous way of communicating. And having a tool to control visibility is basic 😄
I look forward to hearing from you @eapl.me@eapl.me !

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

**(#2dh7m3q) Timeline of Evolution of Twtxt/Yarn.social:

• 2016 – Twtxt created by John Downey: plain text + HTTP = minimalist microbloggin …**
  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 … ⌘ Read more

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.

**I asked ChatGPT what it knows about Twtxt 😂 And surprisingly it’s rather accurate:

Twtxt is a minimalist, decentralized microblogging form …**
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 implementat … ⌘ Read more

my main itch with the DMs extensions is that these messages are intended to be private, not public information. That’s why other extensions make sense, but DMs are another kind of feature.
TwiXter, Mastodon, FB and some other services usually hide the DMs in another section, so they are not mixed with the public timeline.

I find the DM topic interesting, I even made an indie experiment for a centralized messaging system here https://github.com/eapl-gemugami/owl.
Although, as I’ve said a few times here, I’m not particularly interested in supporting it on microblogging, as I don’t use it that much. In the rare case I’ve used them, I don’t have to manage public and private keys, and finally none of my acquaintances use encrypted email.
Nothing personal against anyone, and although I like to debate and even fight, it’s not the case here. This proposal is the only one allowing DMs on twtxt, and if the community wants it, I’ll support it, with my personal input, of course.

A good approach I could find with a good compromise between compatibility with current clients and keeping these messages private is ‘hiding’ the DMs in comments. For example:
# 2025-04-13T11:02:12+02:00 !<dm-echo https://dm-echo.andros.dev/twtxt.txt> U2FsdGVkX1+QmwBNmk9Yu9jvazVRFPS2TGJRGle/BDDzFult6zCtxNhJrV0g+sx0EIKbjL2a9QpCT5C0Z2qWvw==

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.

well… it has been an opportunity to build an artisanal microblogging client on top of a minimalist protocol. I agree on the hacker toy part.

And of course it’s about being part of a niche community which is (mostly) amazing, and nurturing. As there is almost no one writing in my native spanish, it has been an interesting challenge to share my thoughts in english, as well.

I couldn’t say it’s a ‘social network’ per se, I think it lack many engagement things usually associated with social networks, although it has a social part of igniting discussions, learnings and behavioral changes, which is the meaning of social for me.

What is twtxt for me? It is a community of users sharing plain text following a specification that can be readable by both humans and machines.

For some it is a microblogging platform, for others it is a social network, others see it as an enhanced RSS feed and a few consider it a hacker’s toy. I use it as a learning platform. And as collateral damage, I’m meeting some very interesting people.

And for you?

well (insert stubborn emoji here) 😛, word blog comes from weblog, and microblogging could derivate from ‘smaller weblog’. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Microblogging

I’d differentiate it from sharing status updates as it was done with ‘finger’ or even a BBS. For example, being able to reply; create new threads and sharing them on a URL is something we could expect from ‘Twitter’, the most popular microbloging model (citation needed)

I like to discuss it, since conversations usually are improved if we sync on what we understand for the same words.

(#6z7qt4a) You’re all wrong 😑 @anth@anth will happily tell you (hopefully) that we’ve been doing this whole “microblogging” / “status …
You’re all wrong 😑 @anth @a.9srv.net will happily tell you ( hopefully) that we’ve been doing this whole “microblogging” / “status update” thing decades earlier than anything you’ve ever seen in the form of finger 🤣 and “plan” files 😅 ⌘ Read more

I’d need to think about it deeply, but at a first sight, nanoblogging would be a simple text (like the original twtxt spec, aimed for TUIs), and microblogging (like Twitter was a few years ago), would be about sharing texts, images, videos, GIFs, links, and perhaps Markdown styling.

Why? You have shorter messages than in a blog, but you may add almost anything you could do in a blog.
Buuut… who knows?

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com That’s how twtxt started: As microblogging. Yarn shifted up some gears and now it’s more like social media – more powerful, but a bit different. 😅

twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers.

The keyword here is microblogging. But it doesn’t feel like we’ve been (relatively speaking) doing much of that lately… maybe I go the concept of microblogging wrong.

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/

that’s a fair point.

Perhaps, since Twitter in 2006 never implemented read flags, every derivative microblogging system never saw that as an expected feature. This is curious because Twitter started with SMS, where on our phones we can mark messages as read or unread.
I think it all comes from the difference between reading an email (directed to you) vs. reading public posts (like a blog or a ‘wall,’ where you don’t mark posts as read). It’s not necessary to mark it as ‘read’, you just jump over it.

Reading microblogging posts in an email program is not common, I think, and I haven’t really used it, so I cannot say how it works, and whether it would be better for me or not.
However, I’ve used Thunderbird as a feed reader, and I understand the advantages when reading blog posts.

About read flags being simple, well… we just had a discussion this morning about how tracking read messages would require a lot of rethinking for clients such as timeline where no state is stored. Even considering some kind of ‘notification of unread messages or mentions’ is not expected for those minimalist client, so it’s an interesting compromise to think about.

although I agree that it helps, I don’t see completely correct to leave the nick definition to the source .txt. It could be wrong from the start or outdated with the time.

I’d rather prefer to get it from the mentioned .txt nick metadata (could be cached for performance).
So my vote would to make it mandatory to follow @<name url> but only using that name/nick if the URL doesn’t contain another nick.
A main advantage is that when the destination URL changes the nick, it’ll be automagically updated in the thread view (as happens with some other microblogging platforms, following the Jakob’s Law)

As I want to use my blog as my central web identity, I now updated my blogroll to also show all the microblogs I follow, whether these are real blogs, Fediverse or Bluesky profiles. Aren’t starter packs also just a new form of blogrolls? To follow all the blogs in my list, all you need to do is import the OPML file into a feed reader. ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net I recommend its Wikipedia entry is edited then, if you are completely certain.

“Bluesky is a decentralized microblogging social media service primarily operated by Bluesky Social, PBC.”

That I know of, you can run the PDS, and pretty much everything else.

That’s very sad… Btw twtxt is more hardly to spam because of bad discovery. So you can only spam to your followers. Did you really want abandon best method of microblogging?

Serious open (for anyone) question: what makes you follow someone on twtxt? Will you just follow anyone that you come across, simply because that someone using the “decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers” microblog?

Kuo: Next Year’s Upgrade to 12GB RAM Will Be Limited to iPhone 17 Pro Max
Just a day after a noted leaker on Chinese microblogging site Weibo suggested the iPhone 17 lineup in 2025 could see an upgrade to 12GB of RAM across the board, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has claimed that the upgrade [will be limited to the iPhone 1 … ⌘ Read more

Run Threads on Desktop with Mac, Windows PC, Linux
Threads, the social network microblogging Twitter/X competitor launched by Meta (Facebook), is typically thought of as a mobile only experience, with users having the Threads app on their iPhone or Android device. But, if you have a Mac, Windows PC, or Linux computer, and you want to use Threads on your desktop computer, you can … Read More ⌘ Read more

Kev built his own microblog using WordPress and iOS shortcuts to separate his long and short posts. It sounds like this is a better alternative for him than micro.blog. Maybe with SQLite as the database he can even simplify this setup. ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net I like it, I get to follow some people I could not follow before, which I find useful.
But if you have second thoughts about it all - then I can understand that.
If you decide to pull the plug on it - then I’ll just get some additional activitypub service installed on my server and use that for that (I was thinking about installing this: https://github.com/tsileo/microblog.pub ) if needed.

After all, debugging is still fun!
One reason I use an Android smartphone is that there are apps like Indigenous (a MicroPub-compatible app for posting from your phone to a MicroPub-compatible blog). And even if the app ever disappears from the store, there’s still the option to manually install the app. And if you need to, you can also develop your own apps without having to invest nearly $100 a year. ⌘ Read more

GoToSocial seems like a promising alternative to Mastodon. It’s written in Go (👍 in my opinion), lightweight and pretty good documented so far. It’s still “alpha software” but seems to make great progress. In the past, I self hosted a microblog.pub instance and then after some time without any Fediverse profile other than my blog, which has ActivityPub support as well, signed up at Fosstodon to be able to reply to blog comments from the Fediverse. I already set up an instace of GTS, but will probably wait to use it … ⌘ Read more

We’ve barreled past the microblog line and flew straight over the e-mail chain line. This is just social blogging.

@adi@f.adi.onl I don’t remember. I knew about twtxt for a long time. I often seek information about microblogs, and I believe I came across Yarn while browsing the Tubes.

Oooooh idea! I should use this for microblogging! Far superior to Twitter or Mastodon! ;P

I’m finding the microblogging format to be really useful for working out ideas.

plans for weewiki: a zettelkasten-like interface, a microblogging platform inspired by !twtxt, and some utilities for managing collections of SQLar archives. #updates #halfbakedideas

microblog.pub documentation | hexa.ninja ⌘ https://docs.microblog.pub/

a microblogging creative coding platform like dwitter, but for sound. users would be encouraged to remix, the output of one persons code would become the input of the new code. only text would be stored on the server, with audio rendered client-side. to save on time, there could be caches of frozen audio for remixes. #halfbakedideas

This one is coming to you from the Alfred launcher https://albertlauncher.github.io/ and a Bash script calling txtnish https://github.com/mdom/txtnish and oysttyer https://github.com/oysttyer/oysttyer #microblogging

This one is coming to you from the Alfred launcher https://albertlauncher.github.io/ and a Bash script calling txtnish https://github.com/mdom/txtnish and oysttyer https://github.com/oysttyer/oysttyer #microblogging

If someone is using this niche microblog thing twitter: #profanity has a poll what terminal #xmpp client you are using: https://twitter.com/ProfanityIM/status/1207317970667606022

@robbinaer@robbinaer.info, ok I think it’s normal for such a nerdy microblogging tool to be rather quiet.

Let’s see if I will really use this as I never was into microblogging so far…