@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

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.

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.

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)

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?

@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.

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

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