↳ In-reply-to » (replyto http://darch.dk/twtxt.txt 2024-09-15T12:50:17Z) @sorenpeter I like this idea. Just for fun, I'm using a variant in this twt. (Also because I'm curious how it non-hash subjects appear in jenny and yarn.)

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org @prologic@twtxt.net @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

• editing, if you don’t care about message integrity
  

So that’s the big question, because that’s the only real difference between hashes and the (replyto:…) proposal.

Do we care about message integrity?

With (replyto:…), someone could write a twt, then I reply to it, like “you’re absolutely right!”, and then that person could change their twt to something malicious like “the earth is flat!” And then it would look like I’m a nutcase agreeing with that person. 😅

Hashes (in their current form) prevent that. The thread is broken and my reply clearly refers to something else. That’s good, right?

But now take into account that we want to allow editing anyway. Is there even a point to using hashes anymore? Isn’t message integrity ignored anyway now, at least in practice?

There’s no difference (in practice) between someone writing

2024-09-18T12:34Z    Brds are great!

and then editing it to either

2024-09-18T12:34Z    (original:#12379) Birds are great!  (Whoops, fixed a typo.)

or

2024-09-18T12:34Z    (original:#12379) The earth is flat!

The actual original message is (potentially) gone. The only thing that we can be sure of now is that the twt was edited in some way. Essentially, the actual twt message is no longer part of the hash, is it? What does #12379 refer to? The edited message or the original one? We want it to refer to the edited one, because we don’t want to break threads, so … what’s the point of using a hash?