@prologic@twtxt.net When I first started using twtxt, I was fascinated by the fact that it’s just a simple text file. This is already undermined a lot today by us using multiline replies and Markdown and what not. Still, I would love to retain this property of it being just a file that needs very few external tools to maintain. (Jenny is quite bloated, one might argue. One of the reasons for even starting the jenny project was the calculation of hashes – I was using a smaller, simpler toolchest before.)
If we were to use (replyto:…), I could just copy and paste the required info into my text editor. With echo … | sha256sum | base64 (+ the truncation step), I have to open a new terminal, make sure the tab gets copied verbatim, make sure that there’s no trailing whitespace in the content, little details like that. It is more effort.
This probably isn’t the best argument for (replyto:…), but it is an argument.
Would people do all this manually? I don’t know. Probably not. But part of the fascination with twtxt is that you could do it.
I’m speaking from a point of extreme minimalism here and all this isn’t strictly only related to (reply:…). It just reflects my general view on twtxt. The more additional things we build on top, the less interesting twtxt becomes (for me). My goal would be to find solutions that require less. Like, don’t solve edits breaking threads by adding another protocol, but by rethinking the whole thing, finding the root cause, and maybe come up with something that doesn’t need another building block on top.
This is all I have to say for now. 😃 I’m gonna let things cool off for a while.