# I am the Watcher. I am your guide through this vast new twtiverse.
#
# Usage:
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/users View list of users and latest twt date.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/twt View all twts.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/mentions?uri=:uri View all mentions for uri.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/conv/:hash View all twts for a conversation subject.
#
# Options:
# uri Filter to show a specific users twts.
# offset Start index for quey.
# limit Count of items to return (going back in time).
#
# twt range = 1 150
# self = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://twtxt.net/user/https://twtxt.net/user/eldersnake/twtxt.txt/twtxt.txt&offset=150
# prev = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://twtxt.net/user/https://twtxt.net/user/eldersnake/twtxt.txt/twtxt.txt&offset=50
If anyone has any ideas of good lightweight website 'date-picker' options I'm all ears. Most are just overly JS bloated and such, but at the same time native browser options aren't great either. So much for standards!
@adi I don't think I ever used the word 'force'. I like the idea of omitting the Like features etc because it, we'll say, *encourages* proper conversation and back and forwards communication.
@prologic Especially important because instead of how we see on the likes of FB where people just passively aggressively 'react' to comments/posts with the Laugh emoticon, people have to actually reply with a reasoned argument. In theory anyway.
Another Luke Smith video I just enjoyed: A Demonstration of Modern Web Bloat\n\nThe difference in the bloated examples versus the minimal (but still lovely) example he made was a thing of beauty.
I haven't looked up any studies or anything but I wouldn't be surprised if those who avoided Facebook, Twitter etc were actively happier on a daily basis.
I think when you reduce entire scores of people to nothing but dots and lines on a graph, it's bound to go badly. In a business setting at least.
@prologic It is very difficult it seems. There are those who will argue "just talk to them through text and calls" like the old days, which on the surface at least seems a fair enough argument, but I don't know it's always that easy. I feel like anyone that does that might, depending on the people they are family/friends with, be seen as a bit outcast or something. I hate the big tech platforms as much as anyone, but it's hard to be kept "in the loop" if I don't at least keep some tabs on it.
@prologic In the case of social media it's really just the factor of my close family and friends being on the likes of Facebook, which is really the only mainstream social media I'm on. It probably sounds like a cop out, but I don't think I'm the only one. As for junk food, ironically I have that more under control, mostly because it upset my stomach π
There is occasional indulgence of course though.
P.S I'm still a consumer of both to some degrees, I'm not perfect, but I think it's worth thinking about.
More I think of it, I believe the typical popular social media landscape as we know it is an analog to junk food.\n\nAs we know junk food:\n- rewards the pleasure sensors, not necessarily through good means\n- is addictive and often designed to be so\n- often defended/justified by the masses as being okay in 'moderation', despite knowing that it's addictive qualities make that difficult in some cases.\n\nI think the above can be directly applied to the big social media platforms too.
@prologic Yep I'm not even very familiar with Go and had the same thoughts as you. Might as well have compared C with PHP.
@adi Ahh okay, never seen that before. Mine is basically this. I admit I haven't at all looked up RSS/Atom specifications or anything so not sure how correct the actual feed is, should probably check that some time!
@adi I'm pretty sure the mkws archive I downloaded just had the sitemap.uppxml file, which I based my rss.uppxml on, but copied in the relevant atom tag bits from another blog site. Then I loop through my folder pages, source the meta data, etc, similar as how I customized the mkws script.
@prologic totally agree with you but unfortunately I think critical thinking escapes too many. In some ways I'm pretty sure these social media platforms encourage lack of critical thinking. A lot easier to keep and control a big dumb addicted herd.
@ionores looks interesting! I use a pre-configured Mutt at the moment, be interesting to compare them.
Yeah I'm admittedly a little wasted tonight so not sure I 100% understood the article π€£ Might have to re-read in the morning.
Interesting article. The author seems to prefer the populace social media model with all the problems it brings. On the one hand I know what he's saying, but on the other I think he's being a bit defeatist.
It's pretty bloody ridiculous. Unfortunately, it's a good example of the real problem - not the internet itself, but corporations and those in power mucking it up for everyone else.
@prologic "What you see here is as good (or as bad, ir may never become huge or popular, letβs face it!, it lacks the dopamine effects) as it gets" \nAnd fine with me! (how do you quote on here?). Something I've begun to realise while being on here is that the only 'reaction' one gets is actual *interaction*, you know, with words and stuff like people would normally do in conversations, and it's kinda refreshing.
There's also surfraw. Written by Julian Assange believe it or not. But it's a handy little CLI tool for the sort of thing you guys are talking about.
I already have it - Vim + plain text π
Looks good to me. Not sure if they will load for everyone, because of the Amazon part, although it did for me and Brave browser's blocking shield is reasonably aggressive. But yeah, looks good and the books look like good resources.
@bml oh nice! Yeah the awesome battery life is appealing too.
@prologic Haha π
In all seriousness though, the topic reminds me of one of these: AlphaSmart 3000 Review.\nI wouldn't mind getting one of these some time. Looks good for a bit of distraction free writing, and portable!
@prologic @xjix I'm surprised no one has tried to run JavaScript on a typewriter π (jokes)
@prologic Yeah exactly kind of what I'm thinking, a typical twtxt.txt file will end up being pretty long and a HTML page with an ever decreasing scrollbar size might not be a good thing lol xD Yeah latest *N* is probably the *simplest* solution...
@adi What's your opinion on pagination? I was able to implement a rudimentary pagination on my twts page by using split on the twtxt.txt and a nested call to pp, but I dunno, I don't love it. Do people generally not mind loading a longer HTML page if its still mostly just text?
@adi In terms of wrapping them in HTML it's no more effort really, plus it's just a lot more efficient than calling smu a billion times (slight exaggeration) line by line.
@bml I know it won't win any game awards, but I am impressed the guy managed to make it in pretty much just C and a handful of FOSS tools. Ultra ultra portable!
@adi Aha! Interesting, thank you. Programs like awk continue to surprise me (in a good way).
@will Isn't that almost a badge of honour nowadays? π
@prologic Lol I thought you were talking about a politician
And probably just their media person too.
@adi Just realised a basic gsub on the date string stripping the 'T' and 'Z' does a respectable enough output.
@adi Legend! Works great, thanks man. awk still isn't my strong area, so that helps. It's definitely that bit quicker to generate as you would expect too, being more efficient. You wouldn't also have some clues how to format the date? AFAIK you can't run the date command inside awk?
@adi good point! I might have a go of that today.
@adi probably yeah, the main reason I even do the line by line is so I can more effortlessly wrap each line in my HTML container divs.
This does mean it's only updated when I push another site update of course, so it's not a live feed. I could Cron that too, but eh, I don't mind synchronizing once or twice a day for now.
@darch custom I guess. I'm running sed on the raw twtxt.txt file to convert the tags to Markdown friendly links, saving it to a temporary file and then looping through it line by line and putting the lines through smu (Markdown). This is run inside the mkws SSG by @adi . It's probably not the most efficient code but it works!
@prologic Yep, I tapped the post button twice, which apparently submits even though the button is in the 'Loading/Spinning' state still submits a second time!\nSo yeah, not a bug as such, maybe something that could be fixed in Goryon's UI to not allow an accidental second tap or so. My touchscreen can be fairly sensitive, especially as battery gets low.
@prologic this is a test post (may double up)
@prologic this is a test post (may double up)
It's interesting that the double up is actually in the twtxt.txt file itself, and looking at this particular example, the double up comment was timestamped two seconds after the original.
@adi Oh it totally is. And as I said in the article, I once did essentially just that. Which I totally regretted. And managing all the bits and pieces with Webpack/Rollup etc, while it might be useful for really big projects, just felt like bloat and overkill.
@prologic @xuu Strange, I made that comment from Goryon if that helps at all.
@xj9 you must have words to express?
@bml just on OpenBSD, how's the hardware support? in terms of drivers etc. I can never quite tell looking at the site. I used to play around with FreeBSD a bit which I enjoyed, I think it's the only BSD I've tried though.
@bml haha I hear ya. I'm not against it in general but the way it gets overused in many places just hurts my soul lol.
@bml love the simplicity TBH. If it's all you need, that's all that matters.
Hmm, just to let you know, the tw.tgz file doesn't seem to download, I get a 406 error.
I uh... don't know what to say about this π³
Haha awesome. I love how Plan9 seems to be cropping up in more and more places lately, a twtxt client was bound to happen at some point.
I'm all for a prologic built Aussie search engine! Sadly you just know the buffoons who'll fork out money will give it to some company that will try to take advantage of peoples data and be Aussie's Google-lite.
Yeah look I'll grant them the work they did early on, they earned their stripes to get them on their way. But then eventually they've made their whole "Do No Evil" mantra look like a total farce, because for mine they do plenty of 'evil'.
Yeah you built one as a starting point in a weekend sitting on your own budget. Given money in the millions, I imagine it's not too hard of an ask at all. Google's dominance comes down to a bunch of other factors anyway rather than who is _better_, not least of which the fact it's included as default search engine on so many devices and browsers.
@slashdot memo to thr world: you don't have to get AI to do everything..
it's nice not having data held hostage π
in the meantime I just run a Cron scheduled script to periodically wget the twtxt.txt hosted here and copy it to my local machine as well as push the downloaded copy to my personal website.
interesting indeed. The import syntax and concat'ing of variables reminds me of JavaScript funnily enough.
@prologic Good stuff. Yeah sys-admin-ing a typical mail setup isn't exactly always fun...
Sh*t like this is what makes one want to use their own hosted mail...*
@prologic No worries! And that makes sense regarding the angle brackets, force of habit for me just using them wily nily in WYSIWYG editors. But anyway, it helped expose a bug π
@prologic Odd! For extra info, the reason I edited is I originally had my "insert web framework" enclosed in arrows (eg. less than and greater than arrows) but putting them in directly made the whole bit of text not even show (I'm guessing they weren't automatically converted to HTML safe > etc).
@prologic Heh exactly! And interesting, I edited my comment and it put it after yours.
KISS has been my mantra for some years now, and I still have to pull myself up sometimes for being caught up trying to over complicate some solution or falling for the hype around _insert web framework_ etc etc.
twtxt/Yarn.social is definitely the best Indieweb-ish thing I've come across. Even Webmentions looked a little complicated to self implement, although I suspect part of that is the documentation is all over the place (and maybe part of it is me, who knows)
@prologic I'm totally quietly thinking of it as Yarns ππ
yeah I love not having to be on some massive API reference docs page just to generate a website too, as a user.
And this would be a bad thing?? lol π
@jlj very interesting. And through that I just discovered the solar version of Low Tech Magazine. I think I'm in love!!
It amazes me sometimes how these things end up vertical enough to end up embedded like this. Always sucks!
@prologic You can according to this (run your own Gab instance) https://code.gab.com/gab/social/gab-social. I just think no one... really has. I assume because of a combination of complexity and maybe just the general audience would rather pay a Pro subscription to be on the main instance instead of going through the work of spinning up their own. But yes as it stands the user experience is one of frustration a lot of the time. If a comment thread is big enough, it somehow even lags my phone terribly while trying to type.
@prologic As for *this* site, besides the odd caching issue, it runs like a dream. I know the demand and everything is apples and oranges, obviously, but I think twtxt is structured in such a way from the outset it will always scale better for reasons you just stated.
As for Gab's design, that didn't worry me too much, if we're talking aesthetics, but what worries me is their underlying codebase. They're struggling to keep up with the server demand and performance as it is, and I'm pretty sure it's based on Ruby under the hood? I thought that would introduce some scaling problems alone, but I'm no expert on it. In any case, it doesn't run terribly well a lot of the time.
Yeah I have mixed thoughts on Gab since that post. It was my first forey into a new free speech platform, that was also meant to be somewhat decentralised, although I don't know how many people *actually* run separate Gab instances.\nMy idea was good; get more diverse people on there to make it less of an echo chamber. Problem is, there's still so many hardcore Christian evangelists there it might scare people away.
@adi Looks good, and I was able to tell what it was so it's effective enough. I'm not sure what else you could really do with the website, it's minimalism and cleanliness is very relevant to the software itself. Maybe somewhere it could do with a bit more talking mkws itself up in terms of its advantages, a few 'testimonials' etc.
@adi Now that's an interesting idea... I don't know how you solve the security issue exactly, but it makes a lot of sense otherwise. And yes, progressive enhancement FTW.