# 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 = 1 204
# self = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://www.uninformativ.de/twtxt.txt.utf-8&offset=204
# prev = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://www.uninformativ.de/twtxt.txt.utf-8&offset=104
afk for a while due to personal stuff
I love the turn this thread took. 🥴
@prologic Hmm. I never really thought this would matter. Most twtxt files are small and I only do a fetch about every 10 minutes. Retrieving a couple of JPEGs from people’s regular web sites is probably more costly. 🤔 Nevertheless, I’ll consider adding it. Thanks!
@lyse Hmm, yeah, that could be worth a try. However: The program tends to be I/O bound because it has to check tens of thousands of local files (one for each twt). Not sure if optimising networking makes a big difference. Plus, it’s finished in 3-6 seconds anyway. 😊
@niplav I don’t know. But you got me.
@birb Welcome back, birb overlord! 
@adi I see. 🤔 Dunno, I might be biased here. The advantages outweigh the costs by far, IMHO. I use Git for almost everything, no matter the size.
@thewismit DVCS = Distributed Version Control System. Something like Mercurial, Bazaar, Darcs, or Git. (Git was probably won this “war”, but there are others.) =
I’m seeing a lot of “FOLLOW: @news from @vain using twtrd/latest” recently on twtxt.net. Bug on your end or on mine? 🤔 🙃
@adi DVCS have made my life so much easier, I wouldn’t give that up. 🤔 Diffability™, history, checksums, syncability, easy branching. There are so many reasons for me to love it. 😊
@adi It comes from my years as a teenager. Lots of strange stuff was going on back then. 🤐
@thewismit Well, it’s a bit exotic: It fetches all the feeds I follow and puts them into a Maildir, which I can then read using Mutt. It looks like this window on the left: https://www.uninformativ.de/desktop/2021-01-12--katriawm-twtxt.png So, it’s a text-only user interface for a terminal on GNU/Linux. (Didn’t care about portability to BSD yet, maybe in the future.) The new code is not yet published, as it’s very fresh and barely tested. 🙃 👷
@adi Haha, not gonna talk about that. 😄
… also fixed a few bugs in the process in the area of twt hash calculation 🙄 Normalizing the time stamps is nasty.
Alright, rewrote my twtxt client in Python. It’s cleaner and a loooooot faster now. fork() + exec() in a Shell script is so super expensive, especially when done many times (i.e. on every twt I see) …
@lyse Yeah, it’s a real word, sadly. I picked it a really long time ago, when I wasn’t good at English – I thought it meant something else. 😵 It’s always a bit embarrassing to read that nickname. Haven’t really thought of something else yet (doing this as an adult feels weird), maybe I’ll just use my initials or fire up a random generator. 🥴
@prologic Hmm, since the username is not part of the actual feed, clients have to store the name separately. (This is actually a flaw of the spec, if you ask me.) So, if I change my name, people would still send me @vain stuff, unless they manually edit their configs. I don’t see a way for an automatic/seamless transition. 🤔
@prologic So, basically a new feed which people have to follow afresh? 🤔 I mean, the HTTP redirect helps with a new feed URL, but not with the username (since people have to explicitly store that name in their database).
Thinking about changing my online nickname, because it’s ancient and quite a bit stupid. I wonder how much chaos that would cause in the twtiverse. 🤔 🥴
@prologic Nice! I’m thinking about polishing up or rewriting my own client, just to get another alternative out there. It’s a bit messy at the moment. Leveraging mutt (or another MUA) to read twtxt works great, IMHO.
@lyse Heh, yeah, that too 😁
When I see people interact on twtxt *without* the use of the Twt Hash Extension, it’s pretty messy. It really makes me appreciate that extension. 👍 Threading is such an important feature. 👍 Too bad the old clients don’t support that. 🤔
@darch Well, thanks – and god dag! I guess. I’m sorry, I don’t know Danish. ;(
In theory, I’m saving a lot of time by working from home 100%. But it doesn’t feel that way. The days appear to be just as short as usual. Meh.
@lyse Feel free to join the forums. 😊 I hope there’s going to be lots of interesting discussions.
@prologic Whoops. Well, let’s hope they can’t do a lot with just your phone number. (I may be a bit old-fashioned and blissfully ignorant, but can they do *anything* aside from sending you spam?)
@angel If XTerm only supported fallback fonts. 😐
@lyse Awwwww 😍 We didn’t get that much. (It appears I live closer to a city, so it’s probably a bit warmer here?)
@prologic Now there is enough. 😁 It’s not like I’d do it, but still nice.
@lyse Nice! We didn’t get that much, but still. I just saw a kid roll around in the snow. 🤣
@lyse Oh, I sacrificed cats. Lots and lots of them. 😈
@prologic Is this translation of one of the replies correct? “Looking at the name, I thought it was a txt site dedicated to Taiwanese 🤪 🤪” 😂
@prologic Oh, sorry then. The glyphs looked chinese to me and Google Translate said so. But I really have no idea. :(
Oh, we have our first chinese user in the twtiverse? Welcome! 👋
That did not help. (Why are graphics drivers so fragile?)
Hmm … I miss the nice warm light of my christmas decoration. Maybe I’ll put it back up. 🤔
My whisky bottle is empty. Sad.
@adi It’s just so tempting. “Oh, I can do this in a few lines of Shell.” Nope, should have been C or Python right away.
@adi Yeah, shell scripts kind of were “the holy grail” for me for many years, but this is changing lately. Especially the lack of proper data structures (lists, dicts) is really annoying. But, uhm, don’t let me stop you! Enjoy it while it lasts! 😁
@adi Don’t be afraid, it will revert. At some point, you’ll think it’s ugly again. 🥴
Seeing crashes again with Intel GPUs on Linux 5.10. Gah. The Internet suggests to remove the xf86-video-intel driver and have X11 fall back on modeset instead … Let’s give it a shot.
@prologic Would be interesting to plot these values. I suspect there are tons and tons of feeds with just a few messages and then some bots with thousands of twts. 🥴
@adi It’s working again! I did a great job, eh? 😇
The end of season 3 would be a good moment to end Star Trek Discovery.
“You broke Reddit! 😢” Well that’s just great.
@lyse Yeah, it’s a huge difference. Pretty happy with the results so far. 🥰 Still, I’d rather pay more next time. (The whole bass guitar thingy was an experiment, I didn’t know if I was going to quit after a few weeks. I tried guitar first, didn’t like it. So I bought the cheapest bass I could find. Turns out, it’s awesome, I love it. 😍)
@lyse Thx 🥴 It’s the first time I’m doing this. Works great, though, already feels *much* better. 🎉
@prologic Lol, mostly the birds, but now that you mention it … 😁
@prologic No, I just stole that video from The Internet. Also, nice dinosaur vibe in your vid. 🦖 😂
@lyse Huh, well, that’s better than nothing. 😲 Thanks!
@lyse Naaah, where’s the fun in that? 🤣
@prologic Yeah, a bit. But nothing’s stopping people from spamming my twtxt.txt file with spammy user agents. If someone can reach me, there will be spam. It’s inevitable. 🤣 (Just much more unlikely if twtxt stays niche and tiny.)
@lucidiot Whoa, dude, that would go to eleven! 🤯
@lyse Ya see, your terminals are black -- now switch to a massively bright browser showing a white page and you'll be blind. 🥴 Dunno, it doesn't have to be *dark* as in *black*. twtxt.net’s dark theme, for example, is really nice.
Haha. I actually made a Mastodon account. Didn’t take long until I got my first “spam follower”: A bot that follows everyone in an effort to gain attention. Yeah. The crux of large social media networks … (Sooner or later, the same thing will happen with twtxt, though.)
Is it just me or is GitHub’s dark mode a bit *too* dark … 🤔
@lyse I see. 🤔 Agreed, just using the original line would have been the easiest thing to do. Well, FWIW, I think including the twter URL is the right thing to do. Otherwise, two “Good morning!” twts sent at the same time get the same ID. That’d be wrong, wouldn’t it?
Deleted my account on twtxt.net. Don’t be alarmed! 😄 It was unused and caused confusion.
@deadguy Hmm, I never used their software like that. When I used dwm, I applied my own patches (or used it vanilla, like dmenu) – which worked really great *for me*. Doesn’t work for anybody. And, yes, documentation is often terrible, plus the code style is way too “concise” IMHO, lots of short variable names, too much focus on the number of lines of code. But the idea of staying small and having well defined goals, all that works great, I think.
@prologic @adi Hmm, I guess for twtxt.net it means something like “be a microblogging platform”, i.e. probably no private messages (totally new scope, not covered by the original spec, already solved by e-mail), no pastebin (already solved by other programs), no chat, … Then again, not even dwm is “pure”, because it has a built-in bar, which maybe should be an individual program. 🤔
@prologic Ah, no, I mean the individual programs. dwm is a good example. There was a lot of activity in the early years, but it has slowed down considerably in the last decade or so. That’s not because dwm is dead, but because it’s pretty much “done”. They had a clear goal, they reached it, done. I’d like to see this approach/philosophy more often.
Oof. About 13 years ago, I was introduced to the suckless project. One of its major “selling points” was that “software can be *done*”. You usually see a huge spike of commits in the beginning and then it falls off rapidly. It appears this basic idea is not very popular. We have to re-iterate it over and over: https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/04/A-culture-of-stability-and-reliability.html
The answer is probably “no”, because of Netflix. I like watching movies, DVD rental is very dead, and streaming is better anyway. When it comes to the *infrastructure* of those companies, oof, how much of the web/internet will be left? 😨 It’s scary how many people use Google hosting, for example. (I have a habit of doing dig MX ….)
@deadguy Hmm, in my mind, Twitter and twtxt are very similar. But then again, I never had a Twitter account, so I actually don’t really know. 🥴 The best ways to have a conversation are still email and IRC, IMHO …
@prologic @lyse @deadguy Oh, I do have it automated. :) Just feels like other people don’t do it. No idea, maybe it’s just because this community is so tiny.
@deadguy Why do you think it’s not a good idea? 🤔 twtxt feels a bit too “one-way” at times, since apparently many people don’t check their access.log and don’t know you’re following them / mentioning them. I originally thought this was an advantage, less noise. Dunno, maybe this is just the coronavirus isolation speaking through me. 🥴
This year starts with week number 53. 🥴
Should I give Mastodon a try after all? 🤔 Certainly not doing self-hosting, though …
@prologic I’m not finished either. It’s incredible. At least most of it is gone now. 🎉
Fuck. Why … So much … So many … boxes and bags and plastic and shit. Why … Why does it exist? Why do I exist? Fuck. 🚮 #ChristmasTrashCrisis
“IBM VoiceType” doesn’t work too bad when doing generic commands, like “open $program” or “maximize window”. But, boy, it’s horrible when dictating text. Let’s see if this gets better after I’ve completed the 256 (!) training sentences …
So annoying that “i386” can mean any number of things: An actual i386, i486, i586, i686, or just “something Intel-ish with 32 bit”. Meh. If you call some binary “i386” and it needs a Pentium 2, then just say so. 🙄
(Desktop screenshots over here: https://www.uninformativ.de/desktop/ )