# 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 47
# self = https://watcher.sour.is/conv/5gb3dqq
@twtxt I didn't know unfollow events were publicly broadcasted...
@twtxt I didn't know unfollow events were publicly broadcasted...
@mckinley Yeah they are, but to be honest I _think_ they're a bit pointless. I _might_ just remove them. Less code :D
@mckinley Yeah they are, but to be honest I _think_ they're a bit pointless. I _might_ just remove them. Less code :D
@lyse The utility of follow events I think is important for discovery 🤔
@lyse The utility of follow events I think is important for discovery 🤔
@prologic I consider this a violation of privacy. Telling feed authors that you are following them is one thing, but disclosing this to the whole world is problematic.
@lyse @prologic That's an interesting point. It most certainly aids discovery, but at what cost? I hadn't considered that, up to this point.
Honestly, the entire follow system is flawed. Check my followers, #3 was a web crawler with a user agent that happened to fit the regex, and #17 was myself requesting my own feed with a simple curl command.
Unfortunately, I don't see a real solution to the problem while keeping the ability for external feeds to show up as "following" a user on a Yarn pod.
Honestly, the entire follow system is flawed. Check my followers, #3 was a web crawler with a user agent that happened to fit the regex, and #17 was myself requesting my own feed with a simple curl command.\nUnfortunately, I don't see a real solution to the problem while keeping the ability for external feeds to show up as "following" a user on a Yarn pod.
The user agent regex was made a little more restrictive after my git issue, but I think someone could use this and really start breaking things. I want to poke around more than I already have, but I'm not doing it on a live production instance of Yarn.
The user agent regex was made a little more restrictive after my git issue, but I think someone could use this and really start breaking things. I want to poke around more than I already have, but I'm not doing it on a live production instance of Yarn.
@jlj Admittedly, once you start interacting with others, it's pretty clear, that you're following them. But if you just want to silently read somebodys messages, that's not silent then.
@mckinley Hahaha, great fun! :-D I reckon, the following stats need to reset after a specified amount of time (e.g. a week or whatever), so that they get cleaned up a bit over time. Not perfect by any means, but probably a whole lot better than counting a single request from sevens years ago. Unfollow events from other systems aren't propagated to yarnd, so that would take care of this.
@mckinley Of course I meant the stats on the followers of a feed rather than the followings of a feed.
all really good points! Especially the one on privacy is quite valid and something I’d like to address immediately. Can we get some action items so that I can implement them as soon as possible?
all really good points! Especially the one on privacy is quite valid and something I’d like to address immediately. Can we get some action items so that I can implement them as soon as possible?
@prologic I'd say the first thing regarding the privacy one is probably to disable the twtxt feed.
@lyse Sure but we’d have to replace it with something that provides the same utility:
* Know who has started following you
* Pod Admin can see who’s new to their pod
@lyse Sure but we’d have to replace it with something that provides the same utility:\n\n* Know who has started following you\n* Pod Admin can see who’s new to their pod
@lyse Sure but we’d have to replace it with something that provides the same utility:
* Know who has started following you
* Pod Admin can see who’s new to their pod
@lyse Meanwhile I’ve removed the “UNFOLLOW” events 👌 (they’re pretty useless really)
@lyse Meanwhile I’ve removed the “UNFOLLOW” events 👌 (they’re pretty useless really)
@prologic I haven't looked into the source code, but it naively appears to me, that we can just not list the twtxt feed anymore. At least make it not publicly available, if the feed itself is somewhat structural to the whole follow system. Very cool, that the unfollow is removed. :-)
@prologic Oh, actaully looking at the twtxt feed for a second or two, it seems that it also contains the "new feed created" events. So we could simply keep the "FEED" events, but do not add the "FOLLOW" events anymore. This way, the "FEED" events still announce new users/feeds. For users to see, who is following them, they could go to their followers page. But I reckon you want them to see this in their timeline, right?
@lyse The way I originally "envisioned" this was basically a convenience around the whole User-Agent way of advertising your interest in following someone's feed. Of course you don't have to, it's actually optional. But I didn't really want to build a full-blown "notifications" system at the time, I just did the lazy thing of just publishing a FOLLOW foo from bar using xyz posted from a @twtxt bot at the pod level. Think of it as tailing the access.log looking for matching User-Agent(s) -- Because that's what it does 🤣
@lyse The way I originally "envisioned" this was basically a convenience around the whole User-Agent way of advertising your interest in following someone's feed. Of course you don't have to, it's actually optional. But I didn't really want to build a full-blown "notifications" system at the time, I just did the lazy thing of just publishing a FOLLOW foo from bar using xyz posted from a @twtxt bot at the pod level. Think of it as tailing the access.log looking for matching User-Agent(s) -- Because that's what it does 🤣
@lyse I _do_ agree about the privacy aspect though. If you recall an account on a pod has the notation of "show my followers publically" and "show my followings publically" and you an toggle these. So that's cool. But if we're going to do this then we _probably_ want to remove the @twtxt bot entirely and build a proper internal per-user notification?
@lyse I _do_ agree about the privacy aspect though. If you recall an account on a pod has the notation of "show my followers publically" and "show my followings publically" and you an toggle these. So that's cool. But if we're going to do this then we _probably_ want to remove the @twtxt bot entirely and build a proper internal per-user notification?
Also FWIW the existing behaviour doesn't scale anymore anyway... So it's probably time to rethink it anyhow 🤔 -- It often causes noise if you _actually_ happen to follow the @twtxt bot like I do (_mostly just to see who has joined my pod and to greet them_)
Also FWIW the existing behaviour doesn't scale anymore anyway... So it's probably time to rethink it anyhow 🤔 -- It often causes noise if you _actually_ happen to follow the @twtxt bot like I do (_mostly just to see who has joined my pod and to greet them_)
@prologic Yes, I see the point. In fact it's really, really neat, that this just uses the same mechanism as regular feeds. The real notifications rock is probably too big to kill this bird. Maybe we can come up with personalized follower feeds for the users. It's just a crude idea. Haven't given much thought to that.
@twtxt @prologic perhaps the option for email notifications (once a day or week) or a visual marker - your followers display with a slightly thicker border around their avatar or such.
@lazarus Remember pods don't store email addresses, so "sending emails" is impossible 🤣 -- But a "visual marker" to me just sounds like a "notification system". The question is how simple or complex do we make it? 🤔
@lazarus Remember pods don't store email addresses, so "sending emails" is impossible 🤣 -- But a "visual marker" to me just sounds like a "notification system". The question is how simple or complex do we make it? 🤔
@prologic I'm all for a basic notification system personally, it's a matter of how simple it can be kept, code-wise and presentation-wise. One of the strong points of the Yarn system at the moment IMO is how relatively simple it is and fairly distraction free.
@prologic Ah, I forgot no emails. The notification doesn't have to be something that disrupts the user. Somthing simple that users can toggle on and off that can serve as a reminder might be desirable for some. Actually, I don't really care about being notified, but I think it probably shouldn't be published in the Timeline.
@eldersnake I agree! 👌 To that end I’m thinking about a per user “event feed” if you will.
@eldersnake I agree! 👌 To that end I’m thinking about a per user “event feed” if you will.
@lazarus I have this idea to add time ago for each timeline/feed as a way for making none-intrusive notifications. So the server will not store info about if you read a post or not, just showing how long ago the latest post was made. I made mockup back in the spring showcase this: http://darch.dk/yarn-hack/Mockup_to_Code/
@darch Don’t we already display “X hours ago” in the web UI?
@darch Don’t we already display “X hours ago” in the web UI?
@prologic yes and that where I got the inspiration from😉 I want to add it the topnav (timeline, mentions, etc) so you can see if need to click on it or not since you last checked
