# 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 13
# self = https://watcher.sour.is/conv/rsrlmzq
@prologic considering other alternatives we have seeing (of which I have lost track already), yes. Why don’t you guys (client makers) take a step at a time and, for now, increase the hash length to deal with the collisions. Then location-based addressing can be added… or not, you know. 😅
@bender Well honestly, this is just it. My strong position on this is quite simple:
> Do the simplest thing that could work.
It's one of the age old UNIX philosphies.
Therefore, the simplest thing™ to do here is to just increase the hash length, mark a magic™ date/time as @lyse has indicated and call it a day. We'll then be fine for a few hundred years, at which point there'll be no-one left alive to give a shit™ anyway 🤣
@prologic the simplest thing to do is to completely forgo hashing anything because we are communicating using plain text files right now :3 while i agree hashes are incredibly helpful in the backend im not sure it has a place outside of it, it basically eliminates two core design principals of twtxt (human readability and integrating well with unix command line utilities) and makes new clients more difficult to build than it should be
@prologic the simplest thing to do is to completely forgo hashing anything because we are communicating using plain text files right now :3
@zvava Going to have to hard disagree here I'm sorry. a) no-one reads the raw/plain twtxt.txt files, the only time you do is to debug something, or have a stick beak at the comments which most clients will strip out and ignore and b) I'm sorry you've completely lost me! I'm old enough to pre-date before Linux became popular, so I'm not sure what UNIX principles you think are being broken or violat
@zvava Going to have to hard disagree here I'm sorry. a) no-one reads the raw/plain twtxt.txt files, the only time you do is to debug something, or have a stick beak at the comments which most clients will strip out and ignore and b) I'm sorry you've completely lost me! I'm old enough to pre-date before Linux became popular, so I'm not sure what UNIX principles you think are being broken or violated by having a Twt Subject (Subject) whose contents is a cryptographic content-addressable hash of the "thing"â„¢ you're replying to and forming a chain of other replies (a thread).
I'm sorry, but the simplest thing to do is to make the smallest number of changes to the Spec as possible and all agree on a "Magic Date" for which our clients use the modified function(s).
Put another way, what you are proposing/pushing for requires hundreds of lines of code to change across a half dozen or so clients and lots of breaking changes, not to mention unknowns.
What I want us to do is make only a few half dozen or so lines of code changes to our clients and minimize the breaking changes and unknowns.
And I need to make something absolutely clear as well here. Twtxt was completely and utterly dead back in {Aug 2020](https://yarn.social/about.html) when I came across the spec and its simplicity and realised the lost opportunity. Since then we've continued to grow a small but thriving community. The extensions we've built over time have stood and lasted the test of time for the past ~5 years. We need not break things too badly, because what we have today and was designed years ago _actually_ works quite wellâ„¢ (_despite some flaws_).~
@prologic to clarify: i meant the ability to parse feeds using unix command line utilities, as a principal of twtxtv1's design. im not sure how feasible it is to build a simple feed reader out of common scripting utilities when hashing is in play, and;
i concede, it does make a lot of sense to fix up the hashing spec rather than completely supplant it at this point, just thinking about what the rewrite would be like is dreadful in and of itself x.x
@prologic to clarify the i meant the ability to parse feeds using unix command line utilities, as a prinicpal of twtxtv1's design. im not sure how feasible it is to build a simple feed reader out of common scripting utilities when hashing is in play, and;
i concede, it does make a lot of sense to fix up the hashing spec rather than completely supplant it at this point, just thinking about what the rewrite would be like is dreadful in and of itself x.x
plus, if hashv2 was implemented in combination with text fragments the way you proposed that would solve both scripting and human readability woes!!
...though, the presence of the text fragments then makes reversing the replied-to twt (and therefore its hash) trivial, which could allow clients to tolerate the omission of the hash — and while it would be 'non-standard' this would be the best of both worlds; potential to *tolerate* (or pave a glacial path toward? :o) human writable replies whilst keeping a unique id for twts that is universal across all pods
plus, if hashv2 was implemented in combination with text fragments the way you proposed that would solve both scripting and human readability woes!!
...though, the presence of the text fragments then makes reversing the replied-to twt (and therefore its hash) trivial, which could allow clients to tolerate the omission of the hash — and while it would be 'non-standard' this would be the best of both worlds; potential to *tolerate* (or pave a glacial path toward? :o) human writable twts whilst keeping a unique id for twts that is universal across all pods