For example we are using this for PHP twtxt.php#L153
For example we are using this for PHP twtxt.php#L153
It's an interesting topic. For example on Bsky it's natural to allow domains https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutorial
Although TwiXter only allows (letters A-Z, numbers 0-9 and of underscores)
https://help.x.com/en/managing-your-account/x-username-rules
I don't think that commenting out DMs as we are doing for metadata is giving up on simplicity (it's a feature already), and it helps to hide unwanted DMs to clients that will take months to add it's support to something named... an extension.
For some other extensions in https://twtxt.dev/extensions.html (for example the reply-to hash
#abcdfeg or the mention @ < example http://example.org/twtxt.txt >) is not a big deal. The twt is still understandable in plain text.For DM, it's only interesting for you if you are the recipient, otherwise you see an scrambled message like
1234567890abcdef=. Even if you see it, you'll need some decryption to read it. I've said before that DMs shouldn't be in the same section that the timeline as it's confusing.So my point stands, and as I've said before, we are discussing it as a community, so let's see what other maintainers add to the convo.
@andros I give you not creating another file, but then I'd vote for commenting out DMs. See https://eapl.me/timeline/post/z5e2bna
It's easier to find the DM in comments from your side, than asking all the client maintainers to add the regex =P
You can even use a Modified comment, such as
#! <DM content>Or something like that
This approach is retro-compatible with current and older clients.=
That PHP snippet could be merged into https://twtxt.dev/exts/twt-hash.html
# 2025-04-13T11:02:12+02:00 !<dm-echo https://dm-echo.andros.dev/twtxt.txt> U2FsdGVkX1+QmwBNmk9Yu9jvazVRFPS2TGJRGle/BDDzFult6zCtxNhJrV0g+sx0EIKbjL2a9QpCT5C0Z2qWvw==
TwiXter, Mastodon, FB and some other services usually hide the DMs in another section, so they are not mixed with the public timeline.
I find the DM topic interesting, I even made an indie experiment for a centralized messaging system here https://github.com/eapl-gemugami/owl.
Although, as I've said a few times here, I'm not particularly interested in supporting it on microblogging, as I don't use it that much. In the rare case I've used them, I don't have to manage public and private keys, and finally none of my acquaintances use encrypted email.
Nothing personal against anyone, and although I like to debate and even fight, it's not the case here. This proposal is the only one allowing DMs on twtxt, and if the community wants it, I'll support it, with my personal input, of course.
A good approach I could find with a good compromise between compatibility with current clients and keeping these messages private is 'hiding' the DMs in comments. For example:
# 2025-04-13T11:02:12+02:00 !<dm-echo https://dm-echo.andros.dev/twtxt.txt> U2FsdGVkX1+QmwBNmk9Yu9jvazVRFPS2TGJRGle/BDDzFult6zCtxNhJrV0g+sx0EIKbjL2a9QpCT5C0Z2qWvw==
dm-only.txt, twtxt-dm.txt or any other name for an alternative file is the most sensible approach. The name could be specified in the metadata.
!<nick url><encrypted_message> syntax which is meaningless.
The idea was to help those following the spec in https://twtxt.dev/exts/directmessage.Html, to replicate the steps and validate whether your implementation gives the same result.
BTW, you could add a link to the spec in the echo web.
Easylang story
https://easylang.online/apps/story.html
Lessons from open source in the Mexican government
https://lwn.net/Articles/1013776/
Is it following the same endpoints than https://registry.twtxt.org/swagger-ui/#/users/addUser ?
BTW, I think that the
usage section has a wrong base URL or something.For example if you enter here: https://watcher.sour.is/conv/4rx5iyq
It says to look for this URL: https://watcher.sour.is/conv/4rx5iyq/api/plain/users
Which seems to return the content from https://watcher.sour.is
In Mexico you couldn't register the word Sonora (state), nor Taqueria (kind of restaurant) as there are two common words, but perhaps the combination of both is trademarkable, I'm not sure, so many 'taquerias' here don't file a trademark request. It's usually "Taquería [LAST_NAME]" or "Taquería [PLACE]".
At the same time, the word "taqueria" was trademarked in UK, like it would be "Paris" or "Pub" I guess, so basically Sonora Taqueria didn't reply to the cease and desist, based on:
> [Lizbeth García]: A brand may not use a word that is generic or descriptive of the products or services it is putting into circulation on the market.
> Since he (Ismael, Taqueria's representative) didn’t get any response, he decided to leave it in the hands of his law firm.
> In early 2023, after all the noise on the internet and the mobilization caused by this case, an agreement was finally reached with Taquería to settle the matter peaceably.
> In March 2023, Michelle and Sam decided to register the Sonora Taquería brand and logo with the UK Intellectual Property Office.
https://radioambulante.org/en/translation/who-owns-the-taqueria-translation
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Doesn%27t_Want_to_Be_Free
So I won't add much to the topic, what I can say is that this is about being pragmatic. There is some people who's gonna spend their money on books but it requires publicity (polemic topic) and subsidizing creativity with our own money (another controversial one).
Otherwise it's a difficult discipline /profession /industry
Now I'm looking forward to see the next version using MessagePack
Building on top of that, I'm thinking of https://eapl.me/yatwt.yaml
Piracy is a difficult topic which is very personal, so I won't say much about it.
On writing books, I've tried along with other digital products such as courses and videogames, and I got to confess that it has been hard for me.
If it helps, I think it all reaches our expectations on the activity and the result. If royalties is the expectation, it's going to be slow. By 5% of royalties, for a rough example, a huge amount of sales will be required to get a decent "wage", so I've understood of doing it by the side of a normal employment although it has been discouraging and a bit sad.
I have reflected about it in Spanish here: https://sembrandojuegos.substack.com/p/sobre-expectativas-al-crear-juegos
Checking for example https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/twt or https://registry.twtxt.org/api/plain/tweets, I don't know whether this syntax is being used by clients or by people. Is it integrated on Yarn in any way? Genuinely asking to know more about it.
If I might throw a quick thought to those working on the registries, it would be nice to have an endpoint with a valid twtxt output (perhaps cached or dumped to a static file) which a client could point to, helping to discover it's content in a way which is compatible with the twtxt spec.
Taking the first twt I found in https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/twt as an example:
reddit_world_news https://feeds.twtxt.net/Reddit_World_News/twtxt.txt 2025-03-28T00:29:25Z **China bans US logs. 3 billion dollar[...])it would be something like
TIME <@NICK URL> TWT2025-03-28T00:29:25Z <@reddit_world_news https://feeds.twtxt.net/Reddit_World_News/twtxt.txt> **China bans US logs. 3 billion dollar[...])That way you could watch the latest twts with your client, something similar to what we find on Mastodon: https://mastodon.online/public/local
Some support from the clients to separate these 'discovery' content, from your following timeline might be required. 🤔
timeline doesn't autocomplete the mentions yet, and it was 'difficult' to look for your URL from the phone.
Perhaps it was its mention of being a demo implementation here:
https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/registry.html#registry
So I though it wasn't really active.
Anyway, I think that's a good idea.
Is there something similar available on Yarn? Sorry for for asking if that was mentioned recently.
I think that the clients may help you to submit your URL to these directories, and also to get a view of the twts in them.
@bender the idea of the RFC was to reach an agreement on a difficult problem, receiving proposals, and the voting is a simple count to gauge the sentiment of "is this a problem worth to be fixed?, are we committed to implement a change in our clients?"
But that's a fair point. What do the community expect? What do y'all expect?
twtxt, the voting period has started and will be open for a week.https://eapl.me/rfc0001/
Please share the link with the twtxt community, and leave your vote on your preferred proposals, which will be used to gauge the perceived benefits.
Also, the conversation is open to discuss implementation concerns or anything aimed at making twtxt better.
https://hackerweb.app/#/item/43461618
Now I need the non-hacker friends 🥲
> Twtxt was made for nerds, by nerds.
I'd like to change that. It's by nerds/hackers, for nerds/hackers and friends of these. It doesn't have to be hacky all the time, as you don't need to be a nerd to have a blog.
But, for that to happen, someone has to build the tools to improve UX.
> by design there really is no way to easily discovers others
Yeah, I agree, and although there are directories of email addresses, usually you don't want that, unless you are a 'public figure'.
I couldn't say that a microblogging is a "social network" by default, as a blog is not either. At the same time, people would expect to find new people and conversations, as you'd do in a forum.
I think of two features on top of the current spec:
- Clients showing a few posts of what your following are watching but you don't, so perhaps you find something interesting to follow next. Or that feature of "Your 'followings' are following these accounts/people". (Hard to explain in english, but I hope you get the idea)
- Sharing your .txt into some directory, saying "Hey, I have this twtxt URL, I want to be discovered". I'm thinking of something like the Federated tab on Mastodon.
> instead of adding the new twt at the end of the feed, do it at the beginning
The PHP client did that originally, although I didn't see a real benefit if you use... a client.
It could help if you read the .txt file through a browser or something. Also, not many clients are prepared to cut the request, and you can't rely on the file being organized that way, so finally we dropped that feature.
About 1, well, I think anyone has an email address and only about 5% use a Feed, so it makes sense to offer what most people use 🤔
A Sneaky Phish Just Grabbed my Mailchimp Mailing List
https://www.troyhunt.com/a-sneaky-phish-just-grabbed-my-mailchimp-mailing-list/
Joking aside, let's see how it works in the wild!
Is it working now?
I'd say again that perhaps the DMs could be stored in another .txt, but anyway I'd like to try it.
i18n-puzzles.com has been a blast, but I don't like having to think about puzzles on weekends. Like with exercise, doing it every day without rest doesn't sound healthy.
I'd rater have a weekly challenge, at most three.
I knew of twtxt in Gemini Antenna, so at least the 2017 spec might work on that protocol. I think the main issue with extensions is that they weren't designed with many URLs and protocols in mind.
Also I have to admit that the Gemini community significantly reduced in the last few years. I don't know how worth it is to add support for Gemini now.
https://eapl.me/rfc0001/
Help me to play with it a bit and report any vulnerability or bug. Also any idea is welcome.
Also, could you elaborate on how you envision migrating with a script? You mean that the client of the file owner could massively update URLs in old twts ?
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KOUqJ2rNl_jZ4KBVTsR-4QmG1zAdKNo7QXJS1uogQVo/edit?gid=0#gid=0
Feel free to propose another collaborative platform (for those without a G account), and also share your comments and analysis in the spreadsheet or in Gitea.
https://i18n-puzzles.com
At the moment of building the engine there weren't many Gemini URLs supporting twtxt 1.1 (with twtxt.dev extensions).
Also User-Agent won't work there, and many Gemini URLs are a mirror of the HTTP one, so I think is not strictly necessary.
my 2c
And of course it's about being part of a niche community which is (mostly) amazing, and nurturing. As there is almost no one writing in my native spanish, it has been an interesting challenge to share my thoughts in english, as well.
I couldn't say it's a 'social network' per se, I think it lack many engagement things usually associated with social networks, although it has a social part of igniting discussions, learnings and behavioral changes, which is the meaning of social for me.
"This will be managed by Registries." Are we talking about these registries?
https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/registry.html
I worked for a german company and they gave away these calendars to our clients and team every year, but the model you can hang on the wall. Memory unlocked!
I can't find something similar here, but my wife gave this one last year, and I've been using it a bit. I'd say it's useful as you've shared.
A horrible picture of the calendar on my deskWe also have a shared calendar in the kitchen for family events, and it's working great.
blog comes from weblog, and microblogging could derivate from 'smaller weblog'. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/MicrobloggingI'd differentiate it from sharing status updates as it was done with 'finger' or even a BBS. For example, being able to reply; create new threads and sharing them on a URL is something we could expect from 'Twitter', the most popular microbloging model (citation needed)
I like to discuss it, since conversations usually are improved if we sync on what we understand for the same words.
My first thought takes me to something like
secure-scuttlebutt which it's painful to sync data using clients, and too slow compared to downloading a text file.Also I'd like for twtxt to avoid becoming an ActivityPub. Works well but it's uses too many resources IMO.
https://kingant.net/2025/02/mastodon-the-cost-of-running-my-own-server/
I'm defending being able to self-host your Web client (like you'd do with a Wordpress, twtxt is a micrologging, at the end), instead of federated instances, so in a first thought I'd say Registries have many disadvantages being the first one that someone has to maintain them active.
nanoblogging would be a simple text (like the original twtxt spec, aimed for TUIs), and microblogging (like Twitter was a few years ago), would be about sharing texts, images, videos, GIFs, links, and perhaps Markdown styling.Why? You have shorter messages than in a blog, but you may add almost anything you could do in a blog.
Buuut... who knows?
It remind me a bit of the Conclave movie where every part wanted to defend their vision and there is only a winner. If one wins the other loses. Like the political side of many leaders and volunteers representing a broad community. I don't think that's the case here. Most of us (in not all) should 'win'.
I can only add that isn't nice to listen that 'my idea and effort' is not what the rest of the people expect. I personally have a kind of issue with public rejection, but I also like to argue, discuss and even fight a bit. "A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials," they say.
This exercise and belonging to this community also brings me good feelings of smart people trying to solve a human and technical problem, which is insanely difficult to get 'right'.
I genuinely hope we can understand each other, and even with our different and respectful thoughts on the same thing, we might reach an agreement on what's the best for most people.
Good vibes to everyone!
Una opinión pragmática es que hay la libertad de no pagar, pero también esto nos debería llevar a que tenemos la libertad de SÍ reconocer los proyectos que nos dan valor, por medio de un donativo puntual o constante. Adaptarnos al contexto de lo que estamos ofreciendo.
Mi chava trabaja en Asociaciones Civiles (tipo OSALs/ONGs) y es un reto pedir donativos, por lo que es común pedir 'Cuotas de recuperación' pues ayudan a valorar más el servicio, y a que fluya el donativo. Creo que se puede hacer algo así en el código libre, apelando a diferentes motivadores en los usuarios.
From that PR #17 I think it was reverted? We could discuss about metadata later this month, as it seems that I'm the only person using it.
I've added a
[lang=en] to this twt to see current yarn behaviour.
I've drafted a Request for Comments (RFC) to improve how threads work in twtxt:
https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/twtxt.dev/issues/18
I’d love your feedback! Please share your thoughts on anything that could be better explained, check if the proposed dates work for everyone, and I invite you to join the discussion...
What about discussing it in https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/twtxt.dev ?
The only con I see is that everyone would need to create an account there to participate.
The editing process needs a lot of consideration and compromises.
From one side, editing and deleting it's necessary IMO. People will do it anyway, and personally I like to edit my texts, so I'd put some effort on make it work.
Should we keep a history of edits? Should we hash every edit to avoid abuse? Should we mark internally a twt as deleted, but keeping the replies?
I think that's part of a more complete 'thread' extension, although I'd say it's worth to agree on something reflecting the real usage in the wild, along with what people usually do on other platforms.
About alice's hash, using SHA256, I get
96473b4f or 96473B4F for the last 8 characters. I'll add it as an implementation example.The idea of including it besides the follow URL is to avoid calculating it every time we load the file (assuming the client did that correctly), and helps to track replies across the file with a simple search.
Also, watching your example I'm thinking now that instead of
{url=96473B4F,id=1} which is ambiguous of which URL we are referring to, it could be something like:{reply_to=[URL_HASH]_[TWT_ID]} / {reply_to=96473B4F_1}That way, the 'full twt ID' could be
96473B4F_1.
As in https://eapl.me/timeline/post/s7gv6zq
I changed my URL to experiment on this exact situation, and deleted the symlink on my server, so now tw.txt is the only way to get the file, although I could bring it back, what does everyone say?
About the idea of improving the "thread" extension, what if we set aside March 2025 to gather proposals and thoughts from everyone? We could then vote on them at the end of the month to see if the change and migration are worth it.
The voting could include client maintainers (and maybe even users too). That way, we get a good mix of perspectives before taking a decision in a decent timelapse.
What do you think? If this sounds good, we can start agreeing on this. Let me know your thoughts!
#<Alice https://example.com/twtxt.com#2024-12-18T14:18:26+01:00>Hashes are not a problem on PHP, I dont know why it's slow to calculate them from your side, but I agree with your points.
BTW, did you have the chance to read my proposal on twtxt 2.0? I shared a few ideas about possible improvements to discuss:
https://text.eapl.mx/a-few-ideas-for-a-next-twtxt-version
https://text.eapl.mx/reply-to-lyse-about-twtxt
description = 🏗 Full-Stack developer (Mainly Python) ✍ Writer[...]
.txt file:description = ðŸ—Perhaps your nginx server is missing a
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 header?https://serverfault.com/a/975289
In
timeline it looks OK however, I think it's relying on> The file must be encoded with UTF-8
of the original spec:
https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/twtxtfile.html
http(s)://domain.tls is not a valid resource, but http(s)://domain.tls/ is, as you can see here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/2581423I suppose that internally the wget/curl or whatever client you are using is redirecting it?
A squirrel writing on her laptop
The encryption part seems to work, if I decrypt it the message with OpenSSL.
I think it can help you for some key parts not well explained in OpenSSL documentation.
@andros reading your spec I wrote a few notes here: https://github.com/eapl-gemugami/twtxt-direct-message-php/blob/main/direct_message_spec.md
@arne I haven't check your repo yet, although you are using sodium, right?
I want to compare that I can read the encrypted message both from OpenSSL CLI and from the PHP OpenSSL library, following the spec.
# https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.openssl-pbkdf2.php
$password = $sharedKey;
$salt = openssl_random_pseudo_bytes(16); # What's the salt length ?
$keyLength = 20; # What's the key length here ?
$iterations = 100000;
$generatedKey = openssl_pbkdf2($password, $salt, $keyLength, $iterations, 'sha256');
echo bin2hex($generatedKey)."\n";
echo base64_encode($generatedKey)."\n";
$iv = openssl_random_pseudo_bytes(16); // AES-256-CBC requires 16-byte IV
$cipherText = openssl_encrypt($message, 'aes-256-cbc', $generatedKey, OPENSSL_RAW_DATA, $iv);
return base64_encode($iv . $cipherText);
I was amazed experimenting with different combinations, for instance instead of 100, using 60 for a minute, 90 for 1:30, and stupid stuff like heating with 11, 22, 55 seconds and so, to make it quicker to type any time.
Although I like it more "twt", without the dot and with a t at the end
twtxt, the microblogging for hackers and friends...> The biggest challenge of ActivityPub is that it's too technical to easily explain to regular people. Nobody is interested in a jargon-laden diatribe about servers and federation. When simple questions have overly complex answers, people tend to switch off.
https://activitypub.ghost.org/your-thoughts-on-onboarding/
For example here: gemini://text.eapl.mx/en-making-a-tic-tac-toe-variant and there https://text.eapl.mx/en-making-a-tic-tac-toe-variant
I agree that some topics require images to make it easier to explain.
You can type 3 and 0 for 30 seconds, 100 for a minute (shown as 1:00), or 200 for two minutes (2:00).
What would happen if you type 777 and Start?
A) Nothing
B) Self-destruction
C) Will run for 7 minutes and 77 seconds (boring!)
What about 7777 ?
Is it more an API (more oriented to developers), more oriented to UI/UX/Frontend? Perhaps both?
I'd go with prologic's advice of measuring and prioritizing. Perhaps you have a budget or at least something like "let's see how far can we reach in 6 months", and possibly you won't finish in the time you have (just guessing).
Something that has helped me was defining "Why do you we want to refactor this project?".
Could it be to make it compile on newer versions, or making it easier to grow and scale, or perhaps they are trying to sell that product to another company. Every reason has a different path, IMO.
Well, I've heard you have plenty of experience with Unit Testing and TDD. Perhaps designing a few tests before refactoring?
I've heard of Snapshot testing, but have never tried it: https://github.com/spatie/phpunit-snapshot-assertions
Also, what kind of refactor are you trying to do?
Perhaps, since Twitter in 2006 never implemented read flags, every derivative microblogging system never saw that as an expected feature. This is curious because Twitter started with SMS, where on our phones we can mark messages as read or unread.
I think it all comes from the difference between reading an email (directed to you) vs. reading public posts (like a blog or a 'wall,' where you don't mark posts as read). It's not necessary to mark it as 'read', you just jump over it.
Reading microblogging posts in an email program is not common, I think, and I haven't really used it, so I cannot say how it works, and whether it would be better for me or not.
However, I've used Thunderbird as a feed reader, and I understand the advantages when reading blog posts.
About read flags being simple, well... we just had a discussion this morning about how tracking read messages would require a lot of rethinking for clients such as
timeline where no state is stored. Even considering some kind of 'notification of unread messages or mentions' is not expected for those minimalist client, so it's an interesting compromise to think about.
https://tilde.town/~dzwdz/blog/feeds.html
I've polished the CSS style a bit, you can try it here: https://eapl.me/treed/
If OpenSSL were a GUI
A joke about a mock GUI dialog for OpenSSH
https://wordswithrobots.isotropic.us
2 players Codenames vs (or along) gpt-4o-mini
I prefer a forum for that 😊
Obviously if you've worked on something similar, you already know it, he