# 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 2172
# self = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://twtxt.net/user/mckinley/twtxt.txt&offset=772
# next = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://twtxt.net/user/mckinley/twtxt.txt&offset=872
# prev = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://twtxt.net/user/mckinley/twtxt.txt&offset=672
Man, I keep trying to use vim keys in the text box. It's hurting my brain!
@novaburst Extension support. I use them, well, extensively.

@prologic I see lots of things with vi keybindings, but I can't recall seeing a program advertise "emacs keybindings". Emacs does have keybindings, though. Lots of them.
Funny, I just installed a Vim keys extension for my web browser. No turning back now!
@prologic Aw man, did I duck out before it got interesting?
:)
Thank you all for the suggestions. I settled on Newsboat. You can set a macro to make mpv the browser, open the selected item in the browser, and change it back. It's a bit of a hack, but it works. In ~/.newsboat/config:

macro m set browser "mpv --no-terminal %u &" ; open-in-browser ; set browser "xdg-open %u" -- "Open in MPV"

It even appears in the help menu with a helpful description.

@movq @will @lyse I hope you gentlemen don't follow my RSS feed then. It has no content because I write it by hand. :)~
@prologic I would argue that the good outweighs the bad when it comes to viable cryptocurrencies like Monero. The ability to anonymously send real money in any amount to any person on the planet within an hour, all the while completely bypassing fiat currencies and the global financial system, is a good thing for society.
I like Goldbacks too for a similar reason. :)
@prologic Absolutely. Many people will admit that Discord isn't a good thing to use but they use it anyway because their friends are on there. I've seen many such cases.
@tel I forgot about Fosscord. They've made quite a bit of progress since I last looked into the project. Maybe I should give it a try.
@prologic For people like us, they are. But, in order to create alternatives for the general public and lift them out of the walled garden, we need to understand why so many people chose Discord in the first place.
@prologic Discord has a highly efficient core design. IRC-like text channels and Mumble-like voice channels (+video/screen sharing), all in one hierarchy, with a good permissions system tying it all together. There's also a DM system and you can add people to a simple group chat. All of that technology was available before Discord, but I think they were the first to stitch it all together in a coherent, intuitive manner.

I used Discord for several years, but I finally broke away from it entirely about a year ago. The only Free alternative other than Matrix that comes close, at least that I know of, is Revolt. I have several gripes about the project, though, that I won't dive into right now. There won't be federation, for one.
@will In fairness, Discord does include features that are unavailable on IRC and the barrier to entry in mitigating that, like setting up a bouncer, is much higher than signing into Discord. @prologic is right, though. Discord is a privacy eroding centralized pile of crap. There isn't a single worthwhile, libre alternative to Discord, but a Mumble server combined with an XMPP server comes close.
What news aggregators do you all use? I am looking for one that has no integrated web engine and an easy way to open an entry in a Web browser or in mpv. I don't want to have to choose one or the other.
@will What do you mean?
Making the jump from Xorg to Wayland - mckinley.cc
@prologic That's about it. It was a good conversation, I'm looking forward to the next one.
@prologic Sure. I'll sit in on the meeting, but I would rather not enable a microphone or camera at the moment. Can I participate in a text chat or IRC?
@mutefall Nice! Have fun with them, man.
@mutefall Sorry, I didn't. What about them?
@off_grid_living Hear, hear!
@will Cloudflare strikes again!
@mutefall Appreciate it.
Apologies for the formatting issues there, I can't delete or edit the post without enabling JavaScript.
@tkanos It's worth mentioning that Brave and Waterfox Classic are spyware according to Spyware Watchdog:
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/brave.html
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/waterfox_classic.html
Both have a spyware level of "High". For Waterfox Classic, the article is titled "Waterfox Classic" but it frequently mentions "Waterfox". It's unclear to me which browser is being tested for the article, but if one is spyware, the other probably is too.
ungoogled-chromium is Not Spyware, and Librewolf barely has a spyware level of "Low" because it makes a request to the Mozilla safe browsing service and tries to auto-update uBlock Origin. Those requests can be disabled.
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/ungoogled_chromium.html
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/librewolf.html
@novaburst @tkanos The best Web browser is NetSurf, but it's not a practical daily driver yet. ;) My problem with Webkit based browsers like Otter Browser or Surf is a lack of powerful extension support. Some of them come with an integrated content blocker but I use extensions for more than that. Once one of them has an equivalent to uBlock Origin and uMatrix and lets me make regex redirect rules (like ^https?://([A-Za-z0-9\-]+\.)?medium\.com/(.+)$ -> https://$1scribe.rip/$2) then I'll consider using it daily.
Until then, I think Librewolf and ungoogled-chromium (with the Chromium Web Store extension) are the least worst.
@novaburst @tkanos The best Web browser is NetSurf, but it's not a practical daily driver yet. ;) My problem with Webkit based browsers like Otter Browser or Surf is a lack of powerful extension support. Some of them come with an integrated content blocker but I use extensions for more than that. Once one of them has an equivalent to uBlock Origin and uMatrix and lets me make regex redirect rules (like ^https?://([A-Za-z0-9\\-]+\\.)?medium\\.com/(.+)$ -> https://$1scribe.rip/$2) then I'll consider using it daily.
Until then, I think Librewolf and ungoogled-chromium (with the Chromium Web Store extension) are the least worst.
Could someone please do me a favor and copy the list of affected models and upload it somewhere more accessible? Lenovo.com blocks Tor traffic, it's not archived on archive.today, and even if I use an open web proxy the page seems to require JavaScript to load the content.
@prologic Success!
@prologic I tried several different Tor circuits before I logged in and didn't get a captcha once. Let's see if I can talk about /etc/hosts now.
Alright, I don't want to spam anymore. I could reference /etc/ and a meaningless file in /etc/, but I was unable to reference the passwd file. Just another Cloudflare MITM job.
/etc/asdf
/etc/
Okay, I cannot write the location of the hosts file on Unix-like systems in a twt or else Cloudflare gets angry at me. That is very, very strange.
Last thing I changed was "password". Can I say it in a twt on its own?
@prologic I appreciate that but it's not necessary. I'm using *the amnesic incognito live system* anyway, so it would be a chore to enable the admin *secret text* and edit *the hosts file* on every boot. Most *orange cloud*-enabled *common net* sites I try to use over *the onion router* give me a lot more trouble.
Okay, it must be keyword based. I lost the reply text and I had to remake it to post it here and Cloudflare blocked me.
I can make my own post, but whenever I try to reply to #3p5hajq Cloudflare blocks me. Weird.
I can make my own post, but whenever I try to reply to #3p5hajq Cloudflare blocks me. Weird.
Test message
I keep getting Cloudflared when connecting via Tor. :/ Creating a new circuit fixes it for a while, though.
@mutefall That's admirable and a good point. My phone is really only used for calls and the occasional text message, and I don't even connect it to my home network.
A landline phone, or even a mobile phone that never leaves the house, mitigates this kind of tracking almost entirely. I haven't carried my cell phone regularly for years. It just stays at home. Anyone with the means to track me this way already knows where I live. Besides, I don't give anyone my phone number unless I intend to talk to them and I've avoided two factor authentication pretty well. When I decide to start using a service that requires two factor authentication over SMS, I'll use one of those anonymous services that take Monero.
@prologic Congratulations!
@darch Bookmarked! Shame it's written in JavaScript, though.
@thecanine This doesn't seem that bad. It's impossible to make a free-to-use video hosting service profitable, but they're giving it a try. Odysee, in my opinion, is better than YouTube and no worse than Rumble. What makes it a scam, in your view? The weird useless cryptocurrency?
@thecanine @darch I had to manually write an external feed URL for him :)
@carsten Teamspeak is proprietary and you're required to pay for the software if you want more than 32 users or multiple virtual hosts. Mumble has none of those limits, and it's BSD licensed.
@prologic
> There was another Browser-based (no server) Web RTC thingy

I remember seeing that too. You are welcome to use my Mumble server, it's been sitting idle for weeks. I've had success with it talking to people all over the world. The server is located in the eastern part of the US and it has plenty of bandwidth. I don't keep logs either.
You don't have to register to the server or anything. Just join with any nickname and it will prompt you for the server password.
Address: liberty.mck.cx
Port: 64738 (Default)
Password: yarn.social
@darch This one got me for a second. I saw it on a forum just after midnight, so I didn't register what day it was just yet. https://rockylinux.org/news/future-is-rocky-gnu-hurd/
@prologic It pains me to see a beautiful free software project like this collaborate using Google Meet. I can't attend the meeting, but would you like to use my Mumble server? There's no video, but there is high quality, low latency audio.
I'm getting better at using GIMP :) Future of Ubuntu's logo
I'll bet, if polled, a vast majority of Windows users either are neutral or actively dislike that they have to connect their OS to their Microsoft account. Nobody actually likes it, except Microsoft. What legitimate features does that bring, anyway?
@movq It is inexcusable to force people to link the computer that they paid for with a cloud service. Even if there are super hacky ways to avoid it people should not stand for it. That goes for Chrome OS too, which is arguably worse because it's Google spying on you and not Microsoft. Although, a Chrome OS machine is much less useful than a Windows machine, so I guess it balances itself out.
My VPSes run Ubuntu. Once I get a home server set up, I'll probably install Artix on that too.
@crunched I use Arch Linux almost exclusively. I like to do periodic reinstalls on my main machine, though, and I've already decided I'm moving to Artix next time. For now, even with Systemd, it's a pretty minimal system. No display manager, OpenDoas instead of Sudo, etc.
@will Do it, you won't regret it.
@jcrawford Interesting read. The phone system is fascinating to me because it's a bunch of different standards that have been duct taped together for decades and the pile just keeps growing. It's amazing it works as well as it does.
@prologic @ullarah Thank you very much, this solution is the best of both worlds. I turned it on just to try it out, and the pop up is really well done. It feels very natural.
My good trackball will only scroll in one direction. Took it apart, blasted it with air, nothing. There was some corrosion on a few components near the scroll sensor, I must have spilled some water on it at some point. I'm trying to get used to a regular mouse again. I think I'm worse with my old Logitech G502 now than I was with my trackball when I first got it.

What are the odds I can get Kensington support to send me a new logic board?
@justamoment That's an interesting concept, but I need to store other information like online sources, original filenames, date retrieved, etc.
@neoboard And so it begins. Congratulations @prologic, you've created a real social network!
@darch You should be able to disable it in your account settings
@prologic I've been toying with the idea of creating my own format for a couple of days. In my head it's always been an application of XML, but I just realized that, since I want the ability to add multiple tags to an entry, I might be better off using a GNU Recfile or a Plan 9 ndb file for more powerful query options.
Does anyone know of some kind of plaintext file format to store metadata on a collection of other files? My documents folder has outgrown the directory hierarchy and I would like to eliminate the hierarchy entirely, storing metadata on everything in one human and machine readable file.
@prologic That's a good idea. If it's done in JavaScript, mobile devices can be detected using navigator.userAgent. Depending on how far you're willing to go with it, the entire prompt can be constructed locally, so the URL is never revealed to anyone else.
@prologic @ullarah Thank you. It's hugely appreciated.
@ullarah > Thank you for your feedback and hopefully these features won’t be a deterrent from using Yarn.social.

You don't need to talk to me like a customer, let's just have a regular conversation. Your words won't make me leave or stay, and it will take more than a link verification prompt to get me to leave. I like Yarn a lot and I believe in the project. :)
@ullarah
> Thank you for your feedback and hopefully these features won’t be a deterrent from using Yarn.social.

You don't need to talk to me like a customer, let's just have a regular conversation. Your words won't make me leave or stay, and it will take more than a link verification prompt to get me to leave. I like Yarn a lot and I believe in the project. :)
@ullarah On the desktop, at least, it seems like there is very little benefit. Anyone concerned with clicking on a malicious link will hover over it and check the bottom corner before clicking. Those who aren't concerned, even though they should be, will just click the big blue button no matter what. At best, it's an annoyance. At worst, it's allowing the pod owner to play Zuckerberg with his users.
@ullarah I don't think you're being argumentative. I hope I'm not coming off as such either. I didn't consider mobile users, and something like this makes a lot more sense on a device that doesn't just let you hover over the link to see where it goes.
Sure, a pod owner could modify yarnd to track users, but this is has always been a very privacy focused service by default. Privacy focused to the point that it only stores a hash of the user's email address so it's impossible for a pod owner to see it unless the user attempts to recover his account.
@prologic I trust you a lot more than the people who run DuckDuckGo. I see where you guys are coming from, I'm just very skeptical of the efficacy of this kind of system. People will get in the habit of clicking the big blue button immediately and then it's just an annoyance, offering no protection whatsoever. Not to mention it's a unique URL for each link that can easily be tracked by a pod admin.
I know I tried removing the character limit in the inspector but I thought it didn't work and the server truncated my post. 1024 is a nice, round number. It probably shouldn't be much higher than that because at a certain point the "microblog" drops the "micro"
I know I tried removing the character limit in the inspector but I thought it didn't work and the server truncated my post. 1024 is a nice, round number. It probably shouldn't be much higher than that because at a certain point it goes from a "microblog" to just a "blog".
Here is a regex rule for the Redirector browser extension that bypasses /linkVerify on any domain, not just twtxt.net. False positives are possible but extremely unlikely. https://ttm.sh/iaR.json
@prologic @ullarah I don't know what is and is not logged by default, but this makes it easy for a pod admin to track what his users click on. I stopped using DuckDuckGo when I learned that they do this.
@prologic I think you changed a pod setting so external links would change to /linkVerify. I should be able to stop this with the "Link Verification" option in Settings, right? I even tried clearing cookies and logging back in and the option is definitely disabled for my account but the links are still changed.
Hey @eldersnake, are you still self-hosting your Git repositories? My repository archival script has been unable to pull from git.andrewjvpowell.com for some time and https://git.andrewjvpowell.com/ shows an nginx 502 error.
@prologic You guys are making incredible progress on this thing. I'll give it a try as soon as I can.
@lyse Thank you!
A blog post, as promised: Thoughts on NomadBSD
@adi Plan 9 from User Space runs on just about anything POSIX-ish and includes Acme.
Deleted reply twts, I decided halfway through that I'm better off writing a blog post instead.
* Font sizes all around are too small by default. Fixed by customizing tint2rc as well as using the graphical customization tools for GTK, Plank, etc.
* Firefox's default search engine is Google, easy fix.
* I'm still dealing with screen tearing when moving windows, scrolling, or playing video on my T430 with Intel HD 4000 graphics. Not even enabling the TearFree option in xorg.conf appeared to do anything.*
Problems I've had so far:
* The DSBMC (removable storage management utility) tray icon blended into the dark tint2 bar, but the icon theme can be changed from "Papirus" to "Papirus-Dark" to make it look more like the other tray icons.
* The initial package update breaks the autostart programs. Fixed by following the instructions in the NomadBSD Errata.
* Small upstream package conflict with e2fsprogs. Fixed by following the instructions in the errata file.*
Hello from NomadBSD. I'm very impressed with this system. It's much more polished than I would ever expect a BSD to be. It has a huge library of software preinstalled, covering just about everything I do personally. It even has programs you wouldn't expect to be there by default like mpv, KeePassXC, mupdf, and qpdf. Firefox even comes with uBlock Origin preinstalled!
Glad you're here @jcrawford, welcome to Yarn.social!
@prologic I'm sorry. At the moment, I'm set up for neither videos nor calls. I'm going to bed in a few minutes, anyway.
@prologic I'm sorry. At the moment, I'm set up for neither videos nor calls.
@prologic It's misleading because my communications aren't coming from the server that the domain mckinley.cc points to. Here, I'm mckinley@twtxt.net because my twtxt feed is on twtxt.net. I wouldn't really be McKinley *at* mckinley.cc using Salty. I would be McKinley, somewhere else. All it would signify is that I am somehow affiliated with the domain. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just strange to me and I've never seen a service do that.
@prologic I'm having a hard time understanding this. If I wanted to create the ID mckinley@mckinley.cc, would I have to run an instance of the broker *on* mckinley.cc or could I use any broker server? If the latter is true, it's a little misleading to say I'm mckinley *at* mckinley.cc.
@prologic I'm having a hard time understanding this. If I wanted to create the account mckinley@mckinley.cc, would I have to run an instance of the broker *on* mckinley.cc or could I use any broker server? If the latter is true, it's a little misleading to say I'm mckinley *at* mckinley.cc.
I'm having a hard time understanding this. If I wanted to create the account mckinley@mckinley.cc, would I have to run an instance of the broker *on* mckinley.cc or could I use any broker server? If the latter is true, it's a little misleading to say I'm mckinley *at* mckinley.cc.
I'm still seeing [email protected]\n[email protected]\n[email protected]\n[email protected]\n on docs.mills.io, it's making it confusing to read the Salty specification.
I'm still seeing \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n on docs.mills.io, it's making it confusing to read the Salty specification.
I'm still seeing \n\n on docs.mills.io, it's making it confusing to read the Salty specification.
I'm still seeing [email protected][email protected=] on docs.mills.io, it's making it confusing to read the Salty specification.=
I'm still seeing \n\n\n\n on docs.mills.io, it's making it confusing to read the Salty specification.
I'm still seeing [email protected][email protected][email protected][email protected][email protected][email protected][email protected][email protected] on docs.mills.io, it's making it confusing to read the Salty specification.
I'm still seeing [email protected] on docs.mills.io, it's making it confusing to read the Salty specification.
I'm still seeing [email protected][email protected=][email protected][email protected=][email protected][email protected=][email protected][email protected=] on docs.mills.io, it's making it confusing to read the Salty specification.
@mutefall I don't think a lot of people realize just how much power Cloudflare has over the Web. Even we probably can't imagine the extent of it. @prologic, thank you for turning that off. It was even [email protecting]\n[email protecting]\n[email protecting]\n[email protecting]\n version numbers at the bottom of the page.