@prologic@twtxt.net @bender@twtxt.net @eapl.me@eapl.me I think opening another file is a bad idea because it adds complexity to the clients, breaks the single feed and I think keeping legacy clients will be more complex to add new features in the future. A modern approach is important.
I’ll be honest, I’m a bit tired of the fight around the direct message. Perhaps, we can remove it as an extension and use the alternative @prologic@twtxt.net . My suggestion apparently doesn’t like to the community. I have no problem with remove it.

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev how often do you send a private message on the Fediverse? How often do you send PGP/SMIME encrypted emails? Are there other tools that are more suitable for the task? If implementing direct/private messages on twtxt scratches an itch (you know, that hobbyist itch we all get from time to time), then don’t give up so easily. Worse comes to worse, and your feed becomes too noisy, people can simply unfollow/mute.

I really don’t care about direct messages here, but I might be on that bottom 1%!

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev I don’t see any “fighting” here. This is just good experimentation. Unfortunately there hasn’t really been enough time or effort by other “client authors” yet, me especially as I’ve been super busy with ya’ know my “day job” that pays the bills and refactoring yarnd to use a new and shiny and much better SqliteCache 🤣 – I certainly don’t think your efforts are wasted at all. I would however like @doesnm.p.psf.lt@doesnm.p.psf.lt encourage you to look at the work we’ve done as a community (which was also driven out of the Yarn.social / Twtxt community years back).

I do think integrating things like Salty.im might actually be a good idea. I can also see a future where we integrate other things like todo.txt and calendar.txt. I’d even love to see decentralised forms of “plain text” voting too.

I think I would encourage anyone in this community is to care less about supporting “legacy clients” and focus more on value-add whilst balancing the burden of client authors – which have very precious little “spare time” 🤣

my main itch with the DMs extensions is that these messages are intended to be private, not public information. That’s why other extensions make sense, but DMs are another kind of feature.
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==

it should be
# 2025-04-13T11:02:12+02:00 !<dm-echo https://dm-echo.andros.dev/twtxt.txt> U2FsdGVkX1+QmwBNmk9Yu9jvazVRFPS2TGJRGle/BDDzFult6zCtxNhJrV0g+sx0EIKbjL2a9QpCT5C0Z2qWvw==

@eapl.me@eapl.me This is one of my concerns too. The moment you post publicly ciphertext, you open yourself up for future attacks on the ciphertext, which you really want to avoid if you can. If you have a read of the Salty.im Spec you’ll note we went to great lengths to protect the user’s privacy as well as their identity and make it incredibly hard to guess at inboxes. It’s still a WIP, but I’d love to see it progressed even further – I truly feel strongly about a purely decentralised messaging ecosystem 👌

@prologic@twtxt.net @bender@twtxt.net @eapl.me@eapl.me @andros@twtxt.andros.dev I’m new in the neighborhood and I would like to ask you something :) When a new extension is published in twtxt.dev , is it open for discussion or ready for implementation?