I have applied your comments, and I tried to add you as an editor but couldn’t find your email address. Please request editing access if you wish.

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 ?

Hi! For anyone following the Request for Comments on an improved syntax for replies and threads, I’ve made a comparative spreadsheet with the 4 proposals so far. It shows a syntax example, and top pros and cons I’ve found:
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.

Wow, this is a nice way to practice internationalization for our systems
https://i18n-puzzles.com

Timeline and twtxt-php, don’t support Gemini, only HTTP/S, as a design choice (although originally it was intended to work on Gemtext, it was a niche inside a niche, so it was discarded very soon).

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

well… it has been an opportunity to build an artisanal microblogging client on top of a minimalist protocol. I agree on the hacker toy part.

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.

it seems like yarn still points my nick to both my older URL (404 now) along with the current one.

it seems to be “an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts)” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog#History

I’d like to know more about what andros and prologic are talking about, I feel lost.

“This will be managed by Registries.” Are we talking about these registries?
https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/registry.html

ah! those german calendars. Somehow I was thinking of something like mine, with spaces to write inside each day.

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!

do you mind sharing a picture ?

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.

Image

We also have a shared calendar in the kitchen for family events, and it’s working great.

well (insert stubborn emoji here) 😛, word blog comes from weblog, and microblogging could derivate from ‘smaller weblog’. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Microblogging

I’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.

pls elaborate on a ‘p2p database’, ‘all story’ and ‘Registries’.

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.

🐿️ squirrels!

I’d need to think about it deeply, but at a first sight, 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?

@prologic@twtxt.net oops, I’m sorry to see disagreement leading to draining emotions.

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!

[lang=es] definitivamente es una buena llamada de atención para promover más donaciones a proyectos opensource. La verdad apoyo menos proyectos de los que ‘debería’, por el valor que me ofrecen.

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.

Damn! Stay safe mate…

lang=en @xuu@txt.sour.is gotcha!
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.

Hi everyone,
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…

really? I think I haven’t seen it being used in the wild

@prologic@twtxt.net sure thing!
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.

a few async ideas for later

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.

yep! Enjoy your rest, let’s discuss it later

looks good to me!

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.

hi! I hope you can see this message

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?

Hey everyone!

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!

I like this syntax, you have my vote, although I’d change it a bit like
#<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

looks good now!
description = 🏗 Full-Stack developer (Mainly Python) ✍ Writer[...]

also @Andros, I see that if I open that URL on my browser, I see weird characters in the .txt file:
description = 🏗
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

working on my bookmarks tool, I found out that http(s)://domain.tls is not a valid resource, but http(s)://domain.tls/ is, as you can see here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/2581423

I suppose that internally the wget/curl or whatever client you are using is redirecting it?

Testing out this image upload feature…

Image

here is my progress so far: https://github.com/eapl-gemugami/twtxt-direct-message-php
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@twtxt.andros.dev 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@uplegger.eu I haven’t check your repo yet, although you are using sodium, right?

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Could you share (perhaps in the extension document) the private key for alice?

I want to compare that I can read the encrypted message both from OpenSSL CLI and from the PHP OpenSSL library, following the spec.

trying to implement it quickly, I get the same questions than you

# 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 haven’t taken a look into that extension, although I think you could use the OpenSSL library: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.openssl-encrypt.php

I’m surprised, here you can’t find dial controls anymore. How old are your ovens? The last one my parents had was from the 90s.

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.

with the quote?

among these options, 3

Although I like it more “twt”, without the dot and with a t at the end

Something interesting to think about for 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/

well, Gemini clients like Lagrange allow to show inline images when you click on an image link. Text based clients, like Amfora, usually allow to watch the image in another ‘window’.

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 have a microwave oven at home, right?

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 ?

hey! It’s looking nice

ok, sounds like a ‘large’ project to me.
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.

1st thought… Run!

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?

that’s a fair point.

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.

Linear feeds are a dark pattern - A proposal for Mastodon
https://tilde.town/~dzwdz/blog/feeds.html

I’ve polished the CSS style a bit, you can try it here: https://eapl.me/treed/

Hehe, this is amazing:

If OpenSSL were a GUI

Image

Hey, I like this simple Web game:
https://wordswithrobots.isotropic.us

2 players Codenames vs (or along) gpt-4o-mini

a year ago I had a struggle to find documentation about it and now it seems there are more examples, cool!

I agree 🙂, although it’s easy to lose comments over time and are not so grouped by topic, it’s not so easy to vote or make a survey about it…

I prefer a forum for that 😊