@bender@twtxt.net Ahh yes I see what you mean. no indicate of when the post was made right? That should be ideally displayed on the page somewhere? Would you expect it in the url as well, because not having /posts/yyyy/mm/dd/....
was actually intentional. But yeah I should figure out where to put some additional metadata on the page.
@bender@twtxt.net hopeful of the same 🤞
I will try to improve the CSS 🙏
the single posts have no date (intended?)
What do you mean by this? 🤔
@movq@www.uninformativ.de Kill it with fire 🔥
https://zsblog.mills.io/ for anyone interested. I think I still have some small tweaking to do befor eI use this for realz.
@alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it Yeah I think we’re overstating the UNIX principles a bit here 🤣 I get what you’re trying to say though @zvava@twtxt.net 😅 If I could go back in time and do it all over again, I would have gotten the Hash length correct and I would have used SHA-256 instead. But someone way smarter than me designed the Twt Hash spec, we adopted it and well here we are today, it works™ 😅
@alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it Yes well I’m pretty big on self-hosting. I’ve even tried to start a small business/company around it (but that’s another story for another day!) – Meanwhile I would encourage you to have a look at the work we’ve done in Salty.im 👌
@alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it Well we have to really use the same spec or threading doesn’t really work in a truly decentralized manner 😉
@zvava@twtxt.net I axtually latest did and I wasn’t the only one 🤣
@zvava@twtxt.net That’s what I’m leaning towards yeah🤞
Please don’t hate me today; I’m a bit grumpy and have too many reasons to be upset:
- 2 counts of pushing and trying to get the simplest things done at work (that for some reason are made more difficult than they should be)
- This whole Chat Control bullshit
- And some other person things going on that have been ongoing for 72 days and counting 🤬
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 well™ (despite some flaws).
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.
@zvava@twtxt.net 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”™ 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).
@bender@twtxt.net 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@lyse.isobeef.org 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 🤣
@alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it My problem is I don’t see a world where we don’t employ some form of cryptography to use as keys for threads in databases and other such things honestly. I’m not going to use url#timestamp
as keys.
Oh man, if the EU actually rolled out this horribd idea called ChatControl that actually threatens the security and privacy of secure e2e encrypted messaging like Signal™, fuck me, I’m out 🤦♂️ I’ll just rage quit the IT industry and become a luddite. I’m out.
index.md
a prehook
and a few utilities:
@bender@twtxt.net Yes I did about a week or so ago. It took me a lot of effort to get the content even rendered in the first place. LOL I had to basically export my blog as HTML (can you believe that?!) – The Hugo export just didn’t work at all 🤣
I just created a zs blogging template which I’m going to use for https://prologic.blog and I might starting writing long-form again soon™ 🔜 So far the “blogging” template/engine (if you weill) is quite simple. It comprises essentially of an index.md
a prehook
and a few utilities:
$ git ls-files
.gitignore
.zs/config.yml
.zs/editthispage
.zs/include
.zs/layout.html
.zs/list
.zs/months
.zs/now
.zs/onthispage
.zs/posthook
.zs/postsbymonth
.zs/prehook
.zs/scripts
.zs/styles
.zs/tagcloud
.zs/taglist
.zs/years
archives/.empty
assets/css/site.css
assets/js/main.js
index.md
posts/hello-zs-blog.md
posts/on-tagging.md
posts/second-post.md
tags/.empty
Each origin feed numbers new threads
(tno:N)
. Replies carry both (tno:N)
and (ofeed:<origin-url>)
. Thread identity = (ofeed, tno)
.
@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yes it’s kind of terrible 😞 – Let’s not do this 🤣
@bender@twtxt.net Really? 🤔
Each origin feed numbers new threads
(tno:N)
. Replies carry both (tno:N)
and (ofeed:<origin-url>)
. Thread identity = (ofeed, tno)
.
This is possibly the only other threading model I can come up with for Twtxt that I think I can get behind.
Each origin feed numbers new threads
(tno:N)
. Replies carry both (tno:N)
and (ofeed:<origin-url>)
. Thread identity = (ofeed, tno)
.
Example:
Alice starts thread href=”https://yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz/search?q=%2342:”>#42:**
2025-09-25T12:00:00Z (tno:42) Launching storage design review.
Bob replies:
2025-09-25T12:05:00Z (tno:42) (ofeed:https://alice.example/twtxt.txt
) I think compaction stalls under load.
Carol replies to Bob:
2025-09-25T12:08:00Z (tno:42) (ofeed:https://alice.example/twtxt.txt
) Token bucket sounds good.
TNO Threading (draft):
Each origin feed numbers new threads (tno:N)
. Replies carry both (tno:N)
and (ofeed:<origin-url>)
. Thread identity = (ofeed, tno)
.
- Roots:
(tno:N)
(implicitofeed=self
).
- Replies:
(tno:N) (ofeed:<url>)
.
- Clients: increment
tno
locally for new threads, copy tags on reply.
- Subjects optional, not required.
…
@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com I’m glad to hear it 🤣
Of course we still have to fix the hashing algorithm and length.
I would personally rather see something like this:
2025-09-25T22:41:19+10:00 Hello World
2025-09-25T22:41:19+10:00 (#kexv5vq https://example.com/twtxt.html#:~:text=2025-09-25T22:41:19%2B10:00) Hey!
Preserving both content-based addressing as well as location-based addressing and text fragment linking.
I was trying to say (badly):
That’s kind of my position on this. If we are going to make significant changes in the threading model, let’s keep content based addressing, but also improve the user experience. Answering your question, yes I think we can do some combination of both.
@alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it Holy fuck! 🤣 I just realized how bad my typing was in my reply before 🤣 🤦♂️ So sorry about that haha 😆 I blame the stupid iPhone on-screen keyboard ⌨️
@alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it Yhays kind of love you!! Stance and position on this. If we are going to make chicken changes in the threading model, let’s keep content based addressing, but also improve the use of experience. So in fact, in order to answer your question, I think yes, we can do some kind of combination of both.
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I don’t think there’s any point in continuing the discussion of Location vs. Content based addressing.
I want us to preserve Content based addressing.
Let’s improve the user experience and fix the hash commission problems.
Here is just a small list of things™ that I’m aware will break, some quite badly, others in minor ways:
- Link rot & migrations: domain changes, path reshuffles, CDN/mirror use, or moving from txt → jsonfeed will orphan replies unless every reader implements perfect 301/410 history, which they won’t.
- Duplication & forks: mirrors/relays produce multiple valid locations for the same post; readers see several “parents” and split the thread.
- Verification & spam-resistance: content addressing lets you dedupe and verify you’re pointing at exactly the post you meant (hash matches bytes). Location anchors can be replayed or spoofed more easily unless you add signing and canonicalization.
- Offline/cached reading: without the original URL being reachable, readers can’t resolve anchors; with hashes they can match against local caches/archives.
- Ecosystem churn: all existing clients, archives, and tools that assume content-derived IDs need migrations, mapping layers, and fallback logic. Expect long-lived threads to fracture across implementations.
We’ve been discussing the idea of changing the threading model from Content-based Addressing to Location-based addressing for years now. The problem is quite complex, but I feel I have to keep reminding y’all of the potential perils of changing this and the pros/cons of each model:
With content-addressed threading, a reply points at something that’s intrinsically identified (hash of author/feed URI + timestamp + content). That ID never changes as long as the content doesn’t. Switching to location-based anchors makes the reply target extrinsic—it now depends on where the post currently lives. In a pull-based, decentralised network, locations drift. The moment they do, thread identity fragments.
@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Mine shows 1/1 of 14 Twts 😆 I think this is a bug 🤯
@alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it I took it down mostly because of continued abuse and spam:l. I intend to fix I and improve the drive and its sister at Summer point 🤞
@alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it Love this 😍
@alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it Yeah same 🤣 There’s also this @news-minimalist@feeds.twtxt.net feed that shows up the most important shit™ anyway (when/if that happens).
@bender@twtxt.net Seriously I have zero clue 🤣 I don’t read or watch any news so I have no idea 🤦♂️
Did something bad happen in the world today? 🧐
Hello 👋 I’m back!
@bender@twtxt.net Soon soon🤣
@bender@twtxt.net I wish 🤣 Nah work on-site thingy😆
I’m out of town folks and away until tomorrow (have been all week)
@thecanine@twtxt.net Id like that too, it just can’t come from me, because native mobile dev just isn’t my thing 😢
@zvava@twtxt.net And yes yarnd
does have a well documented API and two clients (CLI and unmaintained Flutter App)
@zvava@twtxt.net We can do that 👌
@zvava@twtxt.net The first version of what is now yarnd
was built over a weekend 😀
@zvava@twtxt.net Herw you go: https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/twtxt.dev/pulls/28