A cold and foggy day. 🥶

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I’ve been using Mastodon too much lately. The constant notifications are becoming too stressful. I really do prefer slow communication, like twtxt. ✌️

Yarn spoiler test:

! foo

So, who’s doing Advent of Code? Had some fun this morning:

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And how should we handle spoilers here on twtxt? base64? 😅

It’s been so rainy and windy and cold these last few days, I hardly left the house. 😩

I didn’t realize that the queens of our very common black ants are huge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjbAsdiE7ZI

twtxt.net lost its dark mode? It’s glaringly bright now. 😎

@prologic@twtxt.net Nah. twtxt + Mastodon is enough social media for me. 😅

Numbers are hard. I just almost accidentally sent 33k€ to someone via bank transfer, because the banking website interpreted 334.90 as 33490,00. 😬 This is germany, so it wants a comma, not a dot …

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Regarding section 4 about feed discovery: Yeah, non-HTTP transport protocols are an issue as they do not have User-Agent headers. How exactly do you envision the discovery_url to work, though?

This is from a twt of mine from January 2022:

https://www.uninformativ.de/files/twtxt/2022%2D01%2D22%2D%2Dfollow%2Dendpoint.md

(This idea gets lost all the time, so I put it into a file now. 😅)

Not sure if this is what @eapl.me@eapl.me had in mind, obviously.

@bender@twtxt.net I’m so deeply concerned we even have to discuss the orange clown. 😩 All voodoo dolls up and running. ✅

Funny wobbly moon sets:

https://movq.de/v/4bba078992/moon1.ff.jpg

I also tried to do a little stacked thingy, not too happy with it:

https://movq.de/v/4bba078992/stack.ff.jpg

So, I’m forced to use WhatsApp now. Someone told me: “Hey, I’ve been doing $thing, check my status!” Okay, fine, I open that and it shows a photo.

Then, while looking at that photo, it’s suddenly gone. No, not gone – there are several photos and it switched automatically to the next one. The timeout appears to be four seconds.

JFC, I’m getting too old for this. Let me look at the damn photo! Don’t rush me! 😂

I’m seeing strange lights in the sky. None of my cameras are sensitive enough to make a video.

It’s probably one of two things:

1. A ship on the nearby river with a lightshow going. It’s rare but it happens.
   
2. A steap hill nearby, cars driving “upwards”, and since super bright LED lights are normal nowadays, they reflect from the clouds.
   

Either way, looks fancy.

@doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt May I ask which hardware you have? SSD or HDD? How much RAM?

I might be spoiled and very privileged here. Even though my PC is almost 12 years old now, it does have an SSD and tons of RAM (i.e., lots of I/O cache), so starting mutt and opening the mailbox takes about 1-2 seconds here. I hardly even notice it. But I understand that not everybody has fast machines like that. 🫤

That was a nice 12km walk today. Got home just in time before all the Halloweenies got out. 😅

Time to put up the christmas decoration, I guess. 🤷✨

I think it could be yarnd’s avatar caching. That’s why my avatar field has a #20240102 at the end: To trick yarnd into reloading it.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com … this made me realize that I don’t really know anymore which commands I use. It’s all muscle memory by now. 🤔

TIL: The word “eldritch”, as in “eldritch horror”, does not refer to some small village in England. 🥴 https://www.etymonline.com/word/eldritch

There’s this rumor that you can create a WhatsApp account with a burner phone, then link the phone to a browser on your desktop PC (web.whatsapp.com) and never have to use the phone again. This just doesn’t work. Every ~2 weeks, the session in the browser will time out and you have to re-link again. 🙄

I hope you guys in the US get safely through the next storm. 😳

@3r1c@3r1c.net I think I’m gonna like that blog. 😅 https://unixdigest.com/articles/is-the-madness-ever-going-to-end.html

There’s a lot more activity in Geminispace than I realized: gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m sure you can somehow install something that calculates blake2b on OpenBSD. But it’s not part of the base system as a standalone CLI tool, there only appear to be Perl modules for it. The other SHA tools do exist.

@prologic@twtxt.net I wanted to wait for things to settle down. It’s still unclear to me in which direction we’re going – and if that new/different stuff is even possible to implement in jenny. That said, I’ve been really busy with private stuff these last few days, I’ve lost track of most of what you’re discussing. 🥴

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com rsync -zaXAP is what I use all the time. But that’s all – for the rest, I have to consult the manual. 😅

@xuu@txt.sour.is I think it is more tricky than that.

https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/reform/rules-business-and-organisations/application-regulation/who-does-data-protection-law-apply_en

“A company or entity …”

Also, as I understand it, “personal or household activity” (as you called it) is rather strict: An example could be you uploading photos to a webspace behind HTTP basic auth and sending that link to a friend. So, yes, a webserver is involved and you process your friend’s data (e.g., when did he access your files), but it’s just between you and him. But if you were to publish these photos publicly on a webserver that anyone can access, then it’s a different story – even though you could say that “this is just my personal hobby, not related to any job or money”.

If you operate a public Yarn pod and if you accept registrations from other users, then I’m pretty sure the GDPR applies. 🤔 You process personal data and you don’t really know these people. It’s not a personal/private thing anymore.

Had to build a list of all feeds (that I follow) and all twts in them and there are two collisions already:

$ ./stats
Saw 58263 hashes
7fqcxaa
  https://twtxt.net/user/justamoment/twtxt.txt
  https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt
ntnakqa
  https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt
  https://twtxt.net/user/thecanine/twtxt.txt

Namely:

$ jenny -D https://twtxt.net/user/justamoment/twtxt.txt | grep 7fqcxaa

[7fqcxaa] [2022-12-28 04:53:30+00:00] [(#pmuqoca) @prologic@twtxt.net I checked the GitHub discussion, it became a request to join forces.

Do you plan on having them join?

Also for the name, how about:

• “progit” or “prologit” (prologic official hard fork)
  
• “git-stance” (git instance)
  
• “GitTree” (Gitea inspired, maybe to related)
  
• “Gitomata” (git automata)
  
• “Git.Source”
  
• “Forgor” (forgit is taken so I forgor) 🤣
  
• “SweetGit” (as salty chat)
  
• “Pepper Git” (other ingredients) 😉
  
• “GitHeart” (core of git with a GitHub sounding name)
  
• “GitTaka” (With music in mind)
  

Ok, enough fun… Hope this helps sprout some ideas from others if nothing is to your taste.]

$ jenny -D https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt/5 | grep 7fqcxaa

[7fqcxaa] [2022-02-25 21:14:45+00:00] [(#bqq6fxq) It’s handled by blue Monday]

And:

$ jenny -D https://twtxt.net/user/thecanine/twtxt.txt | grep ntnakqa
[ntnakqa] [2022-01-23 10:24:09+00:00] [(#2wh7r4q) <a href="https://yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz/external?uri=https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt">@prologic<em>@twtxt.net</em></a> I know, I was just hoping it might have also gotten fixed by that change, by some kind of backend miracles. 😂]

$ jenny -D https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt/1 | grep ntnakqa
[ntnakqa] [2024-02-27 05:51:50+00:00] [(#otuupfq) <a href="https://yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz/external?uri=https://twtxt.net/user/shreyan/twtxt.txt">@shreyan<em>@twtxt.net</em></a>  Ahh 👌]

I’m still more in favor of (replyto:…). It’s easier to implement and the whole edits-breaking-threads thing resolves itself in a “natural” way without the need to add stuff to the protocol.

I’d love to try this out in practice to see how well it performs. 🤔 It’s all very theoretical at the moment.

Alright, before I go and watch Formula 1 😅, I made two PRs regarding the two “competing” ideas:

• https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/yarn/pulls/1179 – (replyto:…)
  
• https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/yarn/pulls/1180 – (edit:…) and (delete:…)
  

As a first step, this summarizes my current understanding. Please comment! 😊

One distinct disadvantage of (replyto:…) over (edit:#): (replyto:…) relies on clients always processing the entire feed – otherwise they wouldn’t even notice when a twt gets updated. a) This is more expensive, b) you cannot edit twts once they get rotated into an archived feed, because there is nothing signalling clients that they have to re-fetch that archived feed.

I guess neither matters that much in practice. It’s still a disadvantage.

I’m bad with faces, I know that. But I’m having a really hard time recognizing Linus in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WCTGycBceg

Basically a different person to me. Is it just me or has he really changed that much? 😳

I’m not advocating in either direction, btw. I haven’t made up my mind yet. 😅 Just braindumping here.

The (replyto:…) proposal is definitely more in the spirit of twtxt, I’d say. It’s much simpler, anyone can use it even with the simplest tools, no need for any client code. That is certainly a great property, if you ask me, and it’s things like that that brought me to twtxt in the first place.

I’d also say that in our tiny little community, message integrity simply doesn’t matter. Signed feeds don’t matter. I signed my feed for a while using GPG, someone else did the same, but in the end, nobody cares. The community is so tiny, there’s enough “implicit trust” or whatever you want to call it.

If twtxt/Yarn was to grow bigger, then this would become a concern again. But even Mastodon allows editing, so how much of a problem can it really be? 😅

I do have to “admit”, though, that hashes feel better. It feels good to know that we can clearly identify a certain twt. It feels more correct and stable.

Hm.

I suspect that the (replyto:…) proposal would work just as well in practice.

Regarding jenny development: There have been enough changes in the last few weeks, imo. I want to let things settle for a while (potential bugfixes aside) and then I’m going to cut a new release.

And I guess the release after that is going to include all the threading/hashing stuff – if we can decide on one of the proposals. 😂

@quark@ferengi.one At the moment, the twt in question exists in the sixth archive:

$ jenny -D https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt/6 | head
[o6dsrga] [2020-07-18 12:39:52+00:00] [Hello World! 😊]

Does that work for you? 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, that thing with (#hash;#originalHash) would also work.

Maybe I’m being a bit too purist/minimalistic here. As I said before (in one of the 1372739 posts on this topic – or maybe I didn’t even send that twt, I don’t remember 😅), I never really liked hashes to begin with. They aren’t super hard to implement but they are kind of against the beauty of the original twtxt – because you need special client support for them. It’s not something that you could write manually in your twtxt.txt file. With @sorenpeter@darch.dk’s proposal, though, that would be possible.

I don’t know … maybe it’s just me. 🥴

I’m also being a bit selfish, to be honest: Implementing (#hash;#originalHash) in jenny for editing your own feed would not be a no-brainer. (Editing is already kind of unsupported, actually.) It wouldn’t be a problem to implement it for fetching other people’s feeds, though.

@quark@ferengi.one

Since jenny can’t fetch archived twtxts

I wiped my entire maildir and re-fetched everything. I did that recently because @aelaraji@aelaraji.com asked me to 😅, but I guess I also did this back in 2023.

What did you do to make yours work?

jenny does fetch archived feeds during the normal jenny -f operation. Only when using the recently implemented --fetch-context, archived feeds are not fetched (yet). That was an oversight and I intend to fix that.

@sorenpeter@darch.dk

1. (replyto:http://darch.dk/twtxt.txt,2024-09-15T12:06:27Z)
   

I think I like this a lot. 🤔

The problem with using hashes always was that they’re “one-directional”: You can construct a hash from URL + timestamp + twt, but you cannot do the inverse. When I see “, I have no idea what that could possibly refer to.

But of course something like (replyto:http://darch.dk/twtxt.txt,2024-09-15T12:06:27Z) has all the information you need. This could simplify twt/feed discovery quite a bit, couldn’t it? 🤔 That thing that I just implemented – jenny asking some Yarn pod for some twt hash – would not be necessary anymore. Clients could easily and automatically fetch complete threads instead of requiring the user to follow all relevant feeds.

Only using the timestamp to identify a twt also solves the edit problem.

It even is better for non-Yarn clients, because you now don’t have to read, understand, and implement a “twt hash specification” before you can reply to someone.

The only problem, really, is that (replyto:http://darch.dk/twtxt.txt,2024-09-15T12:06:27Z) is so long. Clients would have to try harder to hide this. 😅

Alright, I saw enough broken threads lately to be motivated enough to extend the --fetch-context thingy: It can now ask Yarn pods for twt hashes.

https://www.uninformativ.de/git/jenny/commit/eefd3fa09083e2206ed0d71887d2ef2884684a71.html

This is only done as a last resort if there’s no other way to find the missing twt. Like, when there’s a twt that begins with just a hash and no user mention, there’s no way for jenny to know on which feed that twt can be found, so it’ll ask some Yarn pod in that case.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Venus?

All this hash breakage made me wonder if we should try to introduce “message IDs” after all. 😅

But the great thing about the current system is that nobody can spoof message IDs. 🤔 When you think about it, message IDs in e-mails only work because (almost) everybody plays fair. Nothing stops me from using the same Message-ID header in each and every mail, that would break e-mail threading all the time.

In Yarn, twt hashes are derived from twt content and feed metadata. That is pretty elegant and I’d hate see us lose that property.

If we wanted to allow editing twts, we could do something like this:

2024-09-05T13:37:40+00:00   (~mp6ox4a) Hello world!

Here, mp6ox4a would be a “partial hash”: To get the actual hash of this twt, you’d concatenate the feed’s URL and mp6ox4a and get, say, hlnw5ha. (Pretty similar to the current system.) When people reply to this twt, they would have to do this:

2024-09-05T14:57:14+00:00	(~bpt74ka) (<a href="https://yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz/search?q=%23hlnw5ha">#hlnw5ha</a>) Yes, hello!

That second twt has a partial hash of bpt74ka and is a reply to the full hash hlnw5ha. The author of the “Hello world!” twt could then edit their twt and change it to 2024-09-05T13:37:40+00:00 (~mp6ox4a) Hello friends! or whatever. Threading wouldn’t break.

Would this be worth it? It’s certainly not backwards-compatible. 😂

@bender@twtxt.net On twtxt, I follow all feeds that I can find (there are some exceptions, of course). There’s so little going on in general, it hardly matters. 😅

And I just realized: Mutt’s layout helps a lot. Skimming over new twts is really easy and it’s not a big loss if there are a couple of shitposts™ in my “timeline”. This is very different from Mastodon (both the default web UI and all clients I’ve tried), where the timeline is always huge. Posts take up a lot of space on screen. Makes me think twice if I want to follow someone or not. 😅

(I mostly only follow Hashtags on Mastodon anyway. It’s more interesting that way.)

@cuaxolotl@sunshinegardens.org Ah, thanks for reporting back! Okay, so you’re basically manually “crawling” feeds right now. 🤔 What do you think about the idea of adding something like # follow_notify = gemini://foo/bar to your feed’s metadata, so that clients who follow you can ping that URL every now and then? How would you even notice that, do you regularly read your gemini logs? 🤔

Found this in an old copyright notice from 1993:

These images are not for use with the Microsoft Windows environment. Using these patterns in a Windows environment consitutes a copyright violation.

Someone clearly didn’t like Windows.

@quark@ferengi.one

I think you are worrying about a non-issue.

That’s what I do best. 😏

35°C and rising … can haz winter?

@yarn_police@twtxt.net I was just about to remove this feed from my config because it was stale … 😂

I think I’m not going to query Yarn pods for the moment. Let’s first see how often I’d actually need that. 🤔

There was a garbage bag incident last night and I had to clean up the kitchen for two hours. 😂 Now I’m sore as fuck. Good thing I have a day off today, huh? 🤪