@sorenpeter@darch.dk Unfortunately it does break all clients, because the original spec stated:

Mentions are embedded within the text in either @ or @ format

@sorenpeter@darch.dk you wrote:

“This might even be backward compatible with older (pre-yarn) clients.”

Yarnd is as backwards compatible with older clients as this. I dare to say, even more so. 😅

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev @eapl.me@eapl.me Still lots of bugs in my client. 🥴 I’ll try to fix it next week.

And yes, using the same timestamp twice will very likely break threads.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de ok, I have included a small modification in the documentation to allow you to reply in your own thread: https://texudus.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
You can see my reply: https://andros.dev/texudus.txt
Don’t delete anything and give me time to make my modifications to the client.

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev I set up a test feed here:

https://www.uninformativ.de/texudus.txt

I made some preliminary adjustments to my client so that it can work with the different threading model. (And I totally get the concerns, this can be quite a bit of work. Especially in a large code base like Yarn.)

I’ve just released version 1.0 of twtxt.el (the Emacs client), the stable and final version with the current extensions. I’ll let the community maintain it, if there are interested in using it. I will also be open to fix small bugs.
I don’t know if this twt is a goodbye or a see you later. Maybe I will never come back, or maybe I will post a new twt this afternoon. But it’s always important to be grateful. Thanks to @prologic@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de @eapl.me@eapl.me @bender@twtxt.net @aelaraji@aelaraji.com @arne@uplegger.eu @david@collantes.us @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt @xuu@txt.sour.is @sorenpeter@darch.dk for everything you have taught me. I’ve learned a lot about #twtxt, HTTP and working in community. It has been a fantastic adventure!
What will become of me? I have created a twtxt fork called Texudus (https://texudus.readthedocs.io/). I want to continue learning on my own without the legacy limitations or technologies that implement twtxt. It’s not a replacement for any technology, it’s just my own little lab. I have also made a fork of my own client and will be focusing on it for a while. I don’t expect anyone to use it, but feedback is always welcome.
Best regards to everyone.
#twtxt #emacs #twtxt-el #texudus

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I think we can make this work 👌 As long as it’s just a client hint.

just for the record I didn’t say I was leaving the twtxt ‘community’ (did I?) but than I have other priorities to focus on in the following months. Please don’t be condescending, is not cool.

Development of Timeline (PHP client) has been stale for some reasons, a few of them in my side, so I think it won’t be updated to the new thread model, at least pretty soon.
So is not that I’ll stop using twtxt, just the client I use won’t be compatible with the new model in July.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de If we’re focusing on solving the “missing roots” problems. I would start to think about “client recommendations”. The first recommendation would be:

1. Replying to a Twt that has no initial Subject must itself have a Subject of the form (hash; url).
   

This way it’s a hint to fetching clients that follow B, but not A (in the case of no mentions) that the Subject/Root might (very likely) is in the feed url.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org likewise I don’t have the energy for a fundamental shift in any of our specifications that would inevitably cause a lot of toil and try and change in our clients implementations and unforeseen problems that we haven’t really fully understood:

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Agreed, finding the right motivation can be tricky. You sometimes have to torture yourself in order to later then realize, yeah, that was actually totally worth it. It’s often hard.

I think if you find a project or goal in general that these kids want to achieve, that is the best and maybe only choice with a good chance of positive outcome. I don’t know, like building a price scraper, a weather station or whatever. Yeah, these are already too advanced if they never programmed, but you get the idea. If they have something they want to build for themselves for their private life, that can be a great motivator I’ve experienced. Or you could assign ‘em the task to build their own twtxt client if they don’t have any own suitable ideas. :-)

Showing them that you do a lot of your daily work in the shell can maybe also help to get them interested in text-based boring stuff. Or at least break the ice. Lead by example. The more I think about it, the more I believe this to be very important. That’s how I still learn and improve from my favorite workmate today in general. Which I’m very thankful of.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Hahahaha 🤣 I mean it’s “okay” every now and then, but what’s the point of having good clients and tools if we don’t use ‘em 🤣

We have 4 clients but this should be 6 I believe with tt2 from @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org and Twtxtory from @javivf@adn.org.es?

Finally I propose that we increase the Twt Hash length from 7 to 12 and use the first 12 characters of the base32 encoded blake2b hash. This will solve two problems, the fact that all hashes today either end in q or a (oops) 😅 And increasing the Twt Hash size will ensure that we never run into the chance of collision for ions to come. Chances of a 50% collision with 64 bits / 12 characters is roughly ~12.44B Twts. That ought to be enough! – I also propose that we modify all our clients and make this change from the 1st July 2025, which will be Yarn.social’s 5th birthday and 5 years since I started this whole project and endeavour! 😱 #Twtxt #Update

And speaking of Twtxt (See: #xushlda, feeds should be treated as append-only. Your client(s) should be appending Twts to the bottom of the file. Edits should never modify the timestamp of the Twt being edited, nor should a Twt that was edited by deleted, unless you actually intended to delete it (but that’s more complicated as it’s very hard to control or tell clients what to do in a truely decentralised ecosystem for the deletion case). #Twtxt #Client #Recommendations

Just like we don’t write emails by hand anymore (See: #a3adoka), we don’t manually write Twts or update our twtxt.txt feeds. Instead, we use modern Twtxt clients that conform to the specifications at Twtxt.dev for a seamless, automated experience. #Twtxt #Twt #UserExperience

Nobody writes emails by hand using RFC 5322 anymore, nor do we manually send them through telnet and SMTP commands. The days of crafting emails in raw format and dialing into servers are long gone. Modern email clients and services handle it all seamlessly in the background, making email easier than ever to send and receive—without needing to understand the protocols or formats behind it! #Email #SMTP #RFC #Automation

@javivf@adn.org.es Ahh! So this is your client implementation? 🧐

Was just looking at the client you’re using Twtxtory 🤔 Very nice! 👍 is this your client, did you write it? I’d not come across it before!

$ bat https://twtxt.net/twt/edgwjcq | jq '.subject'
"(#yarnd)"

hahahahaha 🤣 Does your client allow you to do this or what? 🤔

Interesting factoid… By inspecting my “followers” list every now and again, I can tell who uses a client like jenny, tt or any other client where fetches are driven by user interactions of invoking the app. What do we call this type of client? Hmmm 🤔 Then I can tell who uses yarnd because they are “seen” more frequently 🤣

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The Steam store and desktop client will soon be able to help players find games that feature accessibility support. If your game has accessibility features, you can now enter that information in the Steamworks ‘edit store’ section for your app. ↫ Steam announcements page I have a lot of criticism for the Steam client application – it’s a overly complex, unattractive, buggy, slow, top-heavy Chrome engi … ⌘ Read more

My Hypothesis for why registries didn’t work and why they still won’t really work today is because the bend the rules of “true” decentralization a bit. Users have to pick one or more registries to “register” to. Why would they want to do this? What is their incentive to do so? Then on the other hand, users need a client that has registry support, but now which registry or sets of registries do you choose?

by commenting out DMs are you giving up on simplicity? See the Metadata extension holding the data inside comments, as the client doesn’t need to show it inside the timeline.

I don’t think that commenting out DMs as we are doing for metadata is giving up on simplicity (it’s a feature already), and it helps to hide unwanted DMs to clients that will take months to add it’s support to something named… an extension.

For some other extensions in https://twtxt.dev/extensions.html (for example the reply-to hash #abcdfeg or the mention @ < example http://example.org/twtxt.txt >) is not a big deal. The twt is still understandable in plain text.
For DM, it’s only interesting for you if you are the recipient, otherwise you see an scrambled message like 1234567890abcdef=. Even if you see it, you’ll need some decryption to read it. I’ve said before that DMs shouldn’t be in the same section that the timeline as it’s confusing.

So my point stands, and as I’ve said before, we are discussing it as a community, so let’s see what other maintainers add to the convo.

@bender@twtxt.net You said:

as long as those working on clients can reach an agreement on how to move forward. That has proven, though, to be a pickle in the past.

I think this is because we probably need to start thinking about three different aspects to the ecosystem and document them out:

• Specifications (as they are now)
  
• Server recommendations (e.g: Timeline, yarnd, etc)
  
• Client recommendations (e.g: jenny, tt, tt2, twet, etc)

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev nothing stands still, I agree. I think current twtxt has surpassed the initial specification, while still being relatively backwards compliant/compatible but, for how long?

As for new extensions (DM, for example), they should be OK as long as those working on clients can reach an agreement on how to move forward. That has proven, though, to be a pickle in the past.

The nice thing here is that any Ui/UX rendering for a “good user experience” is similar to what yarnd does for Youtube/Spotify/whatever embedding. Plus anyone can participate, even if they don’t really have a client that understand it, it’s just text with some “syntax” afterall.

💡 I had this crazy idea (or is it?) last night while thinking about Twtxt and Yarn.social 😅 There are two things I think that could be really useful additions to the yarnd UI/UX experience (for those that use it) and as “client” features (not spec changes). The two ideas are quite simple:

• Voting – a way to cast, collect a vote on a decision, topic or opinion.
  
• RSVP – a way to “rsvp” to a virtual (pr physical) event.
  

Both would use “plain text” on top of the way we already use Twtxt today and clients would render an appropriate UI/UX.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz At the core, you need an ngircd.conf like this:

[Global]
    Name = your.irc.server.com
    Password = yourfancypassword
    Listen = 0.0.0.0
    Ports = 6667

    AdminInfo1 = Well, me.
    AdminInfo2 = Over here!
    AdminEMail = forget.it@example.invalid

[Options]
    Ident = no
    PAM = no

[SSL]
    CertFile = /etc/ssl/acme/your.irc.server.com.fullchain.pem
    KeyFile = /etc/ssl/acme/private/your.irc.server.com.key
    DHFile = /etc/ngircd/dhparam.pem
    Ports = 6669

Start it and then you can connect on port 6667. (The SSL cert/key must be managed by an external tool, probably something like certbot or acme-client.)

I’m assuming OpenBSD here. Haven’t tried it on Linux lately, let alone Docker. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net I also thought it was a client-server thingy at first and usually it is, I guess, there’s just this workaround:

If it is not possible to install Borg on the remote host, it is still possible to use the remote host to store a repository by mounting the remote filesystem, for example, using sshfs.

is it like… ethical to offer access to certain self hosted services as patreon exclusives. like i wanna offer the IRC client/bouncer i hosted which seems ok i think because i’ve seen pico.sh offer their instances of that as paid services. but the other ones i have in mind are alt web frontends for stuff like imgur and pinterest. and i just feel weird about it for some reason. idk i’m trying to think of ways to support my server stuff but every time i come up with something it feels weird

@prologic@twtxt.net oooh this looks interesting!!! maybe i could play around with it in docker and see how to integrate it with caddy layer4 for TLS + my existing web client and bouncer!!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de i tried ngircd but couldn’t figure it out T__T i left it at the web client and bouncer for now but i might toy with an IRC server another time!

@prologic@twtxt.net no, it is not a “server-client thingy”.

Seem like it’s a server-client thingy? 🤔 I much prefer tools in this case and defer the responsibility of storage to something else. I really like restic for that reason and the fact that it’s pretty rock solid. I have zero complaints 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de no clue! i’ve never had issues setting up websockets and the gamja client itself seems to work fine when connecting to other servers, but my bouncer doesn’t work right so it’s soju T__T i THINK there’s a problem with the websockets but it seems to be working right so i’m just confused

@javivf@adn.org.es having the extension listed means that it has been discussed and, usually implemented. Now, number 6 and 7 on the list as its stands today are not supported by any of the known clients. I believe their (again, 6 and 7) inclusion on the list has been precipitated, and lax.

I just noticed that my unread messages counter was off by quite a bit. It showed 8, but I only saw one unread message. Even after restarting my client, which recalculates the number of unread messages, it remained at eight. Weird. Looking in the database revealed that this is indeed correct.

Apparently, my query to build up the message tree must be incorrect. It somehow misses seven messages. They all are orphaned, maybe that’s a clue. However, generating missing root messages (and thereby including the replies) typically works just fine. Hmm.

@quark@ferengi.one No editing old Twts that are the root of a thread with replies in the ecosystem. Just results in a fork. Unless the client has an implementation that does not store Twts keyed by Hash.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de wouldn’t editing your own twtxts cause the same issue Yarnd (or any other client) has, which is breaking any replies to it? Under which conditions would this work the best? When copying the twtxt.txt file asynchronously? In my case I copy the twtxt.txt file to its web root right away, but I figure I could not do that, which would give me a set period of time to edit without worries.

@bender@twtxt.net NOOOO i self host an XMPP server and also revolt but as much as i love XMPP (gajim client reminds me of using skype as a kid highkey) i don’t use it much and revolt is a bitch to maintain. like i broke revolt file uploads and it stayed that way for months until literally last week lmao. i never bothered with matrix tbh maybe i should’ve but it seems not worth it

@eaplme@eapl.me you wrote:

“That PHP snippet could be merged into https://twtxt.dev/exts/twt-hash.html”

Why, though? AFAIK @andros@twtxt.andros.dev’s client is on Emacs, @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org’s is on Python (and Golang, for tt2), @movq@www.uninformativ.de’s is on Python, and @prologic@twtxt.net’s is on Golang. All the client creator needs to know is in the documentation already, coding language agnostic.

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev I give you not creating another file, but then I’d vote for commenting out DMs. See https://eapl.me/timeline/post/z5e2bna

It’s easier to find the DM in comments from your side, than asking all the client maintainers to add the regex =P
You can even use a Modified comment, such as
#! <DM content>
Or something like that

This approach is retro-compatible with current and older clients.

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev maybe @movq@www.uninformativ.de, @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org, @prologic@twtxt.net, and @xuu@txt.sour.is can explain what’s going on here, or which approach is the right one. One thing seems to be happening: your approach is breaking “conversations” (threads), as the other clients seemingly do not agree.

@bender@twtxt.net For example:

If you can see this twt in any feed…

xxxx-xx-xxTxx:xx:xxZ	!<bender https://twtxt.net/user/bender/twtxt.txt> U2FsdGVkX1+QmwBNmk9Yu9jvazVRFPS2TGJRGle/BDDzFult6zCtxNhJrV0g+sx0EIKbjL2a9QpCT5C0Z2qWvw==

It is for you. Any other possibility must be ignore (hidden in your timeline).

If your client doesn’t have the posibility to decrypt the twt, hide all direct message. It is all :)

@bender@twtxt.net @aelaraji@aelaraji.com The client should ignore twts if it’s not compatible or not addressed to me. it’s a simple regex to add! It’s similar to Twt Hash Extension, should they be in another file? They are child messages, not flat twt. Not of course!

@doesnm.p.psf.lt@doesnm.p.psf.lt It was always intended to have both Yarn.social and Salty.im integrate together. Yes. This includes having a set of specifications that anyone can write clients to.

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==

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” 🤣

@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).