@zvava@twtxt.net Good question. This is the spec, I think:

https://twtxt.dev/exts/metadata.html#nick

It doesn’t say much. 🤔

In the wild, I’ve only seen “traditional” nick names, i.e. ASCII 0x21 thru 0x7E.

My client removes anything but r'[a-zA-Z0-9]' from nick names.

@zvava@twtxt.net There would be only one hash for a message. Some to be defined magic date selects which hash to use. If the message creation timestamp is before this epoch, hash it with v1, otherwise hammer it through v2. Eventually, support for v1 could be dropped as nobody interacts with the old stuff anymore. But I’d keep it around in my client, because why not.

If users choose a client which supports the extensions, they don’t have to mess around with v1 and v2 hashing, just like today.

As for the school of thought, personally, I’d prefer something else, too. I’m in camp location-based addressing, or whatever it is called. There more I think about it, a complete redesign of twtxt and its extensions would be necessary in my opinion. Retrofitting has its limits. Of course, this is much more work, though.

@zvava@twtxt.net And yes yarnd does have a well documented API and two clients (CLI and unmaintained Flutter App)

@bender@twtxt.net @thecanine@twtxt.net well now this has me thinking abt the feasibility of making an android twtxt app for pods, the actual apis of pods would have to be standardized (or a fucked up version of how activitypub does it, where the “mastodon api” is the defacto client api (does yarn even have an api reference?)) or the client is just simply..a client..but editing feeds via PUT, PATCH, DELETE etc. is standardized!…? (not to mention i dont even know where to begin making an android app lmao)

@bender@twtxt.net @thecanine@twtxt.net well now this has me thinking abt the feasibility of making an android twtxt app for pods, the actual apis of pods would have to be standardized (or the fucked up way that activitypub does it, where the “mastodon api” is the defacto client api (does yarn even have an api reference?)) or the client is just simply..a client..but editing feeds via PUT, PATCH, DELETE etc. is standardized!…? (not to mention i dont even know where to begin making an android app lmao)

Wanting to add, this isn’t a twtxt client. It is Yarnd on steroids! 😂

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I reckon the original <details> need to have the open attribute set in order to expand it, so I cannot just define some custom CSS rules to do that in my browser.

But in regards to twtxt, my client won’t hide anything in that realm anyway. :-) It’s just more noise.

i know yarn has a CLI client in yarnc but ngl i wish there was a TUI client. that’d be really fun

@zvava@twtxt.net Hooray for more twtxt clients 🥳

I finally have my new (top-secret) twtxt client in a working state. Next comes the deployment, which I hope to finish tonight. Release date: TBD. Stay tuned!

@thecanine@twtxt.net I hate it when businesses do this. As well as being annoying and unreliable, Microsoft software is known to have a hell of a lot of security vulnerabilities, and the AI features increase the attack surface. One can use a client like Thunderbird for the email, but Teams doesn’t really have an alternative. Awful stuff.

@prologic@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de My metadata only has my HTTPS URL. I didn’t consider having multiple. I was talking about my config.yaml. Jenny sounds like a good client, so I might give that a try.

@dce@hashnix.club Ah, oh, well then. 🥴

My client supports that, if you set multiple url = fields in your feed’s metadata (the top-most one must be the “main” URL, that one is used for hashing).

But yeah, multi-protocol feeds can be problematic and some have considered it a mistake to support them. 🤔

It might just be my client, but it seems that I cannot track multiple URLs at once. As such, all three of my twtxt URLs will work for following, but mentions will only reach me at my HTTPS URL (https://hashnix.club/~dce/twtxt.txt). If there is a client that can cope with twtxt mirrors, I would love to know about it.

@dce@hashnix.club Twet is a far better command line client. Yea 👌

This would have been neater, but evidently my client foesn’t support multiline posts.

Apparently twtxt wasn’t the right client to use. twet seems to be alright, though.

@eric@itsericwoodward.com Name change is no worries! 😉 Interesting/funnily enough my client yarnd seems to have picked it up automatically which is nice (I’ve historically always had a few bugs to iron out there 🤣)

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz yeah it’s pretty terrible these days. Most recent trouble I had was something as simple as installing and setting up the Tailscale client. On literally all my other devices (Linux and Android) that was a cinch, but on Windows…. ohh boy, I had to mess around with reg edits and all sorts of crap and eventually bludgeoned it into working, but it was a bloody pain.

In 1996, they came up with the X11 “SECURITY” extension:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/4w548u/what_is_up_with_the_x11_security_extension/

This is what could have (eventually) solved the security issues that we’re currently seeing with X11. Those issues are cited as one of the reasons for switching to Wayland.

That extension never took off. The person on reddit wonders why – I think it’s simple: Containers and sandboxes weren’t a thing in 1996. It hardly mattered if X11 was “insecure”. If you could run an X11 client, you probably already had access to the machine and could just do all kinds of other nasty things.

Today, sandboxing is a thing. Today, this matters.

I’ve heard so many times that “X11 is beyond fixable, it’s hopeless.” I don’t believe that. I believe that these problems are solveable with X11 and some devs have said “yeah, we could have kept working on it”. It’s that people don’t want to do it:

Why not extend the X server?

Because for the first time we have a realistic chance of not having to do that.

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html

I’m not in a position to judge the devs. Maybe the X.Org code really is so bad that you want to run away, screaming in horror. I don’t know.

But all this was a choice. I don’t buy the argument that we never would have gotten rid of things like core fonts.

All the toolkits and programs had to be ported to Wayland. A huge, still unfinished effort. If that was an acceptable thing to do, then it would have been acceptable to make an “X12” that keeps all the good things about X11, remains compatible where feasible, eliminates the problems, and requires some clients to be adjusted. (You could have still made “X11X12” like “XWayland” for actual legacy programs.)

Here’s an example of X11/Xlib being old and archaic.

X11 knows the data type “cardinal”. For example, the window property _NET_WM_ICON (which holds image data for icons) is an array of “cardinal”. I am already not really familiar with that word and I’m assuming that it comes from mathematics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_number

(It could also be a bird, but probably not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinalidae)

We would probably call this an “integer” today.

EWMH says that icons are arrays of cardinals and that they’re 32-bit numbers:

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/latest-single/#id-1.6.13

So it’s something like 0x11223344 with 0x11 being the alpha channel, 0x22 is red, and so on.

You would assume that, when you retrieve such an array from the X11 server, you’d get an array of uint32_t, right?

Nope.

Xlib is so old, they use char for 8-bit stuff, short int for 16-bit, and long int for 32-bit:

https://x.org/releases/current/doc/libX11/libX11/libX11.html#Obtaining_and_Changing_Window_Properties

That is congruent with the general C data types, so it does make sense:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_data_types

Now the funny thing is, on modern x86_64, the type long int is actually 64 bits wide.

The result is that every pixel in a Pixmap, for example, is twice as large in memory as it would need to be. Just because Xlib uses long int, because uint32_t didn’t exist, yet.

And this is something that I wouldn’t know how to fix without breaking clients.

OpenBSD has the wonderful pledge() and unveil() syscalls:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXO6nelFt-E

Not only are they super useful (the program itself can drop privileges – like, it can initialize itself, read some files, whatever, and then tell the kernel that it will never do anything like that again; if it does, e.g. by being exploited through a bug, it gets killed by the kernel), but they are also extremely easy to use.

Imagine a server program with a connected socket in file descriptor 0. Before reading any data from the client, the program can do this:

unveil("/var/www/whatever", "r");
unveil(NULL, NULL);
pledge("stdio rpath", NULL);

Done. It’s now limited to reading files from that directory, communicating with the existing socket, stuff like that. But it cannot ever read any other files or exec() into something else.

I can’t wait for the day when we have something like this on Linux. There have been some attempts, but it’s not that easy. And it’s certainly not mainstream, yet.

I need to have a closer look at Linux’s Landlock soon (“soon”), but this is considerably more complicated than pledge()/unveil():

https://landlock.io/

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Me too 😅 – Speaking of which i know you’ve lost a bit of “mojo” or “energy” (so have i of late), rest assured, I want to keep the status quo here with what we’ve built, keep it simple and change very little. What we’ve built has worked very well for 5+ years and we have at least 3 very strong clients (maybe 4 or 5?).

next up: authentication center / for both work & personal use.
for the work project, the customers (of my client) are unhappy with the account login flow and I need a fast & easy SSO for them.

for personal use: just a gateway to lock all the apps and provide access to friends.

i slowly realize the power of 1% everyday on what i am doing.

#<2025-05-10T19:34:00+00:00 https://andros.dev/texudus.txt> Nice:) And is this implemented in your client as well? I’ve started to brainstorm on how to parse texudus in php, but I guess it could snatch some code from you?

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

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

@bender@twtxt.net My point was that the suggested syntax for extending mentions to point to a specific message (@<nick url timestamp>) and having location based treading this way, might not break older clients, since they might just igonore the last value within the brackets.

@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 Thanks for consolidating a lot of good ideas. Especially how you have deiced to just extend the mention syntax for location-based treads. This might even be backward compatible with older (pre-yarn) clients.
What about using Z for UTC +00:00- is that allowed in your specs?
Regarding url = I would suggest to only allow one and the maybe add url_old = or url_alt = !?
I’m still not a fan of a DM feature, even thou it helps that i have now been split out into a separate feed file. Instead if would suggest a contact = field for where people can put an email or other id/link for an established chat protocol like signal or matrix.

@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?