Timeline of Evolution of Twtxt/Yarn.social:

• 2016 – Twtxt created by John Downey: plain text + HTTP = minimalist microblogging
  
• 2017–2019 – Community builds CLI tools, but adoption remains niche
  
• 2020 – Yarn.social launched by @prologic@twtxt.net with federation, threading, UI
  
• 2021–2023 – Pods sync, user mentions, blocking, search, and media support added
  
• 2024+ – Yarn.social becomes the reference Twtxt platform, with active federated pods

I asked ChatGPT what it knows about Twtxt 😂 And surprisingly it’s rather accurate:

Twtxt is a minimalist, decentralized microblogging format introduced by John Downey in 2016. It uses plain text files served over HTTP—no accounts, databases, or APIs.
In 2020, James Mills (@prologic@twtxt.net) launched Yarn.social, an extended, federated implementation with user discovery, threads, mentions, and a full web UI.
Both share the same .twtxt.txt format but differ in complexity and social features.

@bender@twtxt.net LOL 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net class action! Class action! 😤😂

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz ngircd is nice: https://ngircd.barton.de/ You can absolutely host this on your server for you and your friends (I’ve been doing that for a very long time). Actually peering with something like libera is hard, though, because they have strict requirements and a lot of traffic. Then again, there’s no real benefit in peering, actually. IRC is pretty “decentralized” anyway and people are usually used to connecting to several networks, so joining another one isn’t a big deal, imho. 🙃

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz is there anything i can even run or is this like email where you should just use libera and shut up

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz well gamja works fine and all with other people’s networks but I WANT MY OWN LITTLE NETWORK. FOR FUN

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com THANK YOU :D

@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

@gallowsgryph@prismdragon.net Welcome back. 😅

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I skimmed through the gamja docs and they say you need an “IRC WebSocket server” – no idea what that is. Does gamja not speak IRC directly but essentially “IRC over HTTP”? Curious. 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net @bmallred@staystrong.run Ah, I just found this, didn’t see it before:

https://restic.net/#compatibility

So, yeah, they do use semver and, yes, they’re not at 1.0.0 yet, so things might break on the next restic update … but they “promise” to not break things too lightheartedly. Hm, well. 😅 Probably doesn’t make a big difference (they don’t say “don’t use this software until we reach 1.0.0”).

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Sounds like a lot of fun ! 😁 GOOD LUCK!

@prologic@twtxt.net This shi_ is as fun as it is frustrating! 😆 the bot is poking at me from a different ASN now, Alibaba’s.

1. Short term solution: I’ve geo-locked my Timeline instance since I’m the only one using it (and I only do so for reading twts when I’m away from terminal).
   
2. Long term: I took a look at your Caddy WAF but couldn’t figure things out on my own; until then, I’ll be poking at Caddy-Defender, maybe throw in a Crowdsec for lols… #FUN

Oh hey @rrraksamam@twtxt.net 👋 Welcome back! 🙌 Sorry about the data loss 🤯

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Ugh, similar thing with bots (ai and crawlers) over here.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That is a good question, I’ve been on v0.17.3 for some time. In the past there has been one scheme update that I remember and the there was no issue. Maybe this next week I will try out v0.18 and post back.

I really don’t mess with it being on a cron so tend to forget until I need it :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de From what I can tell, they use strict semantic versioning and backwards compatibility. There are two versions of the storage, v1 and v2, but it doesn’t look like v2 is enabled yet.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de LOL 😂

@prologic@twtxt.net @bmallred@staystrong.run So is restic considered stable by now? “Stable” as in “stable data format”, like a future version will still be able to retrieve my current backups. I mean, it’s at version “0.18”, but they don’t specify which versioning scheme they use.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Haha 🤣 I’d say it’s just yet-another-bad-bot 🤖 I’ve blocked a lot of such bots and often their entire networks (ASN) 🤦‍♂️

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz oh and the logs say “failed to write msg: use of closed network connection” WHAT DOES THAT MEAN

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz i can’t send any messages it complains about the server buffer I DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz i JUST want my own IRC server for fun. that is all i want

@bender@twtxt.net REALLLLL

@bender@twtxt.net super old ass CPU lol it’s probably ancient in computer years! GTS needs a CPU thing that came after 2010 so that explains it (2008 machine) lmao

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz lack of RAM, or weak CPU? I run GoToSocial too, on a 1GiB RAM VPS. 😅

@thecanine@twtxt.net I signed, reluctantly. Not because I don’t care about The Internet Archive, but because Change pesters quite a bit for a while afterwards asking, of course, for money.

@bender@twtxt.net How is Borg? I have used restic for so long I haven’t looked at anything else.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz pandoc is a joy! I haven’t used any Microsoft word processing tools since forever. They want a Word document? Pandoc to the rescue!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de it seems you got plenty of choices. That’s the cheapest of their products, and you are quite right, amazing pricing! I pay Apple $10/month for a shared-amongst-family 2TiB storage space.

@bender@twtxt.net My choices might be a bit limited, at least going by this list: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box (That would be some incredibly cheap storage.) I’ll probably have to order such a box and then play with it a little bit to see what’s possible.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de there are many other similar backup tools. I would love to hear what will make you pick Borg above the rest.

@bender@twtxt.net Exactly. I suspect it was because of sqlitebrowser also accessing the database in parallel to debug the original issue.

So far, I have not found the exact reason why some replies don’t show up. When I do not filter for unread messages and show all, though, I actually see them. So, there’s that.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org 😱😱😱 I am assuming that’s happening with tt2, right?

@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.

@javivf@adn.org.es merged in to the repo of specs:

@prologic@twtxt.net merged to what? to yarn? I though twtxt.dev was solution-agnostic 👀

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz It’s more like a cache, it stores things like “timestamp of the most recent twt we’ve seen per feed” or “last modification date” (to be used with HTTP’s if-modified-since header). You can nuke these files at any time, it might just result in more traffic (e.g., always getting a full response instead of just “HTTP 304 nope, didn’t change”).

@quark@ferengi.one Yes, I often write a couple of twts, don’t publish them, then sometimes notice a mistake and want to edit it. You’re right, as soon as stuff is published, threads are going to break/fork by edits.

@prologic@twtxt.net best of luck!!! discover view having no limit sounds scary oh god lol

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I’ll cut a release soon™, but still a few more things to iron out 🤣 One of the new challenges is figuring out what to do with the “Discover” view now that is has an unconfined limit, on my pod (at least) it’s now basically just “noise” 🤦‍♂️

@prologic@twtxt.net alright! i can try that… whenever i am capable of upgrading and figure out how to lol

@prologic@twtxt.net :D

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Been missing your jovial posts too and your friends 🤣

@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 Oh dear 😂

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz The re-fetch should work just fine 🤞

@david@collantes.us Thanks I’ll fix.

@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.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de json and database put together sounds terrifying. i must try jenny