I fell asleep again during snoozing, and started dreaming intensely. My own mind woke me up in time by setting everything I loved on fire within my dream. That jolted me awake alright.

After I stripped off my clothes and turned around, I came to the conclusion that the plan to shower was cancelled at this moment. The faucet had broken right off and was laying in the tub. I noticed that the diameters of the hot and cold water pipes were surprisingly small, didn’t expect that. Since the pipes were broken flush with the wall, I couldn’t even determine if I had to remove the inner our outer threads, well, remains thereof, in order to attempt to repair this mess. Luckily, I was going to see a plumber mate at the christmas tree collection later anyway.

The first thing that came to mind when I woke up was that I didn’t catch the logical flaw in my dream: absolutely no water was coming out of the burst pipes. The whole scenario took place in summer, so the water couldn’t be frozen either.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz ah, thanks for letting me know that! i’ll def be keeping that in mind.

Pinellas County Running: 3.12 miles, 00:08:53 average pace, 00:27:44 duration
first day of marathon training. i do not have a race in mind but wanted to start training again. was going too fast but 48F and just feeling overall good.
#running

nice! would you mind elaborating a bit?
Is that the scientific method?
I couldn’t find anything related when I searched for it.

@xuu@txt.sour.is ROFLMAO! 🤣 reading that, the Tech bro sounded in my mind like Cow from Cow and Chicken

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh! no need to be sorry and feel free to keep at it if it helps, I don’t mind. It’s just that I’m always on the lookout for corpo-bots and crawlers slipping through the cracks (a fun little game of sorts) 😅 the only thing I let them see is a robots.txt telling them to :diffoff

Also, I’m curious about the invalid lines in my feed. is it something I should lookout for in future?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org oh nah it came out like that lol! i actually love how squished it looks it feels accurate lol

oh yeah i think i might have a tripod around but i do need a sandbag or something i could use as one. maybe yeah a giant bag of rice could work LOL. thanks for the tips!!! i took a video class last year in college and we worked with cameras and tripods with sandbags so it was on my mind

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev What do you mean by API? yarnd (which powers Yarn.social pods like twtxt.net) does have an API, however that API is designed for clients to interact with the pod and the user’s account and feed. e.g: there is a command-line client called yarnc and I used to maintain a mobile native app (using Flutter).

What use-case did you have in mind?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I know, nobody asked 🤡 but, here are a couple of suggestions:

• If you’re willing to pay for a licence I’d highly recommend plasticity it’s under GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE, Version 3.
  
• Otherwise if you already have experience with CAD/Parametric modeling you could give freeCAD a spin, it’s under GNU Library General Public License, version 2.0, it took them years but have just recently shipped their v1.0 👍
  
• or just roll with Autodesk’s Fusion for personal use, if you don’t mind their “Oh! You need to be online to use it” thing.
  

(Let’s face it, Blender is hard to use.)
I bet you’re talking about blender 2.79 and older! 😂 you are, right? JK

Fartlek: 7.12 miles, 00:09:56 average pace, 01:10:41 duration
kept it chill the first three miles then took a walk break to lower the heart rate and started off again into a fartlek. the intervals helped because my mind was starting to fuck with me with the steady pace. got some pretty good rain in the last two and a half miles which was great too!
#running

@prologic@twtxt.net I bet our twts are already being fed to circuit monsters… Remember the other day when I’d snapped out about some nonsense, being an A-Hole and what not? I’ve seen an AI company employee lurking around with not much interaction (if I’m not mistaken), so my mind went on auto-pilot mode thinking “This !#@%$ must be feeding us to the circuit peggy monster!! Arrr 😤” 🤣🤣🤣 but then again, one shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover (or an employee by his title) right?

So long Blue Birdy 👋 it was a … Never mind, GTFO of my life already! 😆

@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.

@eapl.me@eapl.me here are my replies (somewhat similar to Lyse’s and James’)

1. Metadata in twts: Key=value is too complicated for non-hackers and hard to write by hand. So if there is a need then we should just use #NSFS or the alt-text file in markdown image syntax ![NSFW](url.to/image.jpg) if something is NSFW

2. IDs besides datetime. When you edit a twt then you should preserve the datetime if location-based addressing should have any advantages over content-based addressing. If you change the timestamp the its a new post. Just like any other blog cms.

3. Caching, Yes all good ideas, but that is more a task for the clients not the serving of the twtxt.txt files.

4. Discovery: User-agent for discovery can become better. I’m working on a wrapper script in PHP, so you don’t need to go to Apaches log-files to see who fetches your feed. But for other Gemini and gopher you need to relay on something else. That could be using my webmentions for twtxt suggestion, or simply defining an email metadata field for letting a person know you follow their feed. Interesting read about why WebMetions might be a bad idea. Twtxt being much simple that a full featured IndieWeb sites, then a lot of the concerns does not apply here. But that’s the issue with any open inbox. This is hard to solve without some form of (centralized or community) spam moderation.

5. Support more protocols besides http/s. Yes why not, if we can make clients that merge or diffident between the same feed server by multiples URLs

6. Languages: If the need is big then make a separate feed. I don’t mind seeing stuff in other langues as it is low. You got translating tool if you need to know whats going on. And again when there is a need for easier switching between posting to several feeds, then it’s about building clients with a UI that makes it easy. No something that should takes up space in the format/protocol.

7. Emojis: I’m not sure what this is about. Do you want to use emojis as avatar in CLI clients or it just about rendering emojis?

Righto, @eapl.me@eapl.me, ta for the writeup. Here we go. :-)

Metadata on individual twts are too much for me. I do like the simplicity of the current spec. But I understand where you’re coming from.

Numbering twts in a feed is basically the attempt of generating message IDs. It’s an interesting idea, but I reckon it is not even needed. I’d simply use location based addressing (feed URL + ‘#’ + timestamp) instead of content addressing. If one really wanted to, one could hash the feed URL and timestamp, but the raw form would actually improve disoverability and would not even require a richer client. But the majority of twtxt users in the last poll wanted to stick with content addressing.

yarnd actually sends If-Modified-Since request headers. Not only can I observe heaps of 304 responses for yarnds in my access log, but in Cache.FetchFeeds(…) we can actually see If-Modified-Since being deployed when the feed has been retrieved with a Last-Modified response header before: https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/yarn/src/commit/98eee5124ae425deb825fb5f8788a0773ec5bdd0/internal/cache.go#L1278

Turns out etags with If-None-Match are only supported when yarnd serves avatars (https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/yarn/src/commit/98eee5124ae425deb825fb5f8788a0773ec5bdd0/internal/handlers.go#L158) and media uploads (https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/yarn/src/commit/98eee5124ae425deb825fb5f8788a0773ec5bdd0/internal/media_handlers.go#L71). However, it ignores possible etags when fetching feeds.

I don’t understand how the discovery URLs should work to replace the User-Agent header in HTTP(S) requests. Do you mind to elaborate?

Different protocols are basically just a client thing.

I reckon it’s best to just avoid mixing several languages in one feed in the first place. Personally, I find it okay to occasionally write messages in other languages, but if that happens on a more regularly basis, I’d definitely create a different feed for other languages.

Isn’t the emoji thing “just” a client feature? So, feed do not even have to state any emojis. As a user I’d configure my client to use a certain symbol for feed ABC. Currently, I can do a similar thing in tt where I assign colors to feeds. On the other hand, what if a user wants to control what symbol should be displayed, similar to the feed’s nick? Hmm. But still, my terminal font doesn’t even render most of emojis. So, Unicode boxes everywhere. This makes me think it should actually be a only client feature.

@david@collantes.us No worries, I got you. And I’ll keep the “Handle with care” reminder in mind, might even use it as mantra if I ever take an arrow in the knee 😆

It is past 16:00 ET, and so the weekend begins. Here is to hoping it transcurs slowly in our minds—or, at the very minimum, in mine.

@bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net I’m not exactly asking yarnd to change. If you are okay with the way it displayed my twts, then by all means, leave it as is. I hope you won’t mind if I continue to write things like 1/4 to mean “first out of four”.

What has text/markdown got to do with this? I don’t think Markdown says anything about replacing 1/4 with ¼, or other similar transformations. It’s not needed, because ¼ is already a unicode character that can simply be directly inserted into the text file.

What’s wrong with my original suggestion of doing the transformation before the text hits the twtxt.txt file? @prologic@twtxt.net, I think it would achieve what you are trying to achieve with this content-type thing: if someone writes 1/4 on a yarnd instance or any other client that wants to do this, it would get transformed, and other clients simply wouldn’t do the transformation. Every client that supports displaying unicode characters, including Jenny, would then display ¼ as ¼.

Alternatively, if you prefer yarnd to pretty-print all twts nicely, even ones from simpler clients, that’s fine too and you don’t need to change anything. My 1/4 -> ¼ thing is nothing more than a minor irritation which probably isn’t worth overthinking.

@off_grid_living@twtxt.net mind sharing the PDF, to take a look? Some PDF containing text as images, which makes it more difficult to complete the task you want to perform.

@bender@twtxt.net So…

() @xuu@txt.sour.is wrote:

”@bender I am also in camp no edit signals. deletes only breaks the head of a thread. all the replies are unaffected.”

I figure I could also answer every single twtxt like this, so that if the original gets edited, or deleted, at least I don’t sound foolish without knowing exactly what I replied to. 🤭

It Sounds like a good idea! should that be limited to just direct replays or can it be extended to replays to other replays, that way and With just the right amount of chain-replays, we’ll be RRrrrrrevolutionizing the way people Mailing Lists like, in no time! xD

P.S: Just a reminder! I’ve already told you not to mind my twts for the next couple of hours, right!

as a matter of fact! don’t mind anything I do/say for the next 72 hours xD

Don’t mind this twt!

Hurricane Helene is passing by. Close enough to give us a day off tomorrow, but not that close to cause major harm. Well, we think. Hurricanes often have a mind of their own, and decide changes on their path. Either way, I shall be back at work on Friday 😩. LOL.

@prologic@twtxt.net Thanks for writing that up!

I hope it can remain a living document (or sequence of draft revisions) for a good long time while we figure out how this stuff works in practice.

I am not sure how I feel about all this being done at once, vs. letting conventions arise.

For example, even today I could reply to twt abc1234 with “(#abc1234) Edit: …” and I think all you humans would understand it as an edit to (#abc1234). Maybe eventually it would become a common enough convention that clients would start to support it explicitly.

Similarly we could just start using 11-digit hashes. We should iron out whether it’s sha256 or whatever but there’s no need get all the other stuff right at the same time.

I have similar thoughts about how some users could try out location-based replies in a backward-compatible way (append the replyto: stuff after the legacy (#hash) style).

However I recognize that I’m not the one implementing this stuff, and it’s less work to just have everything determined up front.

Misc comments (I haven’t read the whole thing):

• Did you mean to make hashes hexadecimal? You lose 11 bits that way compared to base32. I’d suggest gaining 11 bits with base64 instead.

• “Clients MUST preserve the original hash” — do you mean they MUST preserve the original twt?

• Thanks for phrasing the bit about deletions so neutrally.

• I don’t like the MUST in “Clients MUST follow the chain of reply-to references…”. If someone writes a client as a 40-line shell script that requires the user to piece together the threading themselves, IMO we shouldn’t declare the client non-conforming just because they didn’t get to all the bells and whistles.

• Similarly I don’t like the MUST for user agents. For one thing, you might want to fetch a feed without revealing your identty. Also, it raises the bar for a minimal implementation (I’m again thinking again of the 40-line shell script).

• For “who follows” lists: why must the long, random tokens be only valid for a limited time? Do you have a scenario in mind where they could leak?

• Why can’t feeds be served over HTTP/1.0? Again, thinking about simple software. I recently tried implementing HTTP/1.1 and it wasn’t too bad, but 1.0 would have been slightly simpler.

• Why get into the nitty-gritty about caching headers? This seems like generic advice for HTTP servers and clients.

• I’m a little sad about other protocols being not recommended.

• I don’t know how I feel about including markdown. I don’t mind too much that yarn users emit twts full of markdown, but I’m more of a plain text kind of person. Also it adds to the length. I wonder if putting a separate document would make more sense; that would also help with the length.

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 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.

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org “I don’t really mind if the twt gets edited before I even fetch it.”, right, that’s never the problem. Editing a twtxt before anyone fetches it isn’t even editing, right? :-P The problem we are trying to fix is the havoc is causes editing twtxts that have already been replied to, often ad nauseam. That’s the real problem.

@quark@ferengi.one I don’t really mind if the twt gets edited before I even fetch it. I think it’s the idea of my computer discarding old versions it’s fetched, especially if it’s shown them to me, that bugs me.

But I do like @movq@www.uninformativ.de’s suggestion on this thread that feeds could contain both the original and the edited twt. I guess it would be up to the author.

I came across this Gallery Theme for Hugo, and @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org immediately came to mind. I think it would be a very fitting theme to use for all your photos, Lyse!

Can anyone recommend a decent Android ROM that strips out as much of the spyware as possible? Is GrapheneOS a good option? I need to get a new phone anyway so I don’t mind buying within a supported device list as long as I can get one on the used market for $300-$400 or less.

If anyone could recommend some learning resources for this stuff I’d really appreciate it.

@mckinley@twtxt.net

HTTPS is supposed to do [verification] anyway.

TLS provides verification that nobody is tampering with or snooping on your connection to a server. It doesn’t, for example, verify that a file downloaded from server A is from the same entity as the one from server B.

I was confused by this response for a while, but now I think I understand what you’re getting at. You are pointing out that with signed feeds, I can verify the authenticity of a feed without accessing the original server, whereas with HTTPS I can’t verify a feed unless I download it myself from the origin server. Is that right?

I.e. if the HTTPS origin server is online and I don’t mind taking the time and bandwidth to contact it, then perhaps signed feeds offer no advantage, but if the origin server might not be online, or I want to download a big archive of lots of feeds at once without contacting each server individually, then I need signed feeds.

feed locations [being] URLs gives some flexibility

It does give flexibility, but perhaps we should have made them URIs instead for even more flexibility. Then, you could use a tag URI, urn:uuid:*, or a regular old URL if you wanted to. The spec seems to indicate that the url tag should be a working URL that clients can use to find a copy of the feed, optionally at multiple locations. I’m not very familiar with IP{F,N}S but if it ensures you own an identifier forever and that identifier points to a current copy of your feed, it could be a great way to fix it on an individual basis without breaking any specs :)

I’m also not very familiar with IPFS or IPNS.

I haven’t been following the other twts about signatures carefully. I just hope whatever you smart people come up with will be backwards-compatible so it still works if I’m too lazy to change how I publish my feed :-)

@prologic@twtxt.net I believe you when you say registries as designed today do not crawl. But when I first read the spec, it conjured in my mind a search engine. Now I don’t know how things work out in practice, but just based on reading, I don’t see why it can’t be an API for a crawling search engine. (In fact I don’t see anything in the spec indicating registry servers shouldn’t crawl.)

(I also noticed that https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/registry.html recommends “The registries should sync each others user list by using the users endpoint”. If I understood that right, registering with one should be enough to appear on others, even if they don’t crawl.)

Does yarnd provide an API for finding twts? Is it similar?

@prologic@twtxt.net What’s the difference between search.twtxt.net and the /api/plain/tweets endpoint of a registry? In my mind, a registry is a twtxt search engine. Or are registries not supposed to do their own crawling to discover new feeds?

Yeah, user error on my end, never mind. The persisted settings.yaml overrides the command line arguments. That’s surprising to me. I expected the command line options to overrule the config file. Oh well.

Never mind, I simply searched and deleted them all (D then ~f sender). :-) Phew!

@bender@twtxt.net yeah, I think so as well. Hell I can’t even get myself to upload much media files on the fedi-platforms knowing they’ll be hosted out of someone else’s pocket, someone with no ROI in mind but other’s freedom of expression.

@prologic@twtxt.net I wouldn’t mind that for the bigger images, although, my main problem is with the scrappers and other platforms that nuke my RPi whenever I post a link out there… yes! I mean Mastodon 😆

BTW! I’ve just white listed twtxt.net … you should be able to see the embedded image by now.

I feel like complexity is measured differently at different levels of a project..

• at the function level you use cyclomatic complexity or how many branches internally and how much you need to keep in mind as it calls out to other functions.
  
• at a file/module level is a balance of the module doing too much against being so granular that you have cross dependency across modules. I have trouble with keeping things dry at this level because it can lead to parts being so abstract or generalized that it adds complexity.
  
• at a project level i suppose its a matter of how coupled things are across sub-modules.

@prologic@twtxt.net LOL fare enough! I’ll keep that in mind fir future twts … I hope invidious instances are ok 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net I was replaying to your twt and thing got too long and messy, so I emailed you. I hope you don’t mind.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de yeah, it seems like it. But I don’t mind using neomutt to go through my feed, it feel like a huge upgrade compared to the usual pager 😄

@bender@twtxt.net I don’t mind the character limit. If I hit it and I still have more to say, it’s a good reminder that I should probably write a note instead. I like to POSSE anything that might have value outside of the current conversation.

Somewhere I read that changing location, like entering a room, can rejigger neural pathways so that some thoughts and memories are somehow associated with the space. It’s the same for me when picking up a laptop. My purpose feels clear until I open a blank web browser window and my mind goes blank, too. In all the moments where I’m drawing a total blank, and then suddenly the thoughts come easily again: maybe that’s my brain looking for the room it was in before.

Pinellas County - Hills: 5.15 miles, 00:08:54 average pace, 00:45:51 duration
went to the nearby overpass for some “hills”. stopped after four passes just to be mindful of my right knee a bit. the legs were still very tired from the long run surprisingly.
#running

@prologic@twtxt.net what is the maxlen one should keep in mind here? Like say if I was charing the collected works of Shakespeare? Or maybe just a gpg keychain?

More data contradicting the existence of “echo chambers”. As I’ve argued many times before, the concept of an echo chamber or information bubble is not real. The podcast below is an interview of an author of a study where they actually intervened and changed the information diet of 20,000 people (with consent!), then surveyed them after three months. They observed essentially no changes to the study subjects’ beliefs and attitudes. They also observed that the typical person, while they tend to gravitate towards people with similar political leanings, only get about 50% of their content from such like-minded people. They get the rest from neutral sources and maybe 20% from non-like-minded people.

Varied information diet + No change in attitudes when information diet is forced to be different = no echo chamber.

Listen to the podcast episode here

going thru my own old drawings, exploring those distant worlds, like an archaeologist. tracing origins and evolutions #draw #art #trip #mind

@adi@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net It’s worth bearing in mind that

• Fairphone has taken a considerable amount of VC funding so, sooner or later, that bill will become due: (see: https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/31/fairphone-growth-capital-raise and https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/fairphone)
  
• Fairphone comes with Google Play apps by default, so it’s also a spyware vector (see: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/110978014080809471)
  

I used to have a lot of hope for them but these two ingredients mean that enshittification is virtually inevitable.

@prologic@twtxt.net Horseshit hype:

• AI that we have today cannot think–there is no cognitive capacity
  
• AI that we have today cannot be interviewed–“inter” “viewing” is two minds interacting, but AI of today has no mind, which means this is a puppet show
  
• AI today is not free–it’s a tool, a machine, hardly different from a hammer. It does what a human directs it to do and has no drives, desires, or autonomy. What you’re seeing here is a fancy Mechnical Turk
  

This shit is probably paid for by AI companies who desperately want us to think of the AI as far more capable than it actually is, because that juices sales and gives them a way to argue they aren’t responsible for any harms it causes.