@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I approve! That’s how I learned HTML (version 4 at the time and XHTML shortly after) and making websites, too. Some of them are still made like this to this day. Hand-written HTML. Hardly any <div> and class nonsense. I can’t remember with which editor I started out with, but I upgraded to Webweaver (later renamed to Webcraft) quickly. Yeah, this were the times when there was just a single computer for the whole family.

Free hosting on Arcor, Freenet and I don’t know anymore how they were all called. Like this author, I uploaded everything via FTP. Oh dear, when was the last time I used that? And I had registered plenty of free .de.vu domains.

Being on Windows at the time, everything was ISO-8859-1 for me. No UTF-8, I don’t think I’ve heard about it back then.

Later, I wrote my own CMSes in PHP. Man, were they bad in retrospect. :-D Of course, MySQL databases were used as backends. I still exactly know the moment I read the first time about SQL injections. I tried it on my own CMS login and was shocked when I could just break in. The very next thing I did was to lock down everything with an .htaccess until I actually fixed my broken PHP code. Hahaha, good memories.

I swear by Atom or RSS feeds. Many of my sites offer them. I daily consume feeds, they’re just great.

been playing with making fun scripts using charm CLI’s gum library :P

one that gets lyrics from an open lyrics database’s API and accepts input for artist & song names: https://asciinema.org/a/697860

and one that uses a user-provided last.fm API key to pull what’s currently playing or what last played on your account :) https://asciinema.org/a/697874

for example, ejabberd, redka, and litefs. all using sqlite+litefs for their database needs allows agents to communicate over xmpp, matrix, mqtt, and sip. other applications can use sqlite for storage or speak the redis protocol to redka. ejabberd can also handle file uploads, static file publishing, identity, and various other web application services. when scaling, litefs integrates with consul to manage replication which grants the network access to service disco, encrypted mesh networking, and various other features that can be used to build secure service grids. ejabberd and redka can be scaled to multiple nodes that coordinate over the litefs replication protocol without any changes to the db storage config. other components can be configured to plug into this framework fairly easily as well. we keep the network config fairly simple by linking nodes together with yggdrasil to flatten the address space and then linking app nodes together using consul to provide secure routing for the local grid service. yggdrasil also offers utility for buliding federated networks in a similarly flat address space, for more secure communications i2p is also available in yggdrasil mode. minibase is wonderful, and we have not even started to talk about secure IoT.

i am working on very smol deployments, where a server may use two or so replicated sqlite databases instead of a db server like postgres to seamlessly move from single to multi-node arrangements as needed. there is a clear performance limit here, but the goal is not to serve a huge number of clients. just to do as much as possible with a small number of useful components that can be upgraded to handle up to medium size workloads, without difficult data conversions or migrations. scaling beyond that point should be done via federation.

@prologic@twtxt.net that “little database that could” is simply amazing, isn’t it? I run Conduwuit (nevermind, this one is RocksDB), and GoToSocial using it as a backend, no issues. And, of course, sqlite is the database of choice for a lot of things under iOS.

I demand full 9 digit nano second timestamps and the full TZ identifier as documented in the tz 2024b database! I need to know if there was a change in daylight savings as per the locality in question as of the provided date.

BTW this code doesn’t incorporate existing twts into jenny’s database. It’s best used starting from scratch. I’ve been testing it using a custom XDG_CACHE_HOME and XDG_CONFIG_HOME to avoid messing with my “real” jenny data.

I wrote some code to try out non-hash reply subjects formatted as (replyto ), while keeping the ability to use the existing hash style.

I don’t think we need to decide all at once. If clients add support for a new method then people can use it if they like. The downside of course is that this costs developer time, so I decided to invest a few hours of my own time into a proof of concept.

With apologies to @movq@www.uninformativ.de for corrupting jenny’s beautiful code. I don’t write this expecting you to incorporate the patch, because it does complicate things and might not be a direction you want to go in. But if you like any part of this approach feel free to use bits of it; I release the patch under jenny’s current LICENCE.

Supporting both kinds of reply in jenny was complicated because each email can only have one Message-Id, and because it’s possible the target twt will not be seen until after the twt referencing it. The following patch uses an sqlite database to keep track of known (url, timestamp) pairs, as well as a separate table of (url, timestamp) pairs that haven’t been seen yet but are wanted. When one of those “wanted” twts is finally seen, the mail file gets rewritten to include the appropriate In-Reply-To header.

Patch based on jenny commit 73a5ea81.

https://www.falsifian.org/a/oDtr/patch0.txt

Not implemented:

• Composing twts using the (replyto …) format.
  
• Probably other important things I’m forgetting.

Can I get someone like maybe @xuu@txt.sour.is or @abucci@anthony.buc.ci or even @eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club – If you have some spare time – to test this yarnd PR that upgrades the Bitcask dependency for its internal database to v2? 🙏

VERY IMPORTANT If you do; Please Please Please backup your yarn.db database first! 😅 Heaven knows I don’t want to be responsible for fucking up a production database here or there 🤣

Hmmmm, I somehow run into an encoding problem where my inserted data end up mangled in the database. But, both SQLite and Go use UTF-8. What’s happening here? :-?

@bender@twtxt.net Yes, they do 🤣 Implicitly, or threading would never work at all 😅 Nor lookups 🤣 They are used as keys. Think of them like a primary key in a database or index. I totally get where you’re coming from, but there are trade-offs with using Message/Thread Ids as opposed to Content Addressing (like we do) and I believe we would just encounter other problems by doing so.

My money is on extending the Twt Subject extension to support more (optional) advanced “subjects”; i.e: indicating you edited a Twt you already published in your feed as @falsifian@www.falsifian.org indicated 👌

Then we have a secondary (bure much rarer) problem of the “identity” of a feed in the first place. Using the URL you fetch the feed from as @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org ’s client tt seems to do or using the # url = metadata field as every other client does (according to the spec) is problematic when you decide to change where you host your feed. In fact the spec says:

Users are advised to not change the first one of their urls. If they move their feed to a new URL, they should add this new URL as a new url field.

See Choosing the Feed URL – This is one of our longest debates and challenges, and I think (_I suspect along with @xuu@txt.sour.is _) that the right way to solve this is to use public/private key(s) where you actually have a public key fingerprint as your feed’s unique identity that never changes.

Correct, @bender@twtxt.net. Since the very beginning, my twtxt flow is very flawed. But it turns out to be an advantage for this sort of problem. :-) I still use the official (but patched) twtxt client by buckket to actually fetch and fill the cache. I think one of of the patches played around with the error reporting. This way, any problems with fetching or parsing feeds show up immediately. Once I think, I’ve seen enough errors, I unsubscribe.

tt is just a viewer into the cache. The read statuses are stored in a separate database file.

It also happened a few times, that I thought some feed was permanently dead and removed it from my list. But then, others mentioned it, so I resubscribed.

today i will start trying to extract my dots from my memex database and manage the dependency tree entirely using nix flakes

Haha, yeah sorry about that, I wasn’t even trying to nuke the database either but it worked out that way 😩

@prologic@twtxt.net Righteo, so rookie error - I obviously had some untracked, rather important files for starting my pod and I ran a make clean. Why I originally had them in the git directory is anyone’s guess. Anyway it blew away those files including the database so that’s that. So your good self and @bender@twtxt.net etc - apologies but your profiles got nuked as well (as did my own but easily recreated).

Another thing I noticed which was the reason I ran make clean in the first place. I noticed my pod was being built with Go 1.22.4. Could this be a problem @prologic? preflight.sh actually errors out about it…

@bender@twtxt.net I have nothing against GoToSocial, but:

GoToSocial stores statuses, accounts, etc, in a database. This can be either SQLite or Postgres.

snac is simpler. Some JSON files and that’s it. I can read them with jq and less. I can use tar to back them up. I can hand edit them in a text editor.

I think @abucci@anthony.buc.ci and @stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no are running snac? I didn’t have a closer look at snac (no intention of running it), but if that is a relatively small daemon (maybe comparable to Yarn?) that gives you access to the whole world of ActivityPub, then, well, yeah … That’s tough to beat.

Yes, I am running snac on the same VPS where I run my yarn pod. I heard of it from @stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no, so blame him 😏 snac is written in C and is one simple executable, uses very little resources on the server, and stores everything in JSON files (no databases or other integrations; easy to save and migrate your data) . It’s definitely like yarn in that respect.

I haven’t been around yarn much lately. Part of that is that I’ve been very busy at work and home and only have a limited time to spend goofing off on a social network. Part of it is that I’m finding snac very useful: I’ve connected with friends I’d previously lost touch with, I’ve found useful work-related information, I’ve found colleagues to follow, and even found interesting conferences to attend. There’s a lot more going on over there.

I guess if I had to put it simply, I’d say I have limited time to play and there are more kids in the ActivityPub sandbox than this one. That’s not a ding on yarn–I like yarn and twtxt–I’m just time constrained.

@mckinley@twtxt.net I can’t say for sure. I didn’t even know how three-way merges work till I looked it up. I guess it’s more of git thing that would prove useful in the case of using passwordstore/pass.
As for Keepass, all I do is syncing it’s database file across devices using syncting. Never felt the need to try anything else.

I guess it is safe enough for my use case, with Backup database before saving on and custom Backup Path Placeholders as Backup plan in case of an Eff up.

@shreyan@twtxt.net ever tried KeepassXC or Pass/Password Store ? They are worth giving a try … Then you can keep your KeepassXD database in synch across your devices with (NOT /R/s/y/n/c) I meant Syncthing or git in the case Pass (using a git repo in within your local network of course) 👍🏼(edited)

Thinking of building a simple “Things our kids say” database form, using Node, Express and SQlite3. Going beyond simple text files.

Markdown + Git as a database / object store? 🤔

From my small experience in writing an event database, I am inclined to agree with this.

If you’re looking for a cool p2p database system have a look at www.earthstar-project.org

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci Where did I hate on SQL databases? 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org flawed is the right word, no harsh at all. Good reading, and thanks for supporting the possibility of convincing @prologic@twtxt.net to switch to a database! :-D :-P

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club Several reasons:

• It’s another language to learn (SQL)
  
• It adds another dependency to your system
  
• It’s another failure mode (database blows up, scheme changes, indexs, etc)
  
• It increases security problems (now you have to worry about being SQL-safe)
  

And most of all, in my experience, it doesn’t actually solve any problems that a good key/value store can solve with good indexes and good data structures. I’m just no longer a fan, I used to use MySQL, SQLite, etc back in the day, these days, nope I wouldn’t even go anywhere near a database (for my own projects) if I can help it – It’s just another thing that can fail, another operational overhead.

Hi, I am playing with making an event sourcing database. Its super alpha but I thought I would share since others are talking about databases and such.

It’s super basic. Using tidwall/wal as the disk backing. The first use case I am playing with is an implementation of msgbus. I can post events to it and read them back in reverse order.

I plan to expand it to handle other event sourcing type things like aggregates and projections.

Find it here: sour-is/ev

@prologic@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

The complexity is a feature. It means standards can be replaced with products that let providers get their cut. It means putting data into the slowest most expensive database in cost and enviromnmental impact.

You’ve basically already left, whether you know it or not. Yesterday they nuked their services database. I’d been there ~20 years, but it’s dead. Libera.chat has been lovely.

Think of it like buying a signed print of a photo, instead of the photo itself, but the “signature” is an entry in a database and that’s all you get. Still dumb.