Measure Twice, Cut Once
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i desperately want to simply deploy a bbycll instance but i need to change the entire database schema for the Nth time, i haven’t been working on it much recently as this back and forth w the backend (which you don’t expect from a spec as simple as twtxt) is really demotivating, as well as life and stuff getting in the way

perhaps i just need a nice shower and four coffees, midnight is when i am most productive and the hour is approaching..

@prologic@twtxt.net I too, self-host various services on a VPS (and considering buying a mini PC to keep at home instead).

I use most of it as a hosting platform for personal use only and as a remote development environment (I do share a couple of tools with a friend though).

But given the costant risks of DDoS, hacking, bots, etc. I keep any of my public facing resources purely static and on separate hosting providers (without lock-ins of course).

Lately, I began using homebrew PWAs with CouchDB as a sync database, this way I get a fantastic local-first experience and also have total control of my data, that also sync in a locally hosted backup instance in real-time.

Also, I was already aware of Salty.im, but what I’m thinking is a more feature complete solution that even my family can use quickly, Delta.chat with the new chatmail provider (self-hostable) might be the solution for my needs.

But I’m still thinking if it’s worth the trouble. I might just drop everything and only use safe channels to speak with them (free 24/7 family tech-support is easy to manage 😆).

Also, I’ll be waiting for the day you’ll share with us your story, I’m pretty curious about it!

For a very first attempt, I’m extremely happy how this tray turned out: https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/blechschachtel/ The photos look rougher than in person. The 0.5mm aluminium sheet was 300x200mm to begin with. Now, the accidental outside dimensions are 210x110mm. It took me about an hour to make. Tomorrow, I gotta build a simple folder, so I don’t have to hammer it anymore, but can simply bend it a little at a time.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de You didn’t miss anything. Just time for more useful stuff. ;-)

@prologic@twtxt.net you doing this reminded me of mkws, and Adi. Good times, we have seeing so many people come and go. It is kind of sad, when I think about “jjl”, and Phil, and the many others…

I am feeling “mushy” today. Ugh, ageing sucks.

@prologic@twtxt.net yup, that’s what I meant. The lack of it on the URL is fine, but on the post itself it is always a good idea. Time frames matter.

@prologic@twtxt.net I can’t upload a screenshot (tried, but Yarnd simple “ate” my reply). See https://zsblog.mills.io/posts/hello-zs-blog.html. Is has no date/time on it.

@prologic@twtxt.net They have not rolled it out (yet), they are “just” discussing it (for the n-th time).

@alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it Yeah I think we’re overstating the UNIX principles a bit here 🤣 I get what you’re trying to say though @zvava@twtxt.net 😅 If I could go back in time and do it all over again, I would have gotten the Hash length correct and I would have used SHA-256 instead. But someone way smarter than me designed the Twt Hash spec, we adopted it and well here we are today, it works™ 😅

And I need to make something absolutely clear as well here. Twtxt was completely and utterly dead back in {Aug 2020](https://yarn.social/about.html) when I came across the spec and its simplicity and realised the lost opportunity. Since then we’ve continued to grow a small but thriving community. The extensions we’ve built over time have stood and lasted the test of time for the past ~5 years. We need not break things too badly, because what we have today and was designed years ago actually works quite well™ (despite some flaws).

@zvava@twtxt.net Going to have to hard disagree here I’m sorry. a) no-one reads the raw/plain twtxt.txt files, the only time you do is to debug something, or have a stick beak at the comments which most clients will strip out and ignore and b) I’m sorry you’ve completely lost me! I’m old enough to pre-date before Linux became popular, so I’m not sure what UNIX principles you think are being broken or violated by having a Twt Subject (Subject) whose contents is a cryptographic content-addressable hash of the “thing”™ you’re replying to and forming a chain of other replies (a thread).

I’m sorry, but the simplest thing to do is to make the smallest number of changes to the Spec as possible and all agree on a “Magic Date” for which our clients use the modified function(s).

@bender@twtxt.net Well honestly, this is just it. My strong position on this is quite simple:

Do the simplest thing that could work.

It’s one of the age old UNIX philosphies.

Therefore, the simplest thing™ to do here is to just increase the hash length, mark a magic™ date/time as @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org has indicated and call it a day. We’ll then be fine for a few hundred years, at which point there’ll be no-one left alive to give a shit™ anyway 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net considering other alternatives we have seeing (of which I have lost track already), yes. Why don’t you guys (client makers) take a step at a time and, for now, increase the hash length to deal with the collisions. Then location-based addressing can be added… or not, you know. 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I can’t remember the last time I came across a 360° video. 🤔

Thanks @bender@twtxt.net it’s been a long time indeed but, I was here the whole time. Just silent. I just didn’t have much meaningful/worth twting about … /ME flips a bird to life

@bender@twtxt.net Thanks for asking!

So, I’ve been working on 2 main twtxt-related projects.

The first is small Node / express application that serves up a twtxt file while allowing its owner to add twts to it (or edit it outright), and I’ve been testing it on my site since the night I made that post. It’s still very much an MVP, and I’ve been intermittently adding features, improving security, and streamlining the code, with an eye to release it after I get an MVP done of project #2 (the reader).

But that’s where I’ve been struggling. The idea seems simple enough - another Node / express app (this one with a Vite-powered front-end) that reads a public twtxt file, parses the “follow” list, grabs (and parses) those twtxt files, and then creates a river of twts out of the result. The pieces work fine in seclusion (and with dummy data), but I keep running into weird issues when reading real-live twtxt files, so some twts come through, while others get lost in the ether. I’ll figure it out eventually, but for now, I’ve been spending far more time than I anticipated just trying to get it to work end-to-end.

On top of it, the 2 projects wound up turning into 4 (so far), as I’ve been spinning out little libraries to use across both apps (like https://jsr.io/@itsericwoodward/fluent-dom-esm, and a forthcoming twtxt helper library).

In the end, I’m hoping to have project 1 (the editor) into beta by the end of October, and project 2 (the reader) into beta sometime after that, but we’ll see.

I hope this has satisfied your curiosity, but if you’d like to know more, please reach out!

@bender@twtxt.net Thanks for asking!

So, I’ve been working on 2 main twtxt-related projects.

The first is small Node / express application that serves up a twtxt file while allowing its owner to add twts to it (or edit it outright), and I’ve been testing it on my site since the night I made that post. It’s still very much an MVP, and I’ve been intermittently adding features, improving security, and streamlining the code, with an eye to release it after I get an MVP done of project #2 (the reader).

But that’s where I’ve been struggling. The idea seems simple enough - another Node / express app (this one with a Vite-powered front-end) that reads a public twtxt file, parses the “follow” list, grabs (and parses) those twtxt files, and then creates a river of twts out of the result. The pieces work fine in seclusion (and with dummy data), but I keep running into weird issues when reading real-live twtxt files, so some twts come through, while others get lost in the ether. I’ll figure it out eventually, but for now, I’ve been spending far more time than I anticipated just trying to get it to work end-to-end.

On top of it, the 2 projects wound up turning into 4 (so far), as I’ve been spinning out little libraries to use across both apps (like https://jsr.io/@itsericwoodward/fluent-dom-esm, and a forthcoming twtxt helper library).

In the end, I’m hoping to have project 1 (the editor) into beta by the end of October, and project 2 (the reader) into beta sometime after that, but we’ll see.

I hope this has satisfied your curiosity, but if you’d like to know more, please reach out!

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com welcome back dude! Long time no see!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, it took quite some time to load. But then it was briefly back. Now it’s 503ing immediately all the time.

@prologic@twtxt.net I know we won’t ever convince each other of the other’s favorite addressing scheme. :-D But I wanna address (haha) your concerns:

1. I don’t see any difference between the two schemes regarding link rot and migration. If the URL changes, both approaches are equally terrible as the feed URL is part of the hashed value and reference of some sort in the location-based scheme. It doesn’t matter.

2. The same is true for duplication and forks. Even today, the “cannonical URL” has to be chosen to build the hash. That’s exactly the same with location-based addressing. Why would a mirror only duplicate stuff with location- but not content-based addressing? I really fail to see that. Also, who is using mirrors or relays anyway? I don’t know of any such software to be honest.

3. If there is a spam feed, I just unfollow it. Done. Not a concern for me at all. Not the slightest bit. And the byte verification is THE source of all broken threads when the conversation start is edited. Yes, this can be viewed as a feature, but how many times was it actually a feature and not more behaving as an anti-feature in terms of user experience?

4. I don’t get your argument. If the feed in question is offline, one can simply look in local caches and see if there is a message at that particular time, just like looking up a hash. Where’s the difference? Except that the lookup key is longer or compound or whatever depending on the cache format.

5. Even a new hashing algorithm requires work on clients etc. It’s not that you get some backwards-compatibility for free. It just cannot be backwards-compatible in my opinion, no matter which approach we take. That’s why I believe some magic time for the switch causes the least amount of trouble. You leave the old world untouched and working.

If these are general concerns, I’m completely with you. But I don’t think that they only apply to location-based addressing. That’s how I interpreted your message. I could be wrong. Happy to read your explanations. :-)

@prologic@twtxt.net ah, I was wondering! Hoping you are having a good time, mate! Christening the new RV? :-)

For what I can gather, kind of a waste of time, not a good solution. I might be missing bits, or may haven’t grasp the entire “story”.

@zvava@twtxt.net For the time being, just show both.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz nope, not normal. Something birdy (because why to use fishy all the time?!) is going on.

@zvava@twtxt.net it is amazing how much you have accomplished in such a short time. Take time to sleep, though! :-)

we are now parsing and recursively fetching remote feeds somewhat successfully, gotta work on the media proxy and markdown way more, so so many fucky edgecases….my friend’s feed with like four posts parsed correctly so i tried this account’s feed and well now im not going to bed on time

edit: remaking demo video

we are now parsing and recursively fetching remote feeds somewhat successfully, gotta work on the media proxy and markdown way more, so so many fucky edgecases….my friend’s feed with like four posts parsed correctly so i tried this account’s feed and well now im not going to bed on time

It was nice to start a walk in the woods with sunshine. The last times it was all soupy. It was quite windy, autumn is certainly here. Soon, the leaves will begin to turn. https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2025-09-11/

Oops, maybe I should have posted a reminder. 🥴

@dce@hashnix.club By the time you posted your twt, the red phase was already over. 🙈 Stellarium has a pretty good simulation of the whole thing.

Three weather services with three different forecasts. We got a little bit rained on, so at least some of them were not completely wrong. The timing was off by an hour, though. And nobody expected the Spanish inqui^W^Wthunder either. It was a nice walk.

Oh cool, as I type this, lighning and thunder very close by now. At most a kilometer away. Glad I’m home and not in the woods anymore. And heavy rain kicks in, too.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org (Haha, every time I read the word “Gophers”, I have to stop and remind myself that this is about Golang. 🤪)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I usually only have my GPS tracker with me. That trip yesterday was probably a one-time thing. 😅 It was fun, but I’d rather not carry so much stuff around. 🥴

@dce@hashnix.club Glad you liked it. 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, nice read!

If I’m in the woods, I’d like to not waste my time with computers and focus on the beauty of nature. ;-) So, I’m not gonna participate in that event. But I’d read your articles on that subject anytime. :-)

Looks like it’s this time of the year again where we get beautiful sunsets more often: https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2025-09-01/

@prologic@twtxt.net haven’t had too much time to really try it out yet ^^’ i’m um too busy staring at code i wrote while sleep deprived and wondering why i did the things i did, while sleep deprived \@.@

Ni Hao; bīng qílín!
I’m just dropping in, to emphasize my love for ice cream and the Chinese crawler bots, allocating their time and resources, towards scraping my humble website.

To show my gratitude, I’ve even added a random little dog generator to https://thecanine.ueuo.com/sparkle.html so that everyone can pick up their own custom dogFT, on their journey through my site.

Now that’s interesting. Some of these bots start crawling at URLs like this:

https://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/NetTracer-Scenes/GPUTracer/multipass/xlonitor/http-collect/getpw

That is obviously completely wrong. But I can explain it. Some years ago, I screwed up my nginx rewrite rules, and that’s how these broken URLs came to be.

It all redirects to /git now, which is why that endpoint sees so much traffic lately.

But what does that mean? Why do they start there? I can only speculate that this company bought an old database of web links and they use that to start crawling. And it was probably a cheap one, because these redirects have been fixed for quite a long time now.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m doing that now as well, but I don’t think this is a good solution. This is going to hurt “self-hosting” in the long run: I cannot afford true self-hosting where I actually do host everything here at home – instead, I must use a cloud provider / VPS for that. It is only a matter of time until my provider starts doing AI shit as well (or rather, the customers do it) and then what? I get blocked, e.g. I can’t send email to (some) people anymore. This is already bad and it’s going to get worse.

@dce@hashnix.club Yeah, I’ve read about that approach. Sounds clever. Truth is, I’m too tired. 😢 I don’t want to spend too much of my time fighting assholes.

I’ve now started blocking entire cloud hosters. Sorry, not sorry.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, I’ve blocked some large subnets now (most likely overblocking a lot of stuff) and it has died down.

I’m not looking forward to doing this on a regular basis. This is supposed to be a fun hobby – and it was, for many years. Maybe that time is just over.

We use all the Microsoft programs at work - Teams and Outlook especially.

After all kinds of technical problems with Teams, that sometimes go unresolved for over a year, Microsoft shifted their priorities away from fixing things and towards adding an annoying AI Copilot button, that just takes up space and all it does, is loads the website in Teams, so I disabled it. Soon they just add it back, but in a different row of icons, therefore it’s now a different button, you have to disable (I think they added yet another one, to the Teams, on my work phone and I had to disabled that too). Not too long after, the desktop one just enabled itself, because of “an error” and I can disable it, but doing so activates a popup, that begs you to turn it back on, every once in a while. You can’t disable the popup and can only click “Yes” or “Not now” on it. I still keep it disabled, out of principle, but yesterday I noticed yet another Copilot button, this time in the top right corner of my Outlook and this one cannot be disabled, on the business version of Outlook and even on the personal one, it’s only possible to do it through hidden privacy settings, by prohibiting the program from connecting to Microsoft servers, for extra “features”.

There’s people complaining about it online, so it’s clear nobody really wants it, but at this point Microsofts position is that you will have at least one useless AI button on your screen, at any given time, and you will be happy. And yes, their AI sucks and if I absolutely have to use AI for something, there’s already 2 better options, we have access to, at work.

Since 2020, I’ve been putting together one playlist every year, in which each track represents one month of that year. However, I also have assigned each season two specific songs, which do not change year-to-year: Spring: “A Little Bit Of Love” by Weezer and “Gretel” by Alex G; Summer: “Dumb” by Roe Kapara and “Endless Bummer” by Weezer; Autumn: “1979” by The Smashing Pumpkins and “The Dead Come Talking” by Roe Kapara; Winter: “Red Water (Christmas Mourning)” by Type O Negative and “Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End)” by The Darkness

@movq@www.uninformativ.de At this rate, I’m going to be carrying a feature phone in a few years’ time.

The GPG signatures of my software tarballs have been wrong for years (because I’ve been using rsync wrong, funny enough, it wasn’t a GPG issue) and nobody ever noticed. (They still are wrong at the moment, because I haven’t pushed the fix, yet.)

This confirms that this is just a total waste of time. Nobody ever checks this. Maybe this matters if you’re a distro, but why even bother as a single person …

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org that’s so cool! I had to do some research, as I thought all pallets were made using cheap pine wood (which is quite soft), but, boy, as I erring big time! Oak it is also used, which is hardwood, and quite durable.

Okay, often times, these “employer gimmicks” are just silly, but this one did make me laugh:

The author doesn’t really long for retro. They long for time passed, for old times. We all do. It is called ageing.

hey yall i accidentally nuked my main hard drive for the second time ever yesterday. spent the rest of the day setting up my PC again. thankfully i didn’t lose anything super crucial, i have most of that on another drive

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Any time 😅