@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.

An alternate idea for supporting (properly) Twt Edits is to denoate as such and extend the meaning of a Twt Subject (which would need to be called something better?); For example, let’s say I produced the following Twt:

2024-09-18T23:08:00+10:00	Hllo World

And my feed’s URI is https://example.com/twtxt.txt. The hash for this Twt is therefore 229d24612a2:

$ echo -n "https://example.com/twtxt.txt\n2024-09-18T23:08:00+10:00\nHllo World" | sha1sum | head -c 11
229d24612a2

You wish to correct your mistake, so you make an amendment to that Twt like so:

2024-09-18T23:10:43+10:00	(edit:#229d24612a2) Hello World

Which would then have a new Twt hash value of 026d77e03fa:

$ echo -n "https://example.com/twtxt.txt\n2024-09-18T23:10:43+10:00\nHello World" | sha1sum | head -c 11
026d77e03fa

Clients would then take this edit:#229d24612a2 to mean, this Twt is an edit of 229d24612a2 and should be replaced in the client’s cache, or indicated as such to the user that this is the intended content.

@sorenpeter@darch.dk I like this idea. Just for fun, I’m using a variant in this twt. (Also because I’m curious how it non-hash subjects appear in jenny and yarn.)

URLs can contain commas so I suggest a different character to separate the url from the date. Is this twt I’ve used space (also after “replyto”, for symmetry).

I think this solves:

• Changing feed identities: although @mckinley@twtxt.net points out URLs can change, I think this syntax should be okay as long as the feed at that URL can be fetched, and as long as the current canonical URL for the feed lists this one as an alternate.
  
• editing, if you don’t care about message integrity
  
• finding the root of a thread, if you’re not following the author
  

An optional hash could be added if message integrity is desired. (E.g. if you don’t trust the feed author not to make a misleading edit.) Other recent suggestions about how to deal with edits and hashes might be applicable then.

People publishing multiple twts per second should include sub-second precision in their timestamps. As you suggested, the timestamp could just be copied verbatim.

@prologic@twtxt.net I have some ideas:

• Add smartypants rendering, just like Yarn has.
  
• Add the ability to create individual twtxts, each named after their hash.
  
• Fix the formatting of the help. :-P

@prologic@twtxt.net

() @falsifian@www.falsifian.org You mean the idea of being able to inline # url = changes in your feed?

Yes, that one. But @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org pointed out suffers a compatibility issue, since currently the first listed url is used for hashing, not the last. Unless your feed is in reverse chronological order. Heh, I guess another metadata field could indicate which version to use.

Or maybe url changes could somehow be combined with the archive feeds extension? Could the url metadata field be local to each archive file, so that to switch to a new url all you need to do is archive everything you’ve got and start a new file at the new url?

I don’t think it’s that likely my feed url will change.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Btw, I’m also open to ideas for this tool and welcome any contributions 👌

@mckinley@twtxt.net Yes, changing domains is be a problem if you tie your identity to an https url. But I also worry about being stuck with a key I can’t rotate. Whatever gets used, it would be nice to be able to rotate identities. I like @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org’s idea for that.

@sorenpeter@darch.dk

1. (replyto:http://darch.dk/twtxt.txt,2024-09-15T12:06:27Z)
   

I think I like this a lot. 🤔

The problem with using hashes always was that they’re “one-directional”: You can construct a hash from URL + timestamp + twt, but you cannot do the inverse. When I see “, I have no idea what that could possibly refer to.

But of course something like (replyto:http://darch.dk/twtxt.txt,2024-09-15T12:06:27Z) has all the information you need. This could simplify twt/feed discovery quite a bit, couldn’t it? 🤔 That thing that I just implemented – jenny asking some Yarn pod for some twt hash – would not be necessary anymore. Clients could easily and automatically fetch complete threads instead of requiring the user to follow all relevant feeds.

Only using the timestamp to identify a twt also solves the edit problem.

It even is better for non-Yarn clients, because you now don’t have to read, understand, and implement a “twt hash specification” before you can reply to someone.

The only problem, really, is that (replyto:http://darch.dk/twtxt.txt,2024-09-15T12:06:27Z) is so long. Clients would have to try harder to hide this. 😅

@mckinley@twtxt.net Thanks for the feedback.

1. Yeah I agrees that nick sound not be part of syntax. Any valid URL to a twtxt.txt-file should be enough and is more clear, so it is not confused with a email (one of the the issues with webfinger and fedivese handles)
   
2. I think any valid URL would work, since we are not bound to look for exact matches. Accepting both http and https as well as a gemni and gophe could all work as long as the path to the twtxt.txt is the same.
   
3. My idea is that you quote the timestamp as it is in the original twtxt.txt that you are referring to, so you can do it by simply copy/pasting. Also what are the change that the same human will make two different posts within the same second?!
   

Regarding the whole cryptographic keys for identity, to me it seems like an unnecessary layer of complexity. If you move to a new house or city you tell people that you moved - you can do the same in a twtxt.txt. Just post something like “I move to this new URL, please follow me there!” I did that with my feeds at least twice, and you guys still seem to read my posts:)

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org TLS won’t help you if you change your domain name. How will people know if it’s really you? Maybe that’s not the biggest problem for something with such low stakes as twtxt, but it’s a reasonable concern that could be solved using signatures from an unchanging cryptographic key.

This idea is the basis of Nostr. Notes can be posted to many relays and every note is signed with your private key. It doesn’t matter where you get the note from, your client can verify its authenticity. That way, relays don’t need to be trusted.

So this is a great thread. I have been thinking about this too.. and what if we are coming at it from the wrong direction? Identity being tied to a given URL has always been a pain point. If i get a new URL its almost as if i have a new identity because not only am I serving at a new location but all my previous communications are broken because the hashes are all wrong.

What if instead we used this idea of signatures to thread the URLs together into one identity? We keep the URL to Hash in place. Changing that now is basically a no go. But we can create a signature chain that can link identities together. So if i move to a new URL i update the chain hosted by my primary identity to include the new URL. If i have an archived feed that the old URL is now dead, we can point to where it is now hosted and use the current convention of hashing based on the first url:

The signature chain can also be used to rotate to new keys over time. Just sign in a new key or revoke an old one. The prior signatures remain valid within the scope of time the signatures were made and the keys were active.

The signature file can be hosted anywhere as long as it can be fetched by a reasonable protocol. So say we could use a webfinger that directs to the signature file? you have an identity like frank@beans.co that will discover a feed at some URL and a signature chain at another URL. Maybe even include the most recent signing key?

From there the client can auto discover old feeds to link them together into one complete timeline. And the signatures can validate that its all correct.

I like the idea of maybe putting the chain in the feed preamble and keeping the single self contained file.. but wonder if that would cause lots of clutter? The signature chain would be something like a log with what is changing (new key, revoke, add url) and a signature of the change + the previous signature.

# chain: ADDKEY kex14zwrx68cfkg28kjdstvcw4pslazwtgyeueqlg6z7y3f85h29crjsgfmu0w 
# sig: BEGIN SALTPACK SIGNED MESSAGE. ... 
# chain: ADDURL https://txt.sour.is/user/xuu
# sig: BEGIN SALTPACK SIGNED MESSAGE. ...
# chain: REVKEY kex14zwrx68cfkg28kjdstvcw4pslazwtgyeueqlg6z7y3f85h29crjsgfmu0w
# sig: ...

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Brilliant idea! 😂 One way ticket to Venus please! 🤘

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Another idea: just hash the feed url and time, without the message content. And don’t twt more than once per second.

Maybe you could even just use the time, and rely on @-mentions to disambiguate. Not sure how that would work out.

Though I kind of like the idea of twts being immutable. At least, it’s clear which version of a twt you’re replying to (assuming nobody is engineering hash collisions).

In fact, maybe your public key idea is compatible with my last point. Just come up with a url scheme that means “this feed’s primary URL is actually a public key”, and then feed authors can optionally switch to that.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de good idea, considering it might occasionally not work at all (because of edited twtxts).

@prologic@twtxt.net How does yarn.social’s API fix the problem of centralization? I still need to know whose API to use.

Say I see a twt beginning (#hash) and I want to look up the start of the thread. Is the idea that if that twt is hosted by a a yarn.social pod, it is likely to know the thread start, so I should query that particular pod for the hash? But what if no yarn.social pods are involved?

The community seems small enough that a registry server should be able to keep up, and I can have a couple of others as backups. Or I could crawl the list of feeds followed by whoever emitted the twt that prompted my query.

I have successfully used registry servers a little bit, e.g. to find a feed that mentioned a tag I was interested in. Was even thinking of making my own, if I get bored of my too many other projects :-)

@cuaxolotl@sunshinegardens.org Ah, thanks for reporting back! Okay, so you’re basically manually “crawling” feeds right now. 🤔 What do you think about the idea of adding something like # follow_notify = gemini://foo/bar to your feed’s metadata, so that clients who follow you can ping that URL every now and then? How would you even notice that, do you regularly read your gemini logs? 🤔

For following notifications I would say use webmetion refering to the the line in your twtxt.txt as per: https://darch.dk/mentions-twtxt
Or send them an email, so it would be an idea to add a # contact = mailto:me@domain.net to ones twtxt.txt

A stopgap setting that would let me stop all calls to /external matching a particular pattern (like this damn lovetocode999 nick) would do the job. Given the potential for abuse of that endpoint, having more moderation control over what it can do is probably a good idea.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I have no Idea, I still haven’t found a repair shop I can trust with my monitor. As for the blackouts, they don’t have consistent frequency. Sometimes it’s once every 3 months… other times it’s 3 times a day 😂

Morphotrophic by Greg Egan is built around an idea for how life on Earth could have worked out differently. It gets increasingly strange and interesting as the story progresses. My partner and I finished it last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. The beginning is free online: https://gregegan.net/MORPHOTROPHIC/00/MorphotrophicExcerpt.html #scifi #reading

@prologic@twtxt.net ‘Clownflare’ 🤣🤣🤣 Love it.

But yes the idea of a cheap VPS as a tunnel and keeping home network all local is a good one I reckon.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Ahh it might very well be a Clownflare thing as @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org eluded to 🤣 One of these days I’m going to get off Clownflare myself, when I do I’ll share it with you. My idea is to basically have a cheap VPS like @eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club has and use Wireguard to tunnel out. The VPS becomes the Reverse Proxy that faces the internet. My home network then has in inbound whatsoever.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/logitech-has-an-idea-for-a-forever-mouse-thatrequires-a-subscription/

The fuck…?!

@prologic@twtxt.net Interesting! Had no idea about that, but trust you to know of a self-hosted implementation 😅👌

@stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no @xuu@txt.sour.is @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org “Not cool”? I was receiving many broken (HTTP 400 error) requests per second from an IP address I didn’t recognize, right after having my VPS crash because the hard drive filled up with bogus data. None of this had happened on this VPS before, so it was a new problem that I didn’t understand and I took immediate action to get it under control. Of course I reported the IP address to its abuse email. That’s a 100% normal, natural, and “cool” thing to do in such a situation. At the time I had no idea it was @xuu@txt.sour.is .

The moment I realized it was @xuu@txt.sour.is and definitely a false alarm, I emailed the ISP and told them this was a false positive and to not ban or block the IP in question because it was not abusive traffic. They haven’t yet responded but I do hope they’ve stopped taking action, and if there’s anything else I can do to certify to them that this is not abuse then I will do that.

I run numerous services on that VPS that I rely on, and I spent most of my day today cleaning up the mess all this has caused. I get that this caused @xuu@txt.sour.is a lot of stress and I’m sincerely sorry about that and am doing what I can to rectify the situation. But calling me “not cool” isn’t necessary. This was an unfortunate situation that we’re trying to make right and there’s no need for criticizing anyone.

@prologic@twtxt.net This is weird, but today, out of nowhere, yarnd filled up the disk on the VPS where I run it. It’s never done anything like this before and I have no idea why it would start. But it threw almost 700 Gbytes of data into /tmp in files like this:

yarnd-avatar-1087570772  yarnd-avatar-1599127133  yarnd-avatar-2042956376  yarnd-avatar-2562946212  yarnd-avatar-3274766535  yarnd-avatar-3931929859  yarnd-avatar-553201529
yarnd-avatar-1089125452  yarnd-avatar-1606826819  yarnd-avatar-2089122560  yarnd-avatar-2611944556  yarnd-avatar-3310922372  yarnd-avatar-3938996661  yarnd-avatar-556240195
yarnd-avatar-1101228867  yarnd-avatar-1618755765  yarnd-avatar-2104107259  yarnd-avatar-2641384948  yarnd-avatar-3326285269  yarnd-avatar-3939402047  yarnd-avatar-559344463
yarnd-avatar-1112165824  yarnd-avatar-1650827505  yarnd-avatar-2142824779  yarnd-avatar-2680659340  yarnd-avatar-3340682113  yarnd-avatar-3998621883  yarnd-avatar-570292705
yarnd-avatar-1119886894  yarnd-avatar-1656673647  yarnd-avatar-2160786463  yarnd-avatar-271923479   yarnd-avatar-3374584613  yarnd-avatar-4005102536  yarnd-avatar-595490106
yarnd-avatar-1131417623  yarnd-avatar-1685698239  yarnd-avatar-2165405940  yarnd-avatar-2793562275  yarnd-avatar-3380606954  yarnd-avatar-4016872095  yarnd-avatar-679251850
yarnd-avatar-1160959085  yarnd-avatar-1746759128  yarnd-avatar-2171489899  yarnd-avatar-2842068287  yarnd-avatar-3416352997  yarnd-avatar-4110048378  yarnd-avatar-679950970
yarnd-avatar-1231649265  yarnd-avatar-1752278279  yarnd-avatar-2251317422  yarnd-avatar-2843868670  yarnd-avatar-3468636088  yarnd-avatar-4116552474  yarnd-avatar-737874628

164 files. Some are empty, some are 7 or even 10 Gbyte.

Any idea what would cause that? And why now, after running yarnd for so long with nothing like this happening?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Somewhere or another, I think in a William Byrd talk, I heard it suggested that the best ideas in computer science should fit on an index card (ah yes it’s this one: https://paperswelove.org/2017/video/will-byrd-most-beautiful-program/ ). He was referring to the basic principles of LISP/the lambda calculus, which have sometimes been called the Maxwell’s equations of computer programming (by Alan Kay). Simple, short, elegant, but very densely packed with meaning–generations of people have spent their whole careers unpacking what those simple rules can do.

Much of modern software feels like the polar opposite of that. Not only can you not write it on an index card, you never will be able to because people who write software don’t seem to aspire to try. I wish more people thought this way though!

@bmallred@staystrong.run overall this was pretty good and the run-walk intervals kept my heart rate low.

at around 0400 a car came racing (90-100 mph) down gulf blvd towards my direction. it turned its headlights off and actually lost traction at point and skidded a bit. okay, kids. then a bit later i hear the car coming back behind me… so i got as far to the right as i could in case the car skids again. as it passed me i looked over my shoulder and saw a police vehicle a bit back w/o lights on yet. then looking in front another cop and then they blocked the lanes to get the driver to stop. driver decided he wasn’t stopping and tried to swerve around the police and ended up ping-ponging between sides of the road. enough of that…

took a wrong turn after going over the first bridge, but luckily it went in a loop. didn’t really know exactly where i was going anyways and was just winging it from the get-go.

the rest of the run was pretty uneventful and just a fun experience. crazy idea accomplished.

💡 Does anyone have any ideas for how to combat SPAM submissions to feeds.twtxt.net – An RSS/Atom -> Twtxt feed conversation service. Hmm? 🧐

Good and Bad Ideas
⌘ Read more

Hah 🤣 @dfaria@twtxt.net Your @dfaria.eu@dfaria.eu feed really does consume about >50% of a “Discover” search with filters “Without replies” and “Hide my posts”. 🤣

Image

</> htmx - high power tools for html really liking the idea of htmx 🤔 If I don’t have to learn all this complicated TypeScript/React/NPM garbage, I can just write regular SSA (Server-Side-Apps) and then progressively upgrade to SPA (Single-Page-App) using htmx hmmm 🧐

an adventures in food and drink might be an idea for a twtxt feed

I’ve gathers my ideas about mentions for twtxt/yarn here: Webmentions vs. custom mentions spec for twtxt/yarn - HedgeDoc
You are welcome to edit and comment in the doc, so our ideas are not fragment into a bunch of treads

yarn should define its own federation protocol that extends the basic twtxt in ways that twtxt doesn’t allow. it’s time. and i’ve got ideas!

Idea of the day for public blog posting: a mail alias like this one but to extract only body, no attachments. https://codemadness.org/mailservice.html

danke schøn, yes the idea was that it should work for all feeds

Got a great idea for an web app: a flashlight app which uses media-queries to detect if the light, aka the body of the page, should be on (white) or off.

Algunas ideas random de hoy
https://text.eapl.mx/algunas-ideas-random-de-hoy

@prologic@twtxt.net the new product was GPTs. A way to create tailored bots for specific use cases. https://openai.com/blog/introducing-gpts (fun fact: I did an internal hackathon where we made something like this for $work onboarding. And I won a prize!)

The competed project is poe https://quorablog.quora.com/Introducing-creator-monetization-for-Poe which is basically the same idea. Make a AI bot tailored to a specific domain of knowledge. And monitize it.

The timing fits very well as openAI announced it just a few weeks ago.

Messed up the configuration of the nut UPS monitor so bad it actually initialised an UPS test where the device switched itself off on the reboot of the PC. No idea how that happened. So uninstalled it again.

Anyone have any ideas how you might identify processes (pids) on Linux machine that are responsible for most of the Disk I/O on that machine and subsequently causing high I/O wait times for other processes? 🤔

Important bit: The machine has no access to the internet, there are hardly any standard tools on it, etc. So I have to get something to it “air gapped”. I have terminal access to it, so I can do interesting things like, base64 encode a static binary to my clipboard and paste it to a file, then base64 decode it and execute. That’s about the only mechanisms I have.

@prologic@twtxt.net yeah, it’s true. Thing is, Linux as a desktop operating system sucked in 1996 yet I adopted it then anyway because I wanted nothing to do with MS anymore 😆 I know it’s not for everyone but I’m pretty tolerant of a less-than-stellar experience if it means I can be free of big-company garbage.

I haven’t tried a Linux-based smartphone OS in a long time so I don’t have any idea how bad/good it might be. I figure when I finally break down and get a new phone I’ll experiment on my current phone.

Inspiration
⌘ Read more

Not a bad option, although now we need a phone with camera, a printer, a QR reader app, to name a few…
And don’t let get started with usability issues of QR codes (like restaurant menus)

My idea is to make it easy to backup keys with pen and paper 🖋 📄 without copying the hexadecimal string which is prone to error 👀

@prologic@twtxt.net I had a feeling my container was not running remotely. It was too crisp.

podman is definitely capable of it. I’ve never used those features though so I’d have to play around with it awhile to understand how it works and then maybe I’d have a better idea of whether it’s possible to get it to work with cas.run.

There’s a podman-specific way of allowing remote container execution that wouldn’t be too hard to support alongside docker if you wanted to go that route. Personally I don’t use docker–too fat, too corporate. podman is lightweight and does virtually everything I’d want to use docker to do.

No tengo idea cuanto tome tener un nivel escrito y hablado de Mini. Aunque me llama atención averiguarlo.

Pará el francés ha sido más de un año de unas cuantas horas a la semana y no he pasado del A1.

Definitivamente es un tema de práctica.

https://minilanguage.com/

@prologic@twtxt.net attacking the person, not the idea. It’d be like if you said “yarn is better than mastodon because it isn’t push based” and someone who disagreed with you said “well you think that because you’re an idiot” or something like that.

@prologic@twtxt.net It was super useful if you needed to do the sorts of things it did. I’m pretty sad.

At its core was Sage, a computational mathematics system, and their own version of Jupyter notebooks. So, you could do all kinds of different math stuff in a notebook environment and share that with people. But on top of that, there was a chat system, a collaborative editing system, a course management system (so if you were teaching a class using it you could keep track of students, assignments, grades, that sort of thing), and a bunch of other stuff I never used. It all ran in a linux container with python/conda as a base, so you could also drop to a terminal, install stuff in the container, and run X11 applications in the same environment. I never taught a class with it but I used to use it semi-regularly to experiment with ideas.