we talk about programming like it is about writing code, but the code ends up being less important than the architecture, and the architecture ends up being less important than social issues. The success and failure of Ninja (2020) | Hacker News

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev nos comparte su artículo “twtxt, la red social en texto plano, descentralizada y minimalista”

I would like to share my lastest article about #twtxt on my blog: https://programadorwebvalencia.com/twtxt-la-red-social-en-texto-plano-descentralizada-y-minimalista/ . Attention! It is a Spanish

My 400th Twtxt Post will be about you: wishing you, reader of my Twtxt feed, all the best for the coming year and most of all love, health, and that your projects and work may contribute to the greater good of all mankind. I will be taking a social-media break for a couple of weeks to enjoy this special time with my family. I hope you will be able to do this with your family and friends too.

after thinking and researching about it, yep, I agree that WebFinger is a good idea.

For example reading here: https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutorial
I wasn’t considering some scenarios, like multiple accounts for a single domain (See ‘How can I set and manage multiple subdomain handles?’ in the link above)

One benefit with bluesky is your username is also a website. And not a clunky URL with slashes and such. I wish twtxt adopted that. I have advocated for webfinger to for twtxt to let us do something like it with usernames. Nostr has something like it

By default the bsky.social urls all redirect to their feeds like: hmpxvt.bsky.social
Many custom urls will redirect to some kind of linktree or just their feed cwebonline.com or la.bonne.petite.sour.is or if you are a major outlet just to your web presence like https://theonion.com‬ or https://netflix.com

Its just good SEO practice

Do all nostr addresses take you to the person if typed into a browser? That is the secret sauce.
No having to go to some random page first. no accounts. no apps to install. just direct to the person.

@lime360@lime360.nekoweb.org Welcome yo Twtxt / Yarn.social 👋

@sorenpeter@darch.dk

“A minimalist social network powered by plain text files”

My brain keeps shortening this to “a socialist network …” and then jumps to “uhh, large parts of the US won’t like this” … 🤦🤪

Btw about social: found very interesting thing about twitter:

The legal basis that X asserts in the filing is not terribly interesting. But what is interesting is that X has decided to involve itself at all, and it highlights that you do not own your followers or your account or anything at all on corporate social media, and it also highlights the fact that Elon Musk’s X is primarily a political project he is using to boost, or stifle, specific viewpoints and help his friends. In the filing, X’s lawyers essentially say—like many other software companies, and, increasingly, device manufacturers as well—that the company’s terms of service grant X’s users a “license” to use the platform but that, ultimately, X owns all accounts on the social network and can do anything that it wants with them.

Forcing social media to open their algorithms: hostile to corporations
Forcing young people to not use social media: hostile to young people, helps prevent them from organizing
You think they did this for the benefit of the young people?

Also this ☝️

Australia To Ban Under-16s From Social Media After Passing Landmark Law
Australia will ban children under 16 from using social media after its senate approved what will become a world-first law. From a report: Children will be blocked from using platforms including TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook, a move the Australian government argue is necessary to protect their mental health and wellbeing.
… ⌘ Read more

“A minimalist social network powered by plain text files” - my talk about #twtxt from #Piksel24 Festival is now on YouTube

and slides can be found at http://darch.dk/twtxtalk-piksel

I’m gonna upload my part of the video to youtube and the slides to my website within a day or two. Then you can add it to yarn.social etc.

Starting the call: https://meet.mills.io/call/Yarn.social

Come join us!

@bender@twtxt.net 😆 Would calling it a Single user Twtxt "Yarn Pod **Like**" software help you sleep better at night? And just in case things are not clear here, I’m being sarcastic (well, kinda…) and not trying to gaslight anyone. Think of my comment as Bromance or something like that LOL.

But seriously, Just like any UNIX-Like system to Unix™, as in non of them are UNIX™, but each of them is providing more or less similar experience and re-implementing what once was parts of “UNIX™ software” their own (more or less better) ways. Timeline is Yarn™ Pod like, (my personal take on the word pod is: “an instance of XYZ software acting an escape POD from X-BS for… ABC reasons.”) providing more or less of a similar experience, implementing some of Yarn.social Extensions, trying to add in some more …etc.

Otherwise, I don’t see the Yarn pod mention as some kind of malicious manoeuvre, but more of a tribute to what (might have) sparked inspiration for creating Timeline? Also, our friend @sorenpeter@darch.dk here has got a valid reason for using PHP (#tms7aka) so let’s let’s put our unease towards the language itself aside and maybe just help however/as much as we can in order to make internet (the World?) a better place.

@bender@twtxt.net The tagline of Timeline is “a single user twtxt/yarn pod” not just a yarn pod. Similar to GNU/Linux. When we came up with the concept of Yarn Social it was a way to rebrand twtxt with the extensions that makes conversations like this possible.

its important to see clearly: the rejection of mastodon for bluesky is not a rejection of the desire to be free of our corporate overlords; its a rejection of white bros controlling digital spaces. sit with that

eugen and his interlocutors have had immense power with which to challenge twitter but their racial and cultural and ideological insularity prevented them from using it https://alaskan.social/@seachanger/113500023546622076

👋 Reminder folks of the upcoming Yarn.social monthly online meetup:

• Event: Yarn.social Online Meetup
  
• When: 23rd November 2024 at 12:00PM UTC (midday)
  
• Where: Mills Meet : Yarn.social
  

#Yarn.social #Meetup

@prologic@twtxt.net I recommend its Wikipedia entry is edited then, if you are completely certain.

“Bluesky is a decentralized microblogging social media service primarily operated by Bluesky Social, PBC.”

That I know of, you can run the PDS, and pretty much everything else.

@prologic@twtxt.net Nah. twtxt + Mastodon is enough social media for me. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net what do we make of Labor’s proposed social media minimum age ban, I.e ID verification, and the likes of Yarn? I haven’t been able to find out exactly how far the legislation goes, but some have said it’s broad enough to include any site that even has a comment section 🤔 but that could be FUD.

@galegovski@vaporhole.xyz, a rede social que é lenta :), deixo configurado no meu PC local pra não precisar fazer ssh pra acessar aqui o twtxt, só o iris que acesso entrado no vaporhole mesmo

@codebuzz@www.codebuzz.nl I have some shell scripts that handle some of the log formatting details, but I mostly write my mesages by hand. Lately I’ve been browsing twtxt.net since they aggregate most of the known network. I have a couple of demo aggregators sitting around, but I’m in the middle of some infra rebuilds so a lot of my services are offline rn. They’re both built on a simple social graph analysis that extracts urls for your direct follows the follows listed on each of those feeds (friend-of-a-friend replication). certain formatting operations are awkward with my setup, so I may write an app of some kind in the future. likely gemini-based, but I have a number of projects ahead of that one in the queue.

@bender@twtxt.net I try to avoid editing. I guess I would write 5/4, 6/4, etc, and hopefully my audience would be sympathetic to my failing.

Anyway, I don’t think my eccentric decision to number my twts in the style of other social media platforms is the only context where someone might write ¼ not meaning a quarter. E.g. January 4, to Americans.

I’m happy to keep overthinking this for as long as you are :-P

the test would be: how often does unwanted content get pushed on your feed? do incongruent posters easily disrupt harmonious connections? &c. less about the community, more about how the social dynamics play out as various groups and individuals interact.

i’ve observed that (decentralized) social platforms that encourage promiscuous follow behavior frequently run into this issue. there are lots of grumpy people out there and people who use social media to vent or let off steam. i know people worry about siloes, but i think that actually is an expression of FOMO and anxiety over being ignored by the ‘cool kids’. what i rarely see is media platforms that embrace the reality of bubbles and give users the ability to form healthy social connections and curate content that they enjoy.

Lol, this is actually a good thing by Apple. Doesn’t kill social apps at all, just prevents some harvesting of your entire address book by abusive apps like WhatsApp.

Did Apple Just Kill Social Apps?
Apple’s iOS 18 update has introduced changes to contact sharing that could significantly impact social app developers. The new feature allows users to selectively share contacts with apps, rather than granting access to their entire address book. While Apple touts this as a privacy enhancement, developers warn it may hinder the growth of new social platforms. Nikita Bier, a start-up founder, called it “the en … ⌘ Read more

👋 Thanks for joining us on our Sept monthly Yarn.social meetup today y’all 🙇‍♂️ We had @david@collantes.us @sorenpeter@darch.dk @doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt @falsifian@www.falsifian.org and @xuu@txt.sour.is 💪 Nice turn out! (not all at once of course, as we normally run this over 4 hours as we span many time zones!)

Things we talked about:

• Decentralised vs. Distributed
  
• Use of SHA256 for Twt Hash(es)
  
• We solved Edits! 🥳
  
• UUID(s) probably won’t work! (susceptible to sppofing)
  
• Helped @sorenpeter@darch.dk write some PHP to process/parse User-Agent and service his feed via a custom PHP script 😅
  
• @falsifian@www.falsifian.org introduced himself 👌
  
• Talked about Merkle Trees 🌳
  

Did I miss anything? 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net

See https://dev.twtxt.net

Yes, that is exactly what I meant. I like that collection and “twtxt v2” feels like a departure.

Maybe there’s an advantage to grouping it into one spec, but IMO that shouldn’t be done at the same time as introducing new untested ideas.

See https://yarn.social (especially this section: https://yarn.social/#self-host) – It really doesn’t get much simpler than this 🤣

Again, I like this existing simplicity. (I would even argue you don’t need the metadata.)

That page says “For the best experience your client should also support some of the Twtxt Extensions…” but it is clear you don’t need to. I would like it to stay that way, and publishing a big long spec and calling it “twtxt v2” feels like a departure from that. (I think the content of the document is valuable; I’m just carping about how it’s being presented.)

Official yarn.social tool: git.mills.io/yarnsocial/useragent

if twtxt 2 is dropping gemini support, i will probably move on and spend more time on my gemini social zine protocol instead. i think the direction of the protocol is probably fine, but for me web is a tier 2 publishing channel. if the choice is between gemini and http i’m always going to pick gemini. its been a fun ride, but i guess this is where i get off.

decentralization of nixos https://discourse.nixos.org/t/monorepos-dont-map-to-our-social-structure/44162/5

👋 Reminder folks of the upcoming Yarn.social monthly online meetup:

I hope to see @david@collantes.us @movq@www.uninformativ.de @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @xuu@txt.sour.is @sorenpeter@darch.dk and hopefully others too @aelaraji@aelaraji.com @falsifian@www.falsifian.org and anyone else that sees this! 🙏 We’re hopefully going to primarily discuss the future of Twtxt and the last few weeks of discussions 🤣

• Event: Yarn.social Online Meetup
  
• When: 28th September 2024 at 12:00pm UTC (midday)
  
• Where: Mills Meet : Yarn.social
  
• Cadence: 4th Saturday of every Month
  

Agenda:

• Let’s talk about the upcoming changes to the Twtxt spec(s)
  
  • See #xgghhnq
    

#Yarn.social #Meetup

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I cases of these kind of “abuse” of social trust. Then I think people should just delete their replies, unfollow the troll and leave them to shouting in the void. This is a inter-social issue, not a technical issue. Anything can be spoofed. We are not building a banking app, we are just having conversation and if trust are broken then communication breaks down. These edge-cases are all very hypothetical and not something I think we need to solve with technology.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I’d guess the same goes for all twtxt.social feeds… I can’t see bender’s archived twts either, didn’t check for the others.

@prologic@twtxt.net It’s all I’m using … I have barely touched any other social media since I’ve discovered Twtxt back in April 😂 maybe a little bit of Mastodon and IRC, bluesky even less, but nothing else worth mentioning.

@prologic@twtxt.net didn’t it already? or is it just me and my social bubble? 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net you should see This ! The devs were already trying to figure things out for TWTXT and Yarn.social 😃

On the Subject of Feed Identities; I propose the following:

1. Generate a Private/Public ED25519 key pair
   
2. Use this key pair to sign your Twtxt feed
   
3. Use it as your feed’s identity in place of # url = as # key = ...
   

For example:

$ ssh-keygen -f prologic@twtxt.net
$ ssh-keygen -Y sign -n prologic@twtxt.net -f prologic@twtxt.net twtxt.txt

And your feed would looke like:

# nick        = prologic
# key         = SHA256:23OiSfuPC4zT0lVh1Y+XKh+KjP59brhZfxFHIYZkbZs
# sig         = twtxt.txt.sig
# prev        = j6bmlgq twtxt.txt/1
# avatar      = https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/avatar#gdoicerjkh3nynyxnxawwwkearr4qllkoevtwb3req4hojx5z43q
# description = "Problems are Solved by Method" 🇦🇺👨‍💻👨‍🦯🏹♔ 🏓⚯ 👨‍👩‍👧‍👧🛥 -- James Mills (operator of twtxt.net / creator of Yarn.social 🧶)

2024-06-14T18:22:17Z	(#nef6byq) @<bender https://twtxt.net/user/bender/twtxt.txt>  Hehe thanks! 😅 Still gotta sort out some other bugs, but that's tomorrows job 🤞
...

Twt Hash extension would change of course to use a feed’s ED25519 public key fingerprint.

@prologic@twtxt.net One of your twts begins with (#st3wsda): https://twtxt.net/twt/bot5z4q

Based on the twtxt.net web UI, it seems to be in reply to a twt by @cuaxolotl@sunshinegardens.org which begins “I’ve been sketching out…”.

But jenny thinks the hash of that twt is 6mdqxrq. At least, there’s a very twt in their feed with that hash that has the same text as appears on yarn.social (except with ‘ instead of ’).

Based on this, it appears jenny and yarnd disagree about the hash of the twt, or perhaps the twt was edited (though I can’t see any difference, assuming ’ vs ’ is just a rendering choice).

@prologic@twtxt.net I guess I thought they were search engines. Anyway, the registry API looks like a decent one for searching for tweets. Could/should yarn.social pods implement the same API?

I just manually followed the steps at https://dev.twtxt.net/doc/twthashextension.html and got 6mdqxrq. I wonder what happened. Did @cuaxolo@sunshinegardens.org edit the twt in some subtle way after twtxt.net downloaded it? I couldn’t spot a diff, other than ‘ appearing as ’ on yarn.social, which I assume is a transformation done by twtxt.net.

@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 :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks, it works!

But when I tried it out on a twt from @prologic@twtxt.net, I discovered jenny and yarn.social seem to disagree about the hash of this twt: https://twtxt.net/twt/st3wsda . jenny assigned it a hash of 6mdqxrq but the URL and prologic’s reply suggest yarn.social thinks the hash is st3wsda. (And as a result, jenny –fetch-context didn’t work on prologic’s twt.)

Bluesky Adds 2 Million New Users After Brazil’s X Ban
In the days following Brazil’s shutdown of X, the decentralized social networking startup Bluesky added over 2 million new users, up from just half a million as of Friday. “This rapid growth led some users to encounter the occasional error that would state there were ‘Not Enough Resources’ to handle requests, as Bluesky engineers scrambled to keep the servers stable un … ⌘ Read more

@quark@ferengi.one Check out this thread if you haven’t already: https://mastodon.social/@sundogplanets/112464533481477428

I think we already know It’s likely to be a disaster.

👋 Hello @nigergibe@anthony.buc.ci, welcome to Buccipod, a Yarn.social Pod! To get started you may want to check out the pod’s Discover feed to find users to follow and interact with. To follow new users, use the ⨁ Follow button on their profile page or use the Follow form and enter a Twtxt URL. You may also find other feeds of interest via Feeds. Welcome! 🤗

👋 Hello @nigergibe@anthony.buc.ci, welcome to Buccipod, a Yarn.social Pod! To get started you may want to check out the pod’s Discover feed to find users to follow and interact with. To follow new users, use the ⨁ Follow button on their profile page or use the Follow form and enter a Twtxt URL. You may also find other feeds of interest via Feeds. Welcome! 🤗

@prologic@twtxt.net I think it was some mix of phish and social engineering. She didn’t have the multifactor enabled. But i think she had clicked a message that had a fake login. She talked to someone on a phone and they made her do some things.

I never got the whole story of how it happened.