OpenBSD has the wonderful pledge() and unveil() syscalls:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXO6nelFt-E

Not only are they super useful (the program itself can drop privileges – like, it can initialize itself, read some files, whatever, and then tell the kernel that it will never do anything like that again; if it does, e.g. by being exploited through a bug, it gets killed by the kernel), but they are also extremely easy to use.

Imagine a server program with a connected socket in file descriptor 0. Before reading any data from the client, the program can do this:

unveil("/var/www/whatever", "r");
unveil(NULL, NULL);
pledge("stdio rpath", NULL);

Done. It’s now limited to reading files from that directory, communicating with the existing socket, stuff like that. But it cannot ever read any other files or exec() into something else.

I can’t wait for the day when we have something like this on Linux. There have been some attempts, but it’s not that easy. And it’s certainly not mainstream, yet.

I need to have a closer look at Linux’s Landlock soon (“soon”), but this is considerably more complicated than pledge()/unveil():

https://landlock.io/

@bender@twtxt.net Yeah, well, it’s a bit like twtxt. There is a Gopher community, but it’s small. I actually don’t like that HTTP is so easily accessible. I don’t like it that much when people post links to my site on HackerNews or something like that. Too much exposure.

Gopher is a small world. It’s slow and cozy.

And much like twtxt, the protocol is simple®, so it’s easier to tinker with it.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de oh, you bet someone is adding them. Being as we are a small community, I could almost guess who added what. 😅

feel good today, see all the bros in the matrix room. so nice to have a community

One of the nicest things about Go is the language itself, comparing Go to other popular languages in terms of the complexity to learn to be proficient in:

• Go: 25 keywords (Stack Overflow); CSP-style concurrency (goroutines & channels)
  
• Python 2: 30 keywords (TutorialsPoint); GIL-bound threads & multiprocessing (Wikipedia)
  
• Python 3: 35 keywords (Initial Commit); GIL-bound threads, asyncio & multiprocessing (Wikipedia, DEV Community)
  
• Java: 50 keywords (Stack Overflow); threads + java.util.concurrent (Wikipedia)
  
• C++: 82 keywords (Stack Overflow); std::thread, atomics & futures (en.cppreference.com)
  
• JavaScript: 38 keywords (Stack Overflow); single-threaded event loop & async/await, Web Workers (Wikipedia)
  
• Ruby: 42 keywords (Stack Overflow); GIL-bound threads (MRI), fibers & processes (Wikipedia)
  

My vision with this newsletter is to have a slower medium for communicating about my art as well as ideas and projects I’m working on regarding how we can use digital technology to our own benefits instead of being exploited by big tech.

Twtxt not sloe enough for you? 🤣

@thecanine@twtxt.net I admit I’m a little unclear of your position. What do you mean by “not the right approach”? What’s your position here? 🤔 – I have a funny feeling we actually algin, just getting our wires all mixed up in communicating it 🤣

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oooooohhhhhh, I see. Hmmmm.

To answer your question: Ideally, you would have replied directly to my reply. :-) The flat conversation model always felt unnatural to me. I just yielded to the community’s way of doing it.

I’ve just released version 1.0 of twtxt.el (the Emacs client), the stable and final version with the current extensions. I’ll let the community maintain it, if there are interested in using it. I will also be open to fix small bugs.
I don’t know if this twt is a goodbye or a see you later. Maybe I will never come back, or maybe I will post a new twt this afternoon. But it’s always important to be grateful. Thanks to @prologic@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de @eapl.me@eapl.me @bender@twtxt.net @aelaraji@aelaraji.com @arne@uplegger.eu @david@collantes.us @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt @xuu@txt.sour.is @sorenpeter@darch.dk for everything you have taught me. I’ve learned a lot about #twtxt, HTTP and working in community. It has been a fantastic adventure!
What will become of me? I have created a twtxt fork called Texudus (https://texudus.readthedocs.io/). I want to continue learning on my own without the legacy limitations or technologies that implement twtxt. It’s not a replacement for any technology, it’s just my own little lab. I have also made a fork of my own client and will be focusing on it for a while. I don’t expect anyone to use it, but feedback is always welcome.
Best regards to everyone.
#twtxt #emacs #twtxt-el #texudus

that said, and reading to @sorenpeter@darch.dk and @andros@twtxt.andros.dev I have new thoughts. I assume that this won’t change anyone’s opinions or priorities, so it makes no harm sharing them.

It’s always tempting to use something that already exists (like X, Masto, Bsky, etc.) rather that building anything through effort and disagreement until reaching to something useful and valuable together. A ‘social service’ is only useful if people is using it.

I’ll add that I haven’t lost interest on the ‘hacky’ part of twtxt about developing tools, protocols, and extensions as a community. It’s the appealing part! It’s a nice hobby to have, shared with random people across the world.
But this is not the right way for me, and makes me feel that I’m unwelcome to propose something different (after watching replies to my previous twt). Feels like “If you don’t agree, you are free to leave, we’ll miss you.” Naah, not cool. I’ve lived that many times before, and nowadays I don’t have enough spare time and energy for a hobby like that.

Let’s see what happens next with the micro-community!

just for the record I didn’t say I was leaving the twtxt ‘community’ (did I?) but than I have other priorities to focus on in the following months. Please don’t be condescending, is not cool.

Development of Timeline (PHP client) has been stale for some reasons, a few of them in my side, so I think it won’t be updated to the new thread model, at least pretty soon.
So is not that I’ll stop using twtxt, just the client I use won’t be compatible with the new model in July.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m very sorry but my feelings are similar to @eapl.me@eapl.me . For a long time I thought that Yarn was part of the Twtxt ecosystem, and not that Twtxt is an extension of Yarn. I don’t feel comfortable with what has happened. I didn’t expect this change of direction.
The nice part of Twtxt is that it is read by humans, with a simpler format. It’s the heart of the social network.
I need to think for a little time, but I’m thinking of stopping my involvement in the community.

@eapl.me@eapl.me I honestly believe you are overreacting here a little bit 🤣 I completely emphasize with you, it can be pretty tough to feel part of a community at times and run a project with a kind of “democracy” or “vote by committee”. But one thing that life has taught me about open source projects and especially decentralised ecosystems is that this doesn’t really work.

It isn’t that I’ve not considered all the other options on the table (which can still be), it’s just that I’ve made a decision as the project lead that largely helped trigger a rebirth of the use of Twtxt back in July 1 2020. There are good reasons not to change the threading model right now, as the changes being proposed are quite disruptive and don’t consider all the possible things that could go wrong.

Firefox tab groups are here
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@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Also, I see what you did there in regards to the reply model change poll. ]:->

The community is heavily divided in this regard, and yet we need consensous. We’re like the three Borg in VOY: Survival Instinct. 🥴

@prologic@twtxt.net if not that, what else? Communism? Is there, really, such thing? 🤣

@javivf@adn.org.es Go for it! You’re free to use it.
It’s been a community adventure to explore the whole DM/encryption thing. So the community can do with it whatever they want. 😎

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So far in 2025, I’ve had the privilege of peer-reviewing for these great journals: * Philosophia - A Global Journal of Philosophy, * American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. Grateful to contribute to the academic community! #Philosophy #PeerReview

Je vais tenter la version community de /e/OS pour avoir la version 13 d’android. Je sui bloqué pour quelques trucs sinon, c’est trop bête, j’ai pas envie de racheter un téléphone #ecologie

A tour inside the IBM z17
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by commenting out DMs are you giving up on simplicity? See the Metadata extension holding the data inside comments, as the client doesn’t need to show it inside the timeline.

I don’t think that commenting out DMs as we are doing for metadata is giving up on simplicity (it’s a feature already), and it helps to hide unwanted DMs to clients that will take months to add it’s support to something named… an extension.

For some other extensions in https://twtxt.dev/extensions.html (for example the reply-to hash #abcdfeg or the mention @ < example http://example.org/twtxt.txt >) is not a big deal. The twt is still understandable in plain text.
For DM, it’s only interesting for you if you are the recipient, otherwise you see an scrambled message like 1234567890abcdef=. Even if you see it, you’ll need some decryption to read it. I’ve said before that DMs shouldn’t be in the same section that the timeline as it’s confusing.

So my point stands, and as I’ve said before, we are discussing it as a community, so let’s see what other maintainers add to the convo.

@bender@twtxt.net The DM specification has been updated from time to time in response to advice from the community. For me, It is a successful!
The adoption is another topic 😂
(I am working on my side)

@bender@twtxt.net I use it. It’s not the feature I use the most in the fediverse, but I communicate this way with several friends. For example, it’s the main way I talk to the original creator of the twtxt-el repository, the way people greet me for the first time or the way they notify me of some bugs in the software I maintain. I can even tell you that it’s the main way I talk to some maintainers of the Emacs community. If there are any of you reading my words, speak up!
Why not have the same? There are things I want to say to @prologic@twtxt.net in private, why should I have to send him an email or private IRC? Or an public twt.
Of course, here’s a topic we’ve already talked about: what is twtxt for you? For me it will always be a social network, in microblogging format, but an asynchronous way of communicating. And having a tool to control visibility is basic 😄
I look forward to hearing from you @eapl.me@eapl.me !

4Chan was hacked and has been down for 4 days
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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

As ‘Bot’ Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond
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Spotify Down
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@javivf@adn.org.es Generally speaking if it has been reviewed, discussed and merged, then we accept it as a standard to the set of specs we support. However we might want to document this process and set some guidelines about this to be clear 🤣 We’ve been fairly lax/lose here and I think that’s okay given teh size of our community 👌

my main itch with the DMs extensions is that these messages are intended to be private, not public information. That’s why other extensions make sense, but DMs are another kind of feature.
TwiXter, Mastodon, FB and some other services usually hide the DMs in another section, so they are not mixed with the public timeline.

I find the DM topic interesting, I even made an indie experiment for a centralized messaging system here https://github.com/eapl-gemugami/owl.
Although, as I’ve said a few times here, I’m not particularly interested in supporting it on microblogging, as I don’t use it that much. In the rare case I’ve used them, I don’t have to manage public and private keys, and finally none of my acquaintances use encrypted email.
Nothing personal against anyone, and although I like to debate and even fight, it’s not the case here. This proposal is the only one allowing DMs on twtxt, and if the community wants it, I’ll support it, with my personal input, of course.

A good approach I could find with a good compromise between compatibility with current clients and keeping these messages private is ‘hiding’ the DMs in comments. For example:
# 2025-04-13T11:02:12+02:00 !<dm-echo https://dm-echo.andros.dev/twtxt.txt> U2FsdGVkX1+QmwBNmk9Yu9jvazVRFPS2TGJRGle/BDDzFult6zCtxNhJrV0g+sx0EIKbjL2a9QpCT5C0Z2qWvw==

I think I would encourage anyone in this community is to care less about supporting “legacy clients” and focus more on value-add whilst balancing the burden of client authors – which have very precious little “spare time” 🤣

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev I don’t see any “fighting” here. This is just good experimentation. Unfortunately there hasn’t really been enough time or effort by other “client authors” yet, me especially as I’ve been super busy with ya’ know my “day job” that pays the bills and refactoring yarnd to use a new and shiny and much better SqliteCache 🤣 – I certainly don’t think your efforts are wasted at all. I would however like @doesnm.p.psf.lt@doesnm.p.psf.lt encourage you to look at the work we’ve done as a community (which was also driven out of the Yarn.social / Twtxt community years back).

@prologic@twtxt.net @bender@twtxt.net @eapl.me@eapl.me I think opening another file is a bad idea because it adds complexity to the clients, breaks the single feed and I think keeping legacy clients will be more complex to add new features in the future. A modern approach is important.
I’ll be honest, I’m a bit tired of the fight around the direct message. Perhaps, we can remove it as an extension and use the alternative @prologic@twtxt.net . My suggestion apparently doesn’t like to the community. I have no problem with remove it.

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A2A Protocol – Agent-to-Agent Communication
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@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz it will if we continue to support the community on the ecosystem 🤣

Mike Waltz Used Personal Gmail for Government Communications: Report
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The Average College Student Is Illiterate
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thanks @prologic!
@bender the idea of the RFC was to reach an agreement on a difficult problem, receiving proposals, and the voting is a simple count to gauge the sentiment of “is this a problem worth to be fixed?, are we committed to implement a change in our clients?”

But that’s a fair point. What do the community expect? What do y’all expect?

For anyone following the proposals to improve replies and threads in twtxt, the voting period has started and will be open for a week.
https://eapl.me/rfc0001/

Please share the link with the twtxt community, and leave your vote on your preferred proposals, which will be used to gauge the perceived benefits.

Also, the conversation is open to discuss implementation concerns or anything aimed at making twtxt better.

well, I assume by syntax you mean Gemtext (which I like a lot, my personal blog is built on top of it), so I think it might work for twtxt clients…

I knew of twtxt in Gemini Antenna, so at least the 2017 spec might work on that protocol. I think the main issue with extensions is that they weren’t designed with many URLs and protocols in mind.

Also I have to admit that the Gemini community significantly reduced in the last few years. I don’t know how worth it is to add support for Gemini now.

well… it has been an opportunity to build an artisanal microblogging client on top of a minimalist protocol. I agree on the hacker toy part.

And of course it’s about being part of a niche community which is (mostly) amazing, and nurturing. As there is almost no one writing in my native spanish, it has been an interesting challenge to share my thoughts in english, as well.

I couldn’t say it’s a ‘social network’ per se, I think it lack many engagement things usually associated with social networks, although it has a social part of igniting discussions, learnings and behavioral changes, which is the meaning of social for me.

What is twtxt for me? It is a community of users sharing plain text following a specification that can be readable by both humans and machines.

For some it is a microblogging platform, for others it is a social network, others see it as an enhanced RSS feed and a few consider it a hacker’s toy. I use it as a learning platform. And as collateral damage, I’m meeting some very interesting people.

And for you?

What does the #twtxt community think about having a p2p database to store all history? This will be managed by Registries.

@prologic@twtxt.net oops, I’m sorry to see disagreement leading to draining emotions.

It remind me a bit of the Conclave movie where every part wanted to defend their vision and there is only a winner. If one wins the other loses. Like the political side of many leaders and volunteers representing a broad community. I don’t think that’s the case here. Most of us (in not all) should ‘win’.

I can only add that isn’t nice to listen that ‘my idea and effort’ is not what the rest of the people expect. I personally have a kind of issue with public rejection, but I also like to argue, discuss and even fight a bit. “A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials,” they say.
This exercise and belonging to this community also brings me good feelings of smart people trying to solve a human and technical problem, which is insanely difficult to get ‘right’.

I genuinely hope we can understand each other, and even with our different and respectful thoughts on the same thing, we might reach an agreement on what’s the best for most people.

Good vibes to everyone!

One of the biggest gripes of the community with the way the threading model currently works with Twtxt v1.2 (https://twtxt.dev) is this notion of:

What is this hash?
What does it refer to?

Idea: Why can’t we all agree to implement a simple URI scheme where we host our Twtxt feeds?

That is, if you host your feed at https://example.com/twtxt.txt – Why can’t or could you not also host various JSON files (let’s agree on the spec of course) at https://example.com/twt/<hash> ? 🤔

That way we solve this problem in a truly decentralised way, rather than every relying on yarnd pods alone.

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True. Though if the idea turns out to be better.. then community will adopt it.

if you look at the subject for that twt you will see that it uses the extended hash format to include a URL address.

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev I’ve commented on the ticket: https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/twtxt.dev/issues/14#issuecomment-19142

In all reality, though, I don’t see that our community will come to an agreement. Some folks just don’t want to give up on the content-based addressing scheme.