@prologic@twtxt.net Hm, same startup delay. (Go is not an option for me anyway.)

It’s hard to tell why all this is so slow. Maybe in this particular case it has something to do with fonts: strace shows the program loading the fontconfig configs several times, and that takes up a bulk of the startup time. 🤔 (Qt6 or Java don’t do that, but they’re still slow to start up – for other reasons, apparently.)

To be fair, it’s “just” the initial program startup (with warm I/O caches). Once it’s running, it’s fine. All toolkits I’ve tried are. But I don’t want to accept such delays, not in the year 2025. 😅 Imagine every terminal window needing half a second to appear on the screen … nah, man.

I like to read through old RPG books and zines for inspiration for my games, and lately I’ve been enjoying the Arduin Grimoire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduin), one of the earliest 3rd-party zines (coming out during the initial run of OD&D). It’s filled with a bunch of unique ideas (some better than others), entirely too many charts, and is very much a product of its time, but there’s something about its “raw”-ness (and its variety) that I still find appealing.

Be it Java with Swing or PyQt6, it takes ~300 ms until a basic window with a treeview and a listbox appears. That is a very noticeable delay.

Is it unrealistic to expect faster startup times these days? 🤔

Once the program is running, a new second window (in the same process) appears very quickly. So it’s all just the initialization stuff that takes so long. I could, of course, do what “fat” programs have done for ages: Pre-launch the process during boot, windowless. But I was hoping that this wasn’t needed. 😞 (And it’s a bad model anyway. When the main process crashes, all windows crash with it.)

@bender@twtxt.net Haha 😆

GtS is easier than running Yarn, by the way. Word

This is total bullshit 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net no, I really meant small. I only have a handful of GiBs left of storage. If you can wait until mid-December, then no probleml. Right now it is kind of running on fumes. For testing, and to do not disturb anyone timelines, I recommend you run a small test instance. Running GtS is easier than running Yarn, by the way. Word.

@bender@twtxt.net You don’t run one anymore do you? 🤔

Anyone run a Mastodon serve rI can have an account on to help test the Twtxt <-> Activity Pub bridge? 🙏

I wound up running 2 out of 3 of the one-shots, both Halloween games based on Ravenloft / Curse of Strahd, and both rousing successes (for the players, not so much for Strahd).

Since I’m on something of a gaming kick, I think I’m going to try and finish plotting out the rest of the fae adventure I’m running for my kids, while also (hopefully) finishing my super secret astral gaming project.

Can I do it? Stay tuned and find out!

I used to run office hours at Google and the number of people who came into my office absolutely convinced that there was no way to search a dataset without having the entire thing in memory for every process was too damn high.

Done ✅ Will be available on this pod as soon as the publish workflow finished successfully.

@bender@twtxt.net No plus-aliases, just aliases. The mailserver runs on my OpenBSB box and is managed using BundleWrap (we use that at work), so to create a new alias, I push a new BundleWrap config to the server.

Thank you for the encouragement and love and kind words, @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @movq@www.uninformativ.de @bender@twtxt.net @doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt and others along the way I’m not sure of their feed uris 💕 I’ll keep at it, but for the time being I will keep my distance, mostly off IRC, because I don’t have the energy to spare in that kind of engagement (what//if the worst happens, it’s so draining). I need to remember what I ever did any of this for, it was back in ~2020 and I wanted really to build small interconnected communities that any non “tech savvy” person (more or less) could also benefit from ane enjoy. Even if there are aspects of the specs we’ve built/extended over time that aren’t “perfect”™, they’re “good enough”™ that they’ve last 5+ years (I believe this is 6 years running now). I want to spend a bit of time going back to why I did any of this in the the first place, and get a little micro-SaaS offering going (barely covering running costs) so encourage more folks to run pods, and thus twtxt feeds and grow the community ever so slightly. Other than that, I plan to get the specs “in order” to a point (with @movq@www.uninformativ.de and @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org’s help) where I hope they’ll stand the test of time – like SMTP.

Thank you all ! 🙏

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It’s possible to run the validator locally (my blog generator scripts do that):

https://validator.w3.org/nu/about.html

That way you don’t forget. 🥳

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club What version are you running btw? It’s probably time you upgraded and time I released a new version finally 😂 If you’re running a version that’s pre-SQLite-cache, then yeah I’m not surprised. The SQLite cache version is honestly much better 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net never heard of it before. I wouldn’t call lightweight to anything that needs Docker to run, though. 😅

What is this about? I don’t run my Gopher proxy anymore 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Uh, that actually looks not that terrible. Somehow, I remember Swing GUIs being way uglier.

As for Visual Basic, I only had to use VBA once in my life. That was in the beginning of my career when I inherited a project from a leaving coworker. Fuck me, was that awful. Just alone the damn compiler error dialog box popping up in my face all the time while editing and the compiler already trying to parse the unfinished and hence of course uncompilable code. Boy, that left a lasting impression on me. I ported everything to Java very quickly. Luckily, the code base wasn’t all that large at that point in time. I had to add a bunch of new features after that, so I was very glad that I convinced my workmate/project manager to do that first. We didn’t even need a GUI, the button in Excel was transformed to a command line program that just generated the large file.

But I cannot comment on the VB GUI designer, I never used that. Your screenshot looks very similar to the Delphi one, though. Only towards the end of my Delphi days I found out about the possibility to make the widgets snap to window edges and corners (I don’t remember how that was called), so that resizing the windows was actually possible without messing up their entire contents.

Switching to Linux, Delphi wasn’t an option anymore. For some reason I couldn’t use Kylix. Maybe it was already dead by the time I changed OSes. Or I couldn’t get it to run. I just don’t remember. I just recall that the unavailability of Delphi was the reason it took me a while to actually settle on Linux. I then fully switched to Java. The GridBagLayout was my absolutely favorite Swing layout manager. I reckon I used it 98% of the time, because it was so powerful and made the windows resize properly, just as I had learned to do in Delphi shortly before.

Up until discovering Swing, I used Java’s AWT for a short amount of time. That was very limited I think and I hit the limits fairly quickly. Later at uni, we had one project making use of SWT. Didn’t convince me either. I could be wrong, but I think there was also a SWT GUI designer plugin for Eclipse. If there really was, that one wasn’t in the same street as Delphi’s (there must be a reason I forgot about it ;-)).

Because OP twtxt seems to be a cross-post from the Fediverse, I am bringing some context here. It refers to this GitHub issue. This comment explains why the issue described is happening:

This is usually due to notarization checks. E.g. the binaries are checked by the notarization service (‘XProtect’) which phones home to Apple. Depending on your network environment, this can take a long time. Once the executable has been run the results are usually cached, so any subsequent startup should be fast.

OP network must be running on 1,200 Baud modem, or less. 🤭 I have never, ever, experienced any distinguishable delays.

@bender@twtxt.net is macOS 26 running smoothly? I’ve heard some issues with memory for the first release (docker related IIRC)

The most infuriating 3 seconds of using this Mac every day are the first time I run man and it calls home to see if I’m allowed to do that.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Hm, that might actually be (partially) true. Some external CD drives (without such a weight) start to spin/wiggle when the drive spins up and down … Although I guess that’s not really the case for Audio CDs as they are run at a fixed low RPM value, I think. 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah. The actual services don’t run on AWS, apparently, but often it’s just the login service?! The whole Atlassian suite was “down” today because you couldn’t log in. But if you already were logged in, it wasn’t much a problem.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Too many things˚ running on AWS eh?

@dce@hashnix.club Arch is the most stress-free OS I’ve ever run (I last reinstalled it 14 years ago, only rolling updates since then) – but to be honest, I sometimes wonder what role my general choice of software plays. I mostly run minimalistic software or programs that I wrote myself. I guess that greatly reduces the chance of breakage. 🤔

After taking most of the year off from role-playing, I’ve got 3 one-shots coming up in the next month, all of which need some tweaking before I can run them (as do my homebrew rules).

Plus there’s a “build a game” code challenge at work, a pair of media boxes I need to rebuild, a pair of dead machines I need to diagnose, and I’d like to (eventually) get my twtxt apps to a “releasable” state.

So many projects, so little (free) time…

🤔 💭 🧐 What if, What if we built our own self-hosted / small-web / community-built/run Internet on top of the Internet using Wireguard as the underlying tech? What if we ran our own Root DNS servers? What if we set a zero tolerance policy on bots, spammers and other kind of abuse that should never have existed in the first place. Hmmmm

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s satisfying. :-) Not all my clocks are radio-controlled, though.

I’ve got a digital alarm clock from the Netherlands (no idea where I got this) and it always runs an hour late. No clue. I put it on a shelf in the workshop where it causes the least amount of confusion.

My open letter, to the European Commission digital markets act team:

Hello,

I am joining other developers, concerned about Googles new plan, to approve every app and effectively destroy most of the competing 3rd party stores this way. The biggest one of these alternative stores, most known for their focus on user and developer privacy, already states, this would make it impossible for them to operate: https://f-droid.org/cs/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html
Even communities like the XDA forum, where new developers are often introduced to the world of Android development, would likely be strongly impacted, as making, publishing and installing Android apps is made less accessible.

I am not just writing on their behalf, I run a small website myself (https://thecanine.ueuo.com/), that both provides legal modifications, for some android apps - for example adding an amoled dark theme, to the most popular XMPP chat client for Android, or increasing one of Androids keyboard apps height. This all comes after Googles previous changes to the Android operating system, that prevent users from installing old apps (old to Google, can mean only a couple of months, without an update - https://developer.android.com/google/play/requirements/target-sdk and the target version gets increased every year). I rely on apps developed by a single developer, even for things like making the pixel art presented on my website and sideloading as a way to make these apps work, before developers can catch up to Google’s new requirements - if Google is allowed to slowly kill these options, us digital artists will soon lose the tools we need to create digital art.

Thank you, @alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it! It’s not sealed at all. If you were pouring in a liquid, it would run out on all four corners. It’s just folded over and carefully hammered shut as best as possible. 03 is a bit blurred, but you can see the tab from the right (the short side) tucking in on the left (the long side). The hem on top clamps it in place fairly decently.

I decided against blind rivets, because they leave ugly looking and sharp backsides, which can also interfer with the contents of the box. However, they would be an easy solution to make the corners more rigid and prevent any movement from the short sides.

Unfortunately, I can’t weld or solder, so that’s not an option. It would be the by far best solution. I wanna learn it one day, though.

Yes, Ken is a really great dude. He’s the reason I gave this a shot in the first place. :-)

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Hi everyone, here’s a little introduction of my twtxt client (still WIP).

The client I’m developing is a single tenant project that runs entirely in the browser (it might use an optional backend).

It’s entirely based on native web-components and vanilla JS, it is designed to act closer to a toolkit than a full-fledged client, allowing users to “DIY” their own interface with pure html or plain javascript functions.

Users can also build their own engines by including a global javascript object that implement the defined internal API (TBD).

I’m planning to build a system that is easy enough to build and use with any skill level, using only pure html (with a homebrew minimal template engine) or via plain JS (I’ll be also providing some pre-made templates too).

Everything can be self-hosted on any static hosting provider, this allows to spread twtxt within communities like Neocities and similarly hosted websites (basically any Indieweb/Smallweb/Digital garden website and any of the common GitHub/Lab/Berg/lify Pages).

It will be probably named something like TxtCraft or craf.txt but I’m not really sure yet… 🤔 (Maybe some suggestions could help)

I’m still in the experimental phase, so there’s no decent source-code to share yet, but it will soon enough!

@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!

While working on the Discoverability for my twtxt client (it runs client-side) I found out that Chrome doesn’t allow to set a custom user agent. 🙃

I thought it was a general thing for browsers, but it that was actually allowed in a newer specification, yet it’s still not implemented in Chrome, it does work in Firefox though.

ok so i have found a genuine twt hash collision. what do i do.

internally, bbycll relies on a post lookup table with post hashes as keys, this is really fast but i knew i’d inevitably run into this issue (just not so soon) so now i have to either:
  1) pick the newer post over the other
  2) break from specification and not lowercase hashes
  3) secretly associate canonical urls or additional entropy with post hashes in the backend without a sizeable performance impact somehow

@thecanine@twtxt.net Yeah, what @bender@twtxt.net said. That tail is sick. Is this dog crying, though? The vertically elongated eye looks a bit like a tear running down.

@zvava@twtxt.net I am getting [2025/09/11 12:56:01.816] ⇒ please set config.host when trying to run “bbycll”. How to bypass that tiny hurdle?

i wish the mug didn’t run out of coffee

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’m looking for an OS that runs better than Windows (🤮) and through which I can do basic stuff like read RSS feeds and browse geminispace; but which I can also learn from.

I have a late-2010s ThinkPad running OpenBSD, but it’s about as fast as a snail carrying heavy shopping through molasses. I’d like to run something other than Linux, for variety, but the other members of the BSD family failed for various reasons. What OS do you guys think I should try?

I had some trouble with my nginx reverse proxy, but after much tweaking and fiddling, I now have the prototype version of my node-based twtxt editor up and running on my site! 😎 #twtgoals

I had some trouble with my nginx reverse proxy, but after much tweaking and fiddling, I now have the prototype version of my node-based twtxt editor up and running on my site! 😎 #twtgoals

@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.

I’ve got a prototype of my hardcopy simulator going. I’m typing on the keyboard and the “display” goes to the printer:

https://movq.de/v/56feb53912/s.png

https://movq.de/v/235c1eabac/MVI_8810.MOV.mp4

The biiiiiiiiiig problem is that the print head and plastic cover make it impossible to see what’s currently being printed, because this is not a typewriter. This means: In order to see what I just entered, I have to feed the paper back and forth and back and forth … it’s not ideal.

I got that idea of moving back/forth from Drew DeVault, who – as it turned out – did something similar a few years back. (I tried hard to read as little as possible of his blog post, because figuring things out myself is more fun. But that could mean I missed a great idea here or there.)

But hey, at least this is running on my Pentium 133 on SuSE Linux 6.4, printer connected with a parallel cable. 😍

(Also, yes, you can see the printouts of earlier tests and, yes, I used ed(1) wrong at one point. 🤪 And ls insisted on using colors …)

@bender@twtxt.net That is a noble goal. We can talk about that – as long as it doesn’t mean giving up essential freedoms like choosing which software you can run on your device (without having to ask someone for permission).

@dce@hashnix.club twtxt is quite light, and trouble-free. Welcome! I also run an ActivityPub server, but yeah, more often around here than there.

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com Also just a heads up, GIF(s) aren’t supproted as an Avatar type on yarnd (what runs twtxt.net). I’d change this to something that’s more supproted like PNG, JPEG, etc.

Distrobox is pretty handy and kind of amazed I haven’t played with it before now. I wanted to quickly try out Proton’s Authenticator they just released, but they only had binaries for Ubuntu and Fedora (naturally), but I’m on Void Linux on this laptop.

Installed the latest basic Fedora image with Distrobox, used dnf to install the downloaded rpm file within it, and presto, running the app within Void like I’d just downloaded it though the normal repos.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz On the one hand, all these programs have a very long history and the technology behind manpages is actually very powerful – you can use it to write books:

https://www.troff.org/pubs.html

I have two books from that list, for example “The UNIX programming environment”:

https://movq.de/v/c3dab75c97/upe.jpg

It’s a bit older, of course, but it looks and feels like a normal book, and it uses the same tech as manpages – which I think is really cool. 😎

It’s comparable to LaTeX (just harder/different to use) but much faster than LaTeX. You can also do stuff like render manpages as a PDF (man -Tpdf cp >cp.pdf) or as an HTML file (man -Thtml cp >cp.html). I think I once made slides for a talk this way.

On the other hand, traditional manpages (i.e., ones that are not written in mandoc) do not use semantic markup. They literally say, “this text is bold, that text over here is italics”, and so on.

So when you run man foo, it has no other choice but to show it in black, white, bold, underline – showing it in color would be wrong, because that’s not what the source code of that manpage says.

Colorizing them is a hack, to be honest. You’re not meant to do this. (The devs actually broke this by accident recently. They themselves aren’t really aware that people use colors.)

If mandoc and semantic markup was more commonly used, I think it would be easier to convince the devs to add proper customizable colors.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz @movq@www.uninformativ.de Sorry, I neither finished it nor in time. :-( That’s as good as it’s gonna get for the moment: https://git.isobeef.org/lyse/gelbariab/-/tree/master/rss-proxys?ref_type=heads

The README should hopefully provide a crude introduction. The example configuration file is documented fairly well, I believe (but maybe not). You probably still have to consult and maybe also modify the source code to fit your needs.

Let me know if you run into issues, have questions, wishes etc.