I’m not writing on ‘twtxt’ as much as I did in 2021-2022. While it has many advantages, I couldn’t get my close circle to join.

As part of my focus on digital minimalism, I aim to only use services that bring joy, value, and spark interesting conversations within the community.
That’s why I’m considering suspending my twtxt, switching to microblog on other platforms.

If anything of what I’ve written is interesting for you, or want to chat, you can find me on various platforms here:
https://text.eapl.mx/microblogging

#fzf is the new emacs: a tool with a simple purpose that has evolved to include an #email client. https://sr.ht/~rakoo/omail/

I’m being a little silly, of course. fzf doesn’t actually check your email, but it appears to be basically the whole user interface for that mail program, with #mblaze wrangling the emails.

I’ve been thinking about how I handle my email, and am tempted to make something similar. (When I originally saw this linked the author was presenting it as an example tweaked to their own needs, encouraging people to make their own.)

This approach could surely also be combined with #jenny, taking the place of (neo)mutt. For example mblaze’s mthread tool presents a threaded discussion with indentation.

LMAO 🤣 … I’ve been scrolling through mutt(1) man page and found this:

BUGS

  None.  Mutts have fleas, not bugs.

What gossip, gopherspace?!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’d suggest making the whole content-type thing a SHOULD, to accommodate people just using some hosting service they don’t have much control over. (The same situation could make detecting followers hard, but IMO “please email me if you follow me” is still legit twtxt, even if inconvenient.)

@prologic@twtxt.net Thanks for writing that up!

I hope it can remain a living document (or sequence of draft revisions) for a good long time while we figure out how this stuff works in practice.

I am not sure how I feel about all this being done at once, vs. letting conventions arise.

For example, even today I could reply to twt abc1234 with “(#abc1234) Edit: …” and I think all you humans would understand it as an edit to (#abc1234). Maybe eventually it would become a common enough convention that clients would start to support it explicitly.

Similarly we could just start using 11-digit hashes. We should iron out whether it’s sha256 or whatever but there’s no need get all the other stuff right at the same time.

I have similar thoughts about how some users could try out location-based replies in a backward-compatible way (append the replyto: stuff after the legacy (#hash) style).

However I recognize that I’m not the one implementing this stuff, and it’s less work to just have everything determined up front.

Misc comments (I haven’t read the whole thing):

• Did you mean to make hashes hexadecimal? You lose 11 bits that way compared to base32. I’d suggest gaining 11 bits with base64 instead.

• “Clients MUST preserve the original hash” — do you mean they MUST preserve the original twt?

• Thanks for phrasing the bit about deletions so neutrally.

• I don’t like the MUST in “Clients MUST follow the chain of reply-to references…”. If someone writes a client as a 40-line shell script that requires the user to piece together the threading themselves, IMO we shouldn’t declare the client non-conforming just because they didn’t get to all the bells and whistles.

• Similarly I don’t like the MUST for user agents. For one thing, you might want to fetch a feed without revealing your identty. Also, it raises the bar for a minimal implementation (I’m again thinking again of the 40-line shell script).

• For “who follows” lists: why must the long, random tokens be only valid for a limited time? Do you have a scenario in mind where they could leak?

• Why can’t feeds be served over HTTP/1.0? Again, thinking about simple software. I recently tried implementing HTTP/1.1 and it wasn’t too bad, but 1.0 would have been slightly simpler.

• Why get into the nitty-gritty about caching headers? This seems like generic advice for HTTP servers and clients.

• I’m a little sad about other protocols being not recommended.

• I don’t know how I feel about including markdown. I don’t mind too much that yarn users emit twts full of markdown, but I’m more of a plain text kind of person. Also it adds to the length. I wonder if putting a separate document would make more sense; that would also help with the length.

Hello!

@bender@twtxt.net Just desktop notifications at the moment, but you could easily throw in a Ntfy server and get notified about anything you want, wherever you want. 🤣

@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.

I have just made yet another convoluted twtxt notifications script! Feeling like an old dog learning new tricks! 🤣

Image

@prologic@twtxt.net You’ve done extremely well for ~$125/month, but that’s not figuring in labor. I’m sure you’ve put a lot of hours into maintenance in the last 10 years.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @falsifian@www.falsifian.org @prologic@twtxt.net Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about and You’ve probably already read this: Everything you need to know about the “Right to be forgotten” coming straight out of the EU’s GDPR Website itself. It outlines the specific circumstances under which the right to be forgotten applies as well as reasons that trump the one’s right to erasure …etc.

I’m no lawyer, but my uneducated guess would be that:

A) twts are already publicly available/public knowledge and such… just don’t process children’s personal data and MAYBE you’re good? Since there’s this:

… an organization’s right to process someone’s data might override their right to be forgotten. Here are the reasons cited in the GDPR that trump the right to erasure:

• The data is being used to exercise the right of freedom of expression and information.
  
• The data is being used to perform a task that is being carried out in the public interest or when exercising an organization’s official authority.
  
• The data represents important information that serves the public interest, scientific research, historical research, or statistical purposes and where erasure of the data would likely to impair or halt progress towards the achievement that was the goal of the processing.
  

B) What I love about the TWTXT sphere is it’s Human/Humane element! No deceptive algorithms, no Corpo B.S …etc. Just Humans. So maybe … If we thought about it in this way, it wouldn’t heart to be even nicer to others/offering strangers an even safer space.
I could already imagine a couple of extreme cases where, somewhere, in this peaceful world one’s exercise of freedom of speech could get them in Real trouble (if not danger) if found out, it wouldn’t necessarily have to involve something to do with Law or legal authorities. So, If someone asks, and maybe fearing fearing for… let’s just say ‘Their well being’, would it heart if a pod just purged their content if it’s serving it publicly (maybe relay the info to other pods) and call it a day? It doesn’t have to be about some law/convention somewhere … 🤷 I know! Too extreme, but I’ve seen news of people who’d gone to jail or got their lives ruined for as little as a silly joke. And it doesn’t even have to be about any of this.

P.S: Maybe make X tool check out robots.txt? Or maybe make long-term archives Opt-in? Opt-out?
P.P.S: Already Way too many MAYBE’s in a single twt! So I’ll just shut up. 😅

I like Gopher!

Heads up, @prologic@twtxt.net! We’re seeing increased spate of burglaries in your neighbourhood. Please stay alert, while we keep you safe out there.

Have a nice weekend everyone

And they have arrived (well, they did around 3 hours ago, LOL). Buttery smooth, my 16 Pro (one with dark cover). It took a bit over an hour to transfer all my data.

Image

@david@collantes.us Thanks, that’s good feedback to have. I wonder to what extent this already exists in registry servers and yarn pods. I haven’t really tried digging into the past in either one.

How interested would you be in changes in metadata and other comments in the feeds? I’m thinking of just permanently saving every version of each twtxt file that gets pulled, not just the twts. It wouldn’t be hard to do (though presenting the information in a sensible way is another matter). Compression should make storage a non-issue unless someone does something weird with their feed like shuffle the comments around every time I fetch it.

@prologic@twtxt.net Do you have a link to some past discussion?

Would the GDPR would apply to a one-person client like jenny? I seriously hope not. If someone asks me to delete an email they sent me, I don’t think I have to honour that request, no matter how European they are.

I am really bothered by the idea that someone could force me to delete my private, personal record of my interactions with them. Would I have to delete my journal entries about them too if they asked?

Maybe a public-facing client like yarnd needs to consider this, but that also bothers me. I was actually thinking about making an Internet Archive style twtxt archiver, letting you explore past twts, including long-dead feeds, see edit histories, deleted twts, etc.

AWESOME COOL ☻

I wrote some code to try out non-hash reply subjects formatted as (replyto ), while keeping the ability to use the existing hash style.

I don’t think we need to decide all at once. If clients add support for a new method then people can use it if they like. The downside of course is that this costs developer time, so I decided to invest a few hours of my own time into a proof of concept.

With apologies to @movq@www.uninformativ.de for corrupting jenny’s beautiful code. I don’t write this expecting you to incorporate the patch, because it does complicate things and might not be a direction you want to go in. But if you like any part of this approach feel free to use bits of it; I release the patch under jenny’s current LICENCE.

Supporting both kinds of reply in jenny was complicated because each email can only have one Message-Id, and because it’s possible the target twt will not be seen until after the twt referencing it. The following patch uses an sqlite database to keep track of known (url, timestamp) pairs, as well as a separate table of (url, timestamp) pairs that haven’t been seen yet but are wanted. When one of those “wanted” twts is finally seen, the mail file gets rewritten to include the appropriate In-Reply-To header.

Patch based on jenny commit 73a5ea81.

https://www.falsifian.org/a/oDtr/patch0.txt

Not implemented:

• Composing twts using the (replyto …) format.
  
• Probably other important things I’m forgetting.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de could it be possible to have compressed_subject(msg_singlelined) be configurable, so only a certain number of characters get displayed, ending on ellipses? Right now the entire twtxt is crammed into the Subject:. This request aims to make twtxts display on mutt/neomutt, etc. more like emails do.

@prologic@twtxt.net how about hashing a combination of nick/timestamp, or url/timestamp only, and not the twtxt content? On edit those will not change, so no breaking of threads. I know, I know, just adding noise here. :-P

i found this site by searching “thing-fish”

Apple A16 SoC Now Manufactured In Arizona
“Apple has begun manufacturing its A16 SoC at the newly-opened TSCM Fab 21 in Arizona,” writes Slashdot reader NoMoreACs. AppleInsider reports: According to sources of Tim Culpan, Phase 1 of TSMC’s Fab 21 in Arizona is making the A16 SoC of the iPhone 14 Pro in “small, but significant, numbers. The production is largely a test for the facility at this stage, but more production is expected … ⌘ Read more

Incredibly upset—more than you could imagine—because I already made the first mistake, and corrected it (but twtxt.net got it on it’s cache, ugh!) :‘-( . Can’t wait for editing to become a reality!

Alright. My first mentions—which were picked not so randomly, LOL—are @prologic@twtxt.net, @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org, and @movq@www.uninformativ.de. I am also posting my first image too, which you see below. That’s my neighbourhood, in a “winter” day. Hopefully @prologic@twtxt.net will add my domain to his allowed list, so that the image (and any other further) renders.

Image

Everything starts at a “hello world”. At least around these parts; the nerdy parts.

@prologic@twtxt.net I wouldn’t want my client to honour delete requests. I like my computer’s memory to be better than mine, not worse, so it would bug me if I remember seeing something and my computer can’t find it.

LinkedIn Is Training AI on User Data Before Updating Its Terms of Service
An anonymous reader shares a report: LinkedIn is using its users’ data for improving the social network’s generative AI products, but has not yet updated its terms of service to reflect this data processing, according to posts from various LinkedIn users and a statement from the company to 404 Media. Instead, the company says it … ⌘ Read more

Beginnings of a little notebook app. Doesn’t actually run any code yet. https://akkartik.name/images/20240917-notebook.png

I just ran dwarf fortress on #openbsd O:)

@quark@ferengi.one Mine is a little overkill 😂 but I need to do something for practice:

#!/bin/bash
set -e
trap 'echo "!! Something went wrong...!!"' ERR

#============= Variables ==========#

# Source files
LOCAL_DIR=$HOME/twtxt

TWTXT=$LOCAL_DIR/twtxt.txt
HTML=$LOCAL_DIR/log.html
TEMPLATE=$LOCAL_DIR/template.tmpl

# Destination
REMOTE_HOST=remotHostName     # Host already setup in ~/.ssh/config

WEB_DIR="path/to/html/content"
GOPHER_DIR="path/to/phlog/content"
GEMINI_DIR="path/to/gemini-capsule/content"

DIST_DIRS=("$WEB_DIR" "$GOPHER_DIR" "$GEMINI_DIR")


#============ Functions ===========#

# Building log.html:

build_page() {
	twtxt2html -T $TEMPLATE $TWTXT > $HTML
}

# Bulk Copy files to their destinations:

copy_files() {
	for DIR in "${DIST_DIRS[@]}"; do
    # Copy both `txt` and `html` files to the Web server and only `txt`
    # to gemini and gopher server content folders
		if [ "$DIR" == "$WEB_DIR" ]; then
			scp -C "$TWTXT" "$HTML" "$REMOTE_HOST:$DIR/"
		else
			scp -C "$TWTXT" "$REMOTE_HOST:$DIR/"
		fi
	done
}

#========== Call to functions ===========$

build_page && copy_files

Hmm, but yarnd also isn’t showing these twts as being part of a thread. @prologic@twtxt.net you said yarnd respects customs subjects. Shouldn’t these twts count as having a custom subject, and get threaded together?

@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.

@bender@twtxt.net LOL normally things (in the vanilla template) render like <time class="dt-published" datetime="2024-09-17T15:05:19+01:00"> 2024-09-17 14:05:19 +0000 UTC+0000 </time> the datetime=... atribute is in my local time UTC+1 then the text within the tag is in UTC+0

The thing is, I’ve been poking at the template as well, but nothing changes. I literally whole portionsm added in lorem text just to see if it would do anything, then twtxt2html -T ./layout.html <link to twtxt file> | less shows same thing as before! nothing changes. LOL I’m not sure I’m going at it the right way.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de

Maybe I’m being a bit too purist/minimalistic here. As I said before (in one of the 1372739 posts on this topic – or maybe I didn’t even send that twt, I don’t remember 😅), I never really liked hashes to begin with. They aren’t super hard to implement but they are kind of against the beauty of the original twtxt – because you need special client support for them. It’s not something that you could write manually in your twtxt.txt file. With @sorenpeter@darch.dk’s proposal, though, that would be possible.

Tangentially related, I was a bit disappointed to learn that the twt subject extension is now never used except with hashes. Manually-written subjects sounded so beautifully ad-hoc and organic as a way to disambiguate replies. Maybe I’ll try it some time just for fun.

It feels like an A’ Hole pointing at typos while other people are the ones doing the real work ! 😅

I’ve got 100G to copy from one disk to another. This is going to take forever…

@bender@twtxt.net It’s just a simple twtxt2html and scp … it goes like:

twtxt2html $HOME/path/to/local_twtxt_dir/twtxt.txt > $HOME/path/to/local_twtxt_dir/log.html && \
scp $HOME/path/to/local_twtxt_dir/log.html user@remotehost:/path/to/static_files_dir/

I’ve been lazy to add it to my publish_command script, now I can just copy/pasta from the twt 😅

@sorenpeter@darch.dk It’s nobody’s fault! 😇 It’s all part of the fun with them Ones and Zeros

no my fault your client can’t handle a little editing ;)

Message to the void : présentation. https://si3t.ch/log/2024-09-17-message-to-the-void.txt

afaik nobody has done this, but i really need some numbers that can indicate the relative performance of various git servers (cgit, gitea, gitlab) on comparable hardware. cgit claims to be hyperfast, but what does that mean in practice?

Can anyone recommend a decent Android ROM that strips out as much of the spyware as possible? Is GrapheneOS a good option? I need to get a new phone anyway so I don’t mind buying within a supported device list as long as I can get one on the used market for $300-$400 or less.

If anyone could recommend some learning resources for this stuff I’d really appreciate it.

So, today I created a space where you can send an email to the void: https://void.si3t.ch/ gemini://void.si3t.ch/ #smolnet

Thank you @movq@www.uninformativ.de Things are working again!! 🙏

Done and done! everything is back to normal! 🥳

FIX: Temporarily removed sorenpeter’s twtxt link from my follow list, whipped my twtxt Maildir and jenny Cache. Only then I was able to fetch everything as usual (I think). Now I’ll backup things and see what happens if I pull sorenpeter’s feed.

No keyboards were harmed during this experiment… yet.

On my blog: Developer Diary, Ozone Day https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2024/09/16/ozone-layer.html #programming #project #devjournal

@prologic@twtxt.net Nah! I don’t do news feeds 🤣 I gave some a try back then but it was just way too much noise. I have a separate app for RSS feeds I want to follow. None of them mention AI except for one article about the author’s fight back against the crawlers, I believe I’ve mentioned it before.