All this hash breakage made me wonder if we should try to introduce “message IDs” after all. 😅

But the great thing about the current system is that nobody can spoof message IDs. 🤔 When you think about it, message IDs in e-mails only work because (almost) everybody plays fair. Nothing stops me from using the same Message-ID header in each and every mail, that would break e-mail threading all the time.

In Yarn, twt hashes are derived from twt content and feed metadata. That is pretty elegant and I’d hate see us lose that property.

If we wanted to allow editing twts, we could do something like this:

2024-09-05T13:37:40+00:00   (~mp6ox4a) Hello world!

Here, mp6ox4a would be a “partial hash”: To get the actual hash of this twt, you’d concatenate the feed’s URL and mp6ox4a and get, say, hlnw5ha. (Pretty similar to the current system.) When people reply to this twt, they would have to do this:

2024-09-05T14:57:14+00:00	(~bpt74ka) (<a href="https://anthony.buc.ci/search?tag=hlnw5ha">#hlnw5ha</a>) Yes, hello!

That second twt has a partial hash of bpt74ka and is a reply to the full hash hlnw5ha. The author of the “Hello world!” twt could then edit their twt and change it to 2024-09-05T13:37:40+00:00 (~mp6ox4a) Hello friends! or whatever. Threading wouldn’t break.

Would this be worth it? It’s certainly not backwards-compatible. 😂

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It sounds complicated. After reading it only twice, I haven’t gotten it. :-D

Yes, I’m all for dedicated message IDs. That would be a whole new format then. But I would be fine with it. The only thing is that all our clients have to be touched. At the moment, I do not worry about spoofing (however, I definitely should).

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @prologic@twtxt.net Another option would be: when you edit a twt, prefix the new one with (#[old hash]) and some indication that it’s an edited version of the original tweet with that hash. E.g. if the hash used to be abcd123, the new version should start “(#abcd123) (redit)”.

What I like about this is that clients that don’t know this convention will still stick it in the same thread. And I feel it’s in the spirit of the old pre-hash (subject) convention, though that’s before my time.

I guess it may not work when the edited twt itself is a reply, and there are replies to it. Maybe that could be solved by letting twts have more than one (subject) prefix.

But the great thing about the current system is that nobody can spoof message IDs.

I don’t think twtxt hashes are long enough to prevent spoofing.

@prologic@twtxt.net I kind of want to think of twtxts as chalk text written on a board hanging in front of the user’s house. As the user is in full control of their own board, they can erase, and rewrite it as they deem fit.

So, how to reply, and engage with something that can potentially change? I think the email based message-id, and in-reply-to would work best, without the rigid boundary of a hash that’s bound to break on edit.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Another idea: just hash the feed url and time, without the message content. And don’t twt more than once per second.

Maybe you could even just use the time, and rely on @-mentions to disambiguate. Not sure how that would work out.

Though I kind of like the idea of twts being immutable. At least, it’s clear which version of a twt you’re replying to (assuming nobody is engineering hash collisions).

Wow, there are a lot of ideas in this thread already. 😃