Oh, wow. That is a frightening level of protocol ossification.

IMHO, the original spec had it right when it said (paraphrased) “just upload your tw.txt file wherever”. The essence of micro-blogging, as opposed to full-scale blogging, is low friction and low stakes. Imposing a norm that you can’t just use any ol’ url, looking down on people with insufficently cool urls (as in “Cool URIs don’t change” https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI), puts up too much of a barrier to entry.

@prologic@twtxt.net With respect, a client can not identify whether an edit took place. Not unless that same client witnessed both the original twt and the edited one. This won’t be the case if a person you’re following is joining a thread started by people you aren’t following after the first twt of that thread has already been modified. Or if you’re knocked offline by a multi-hour power outage that spans then entire time window between a twt getting uploaded and modified.

It’s pretty hard to follow though, with the discussion being spread out over so many threads and with the https://search.twtxt.net UI displaying threads in a way that’s different than how https://twtxt.net does.

I finally figured out that https://search.twtxt.net is not the same as https://twtxt.net/search. The former is open to the general public, unlike the latter which is only for registered users of twtxt.net. Meaning that I finally have some kind of access to an archive of the aforementioned debate.

So, uh, did anyone but me notice that the last character of a twt hash is always either an a or a q? Which is the natural consequence of taking the last digit in the base32 representation of a 256-bit hash – 256 is not evenly divisible by 5 ! That final character is made up of one bit of actual information and 4 bits of padding.

Probably going to stick to my original plan, which is to implement everything I need by hand. Becaus to me part of the appeal of twtxt is that it’s simple enough for it to be feasible to roll your own implementation.

I’m not using anything that you would recognize as a full-featured client. I upload twts with hut publish, “publicise my user agent” with manual curl invocations (when I remember to) (thanks to @movq@www.uninformativ.de for the informative guide https://www.uninformativ.de/twtxt-mention.html), and as for following other people’s feeds, I still haven’t decided how I’m going to do that.

Also seen: an eyeless freak of indeterminate species. Swims in the pond and has long toes, like a duck, but lacks toe-webbings (and eyes), unlike a duck.

@prologic@twtxt.net Actually, my twts from the last two days aren’t showing up on , so I guess that no-one is following me and the reason my earlier twts did show up is that yarnd does a one-off fetch of any feed @-mentioned by a pod member. Comments in the code suggest that this is the case, see internal/server.go, commit 7dcec70e, line 468. As the author of that code, can you confirm/deny?

@prologic@twtxt.net :waves: So it seems! I must admit that it surprised me. I did not expect to have anyone following me quite this early. But it’s the nice kind of surprise :)

Say no to cordless peripherals! Real mice have tails! (I just like not having to charge and/or swap out batteries all the time)