It's quite buggy. Any minor change from the norm (config directory, txt file directory) seemed to break it. Finally I went with the standards and it still had trouble. `twtxt following` gives you errors. At first I thought it was because I wasn't following anyone, even though I chose to follow the twtxt news feed, but I never got rid of the error. I got errors about "feed not available" even though the txt files were there (maybe version differences?)
It sounds kinda interesting, honestly, but I give up.
I was using it for years before moving to Mastodon, then Nostr.
It did work rather well, is easy to code for, and I still have people pulling from my twtxt file, but it does get a bit tiresome managing follows etc with the clumsy apps.
And not having a decent mobile app made it less fun to use on what for me is social media's primary use case - while on the loo hahaha.
Not a bad idea, light enough to implement a telegram bot everyone can use or email or maybe a bitlbee plugin so you can have a twtxt channel.
But, what is it? can you PM someone? participate in a conversation? or is it just that, a microblog? Usability wise what will you do? keep a client running that always checks if new blogs have happened over, how many followers? I'm currently following 500 people, that's 500 connections if this takes off.
It would be nice if an rss client supported it, until then ehh
This is literally just a shared text file with buzz words thrown in the title. You could achieve the same thing with a Google Drive link to a text file.
The upvotes on the pronunciation in the sibling comments should be considered legally binding and will be the authoritative pronunciation. Upvote carefully.
Huh, in my head I was reading it 'twit-text' (this is not meant to be a pejorative comment), but I guess that is ascribing it another 't' where there isn't one
There is a long history of confusing or weird project names in computing like sqlite, gif, Splunk, Hadoop, Coq, MongoDB (from humongous apparently), yacc, C, R, and X (the window manager; not a lang or the social media site).
perhaps someone can implement it in the bluesky pds as an additional feature https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds put caddy in front of it for brotli compression so it serves fast on 1k2 links
What problem is this solving? Not a criticism, just genuinely curious. On X, I can follow hackers, I can block/mute and curate as I want. Just not sure who asked for this.
You must like it for political reasons, because from a technical standpoint the new Twitter is a catastrophe. It doesn’t even work properly. The other day I typed in the URL of an account I wanted to check, from a browser where I wasn’t logged in, and I got an endless loop of redirects. Watching Musk tear down Twitter infrastructure over the last two years has been like watching the Notre Dame fire, except if it was set on purpose. It was a miracle of human accomplishment and now it’s a shell of its old self.
I actually liked bitclout, seemed like it would work really well for artists' fundraising for an album release or a tour etc. featured no-fee "tips" of all sizes right next to the like button and kept users addicted with day trading mechanics tied to artists' popularity. Money flowed freely across borders and moderation was going to be handled by clients.
afaik there was never any rugpull of the base currency, but it turned out to be a platform ideally suited to rugpulling and impersonating celebrities. Plus if you thought drama on Twitter was bad just try pinning your bank balance to individuals' reputations and see how well everyone gets along.
Peertube [0], Lemmy [1], and Pixelfed [2] all run on the same protocol as Mastodon. You can interact across all of them (e.g. Mastodon user replies to Peertube video post), but the presentation on each is very different.
There's more as well. Like Friendica [3] feels a little bit like Facebook, and Hubzilla [4] feels a bit like Google+ used to. Diaspora feels a bit more basic, but similar concept to Friendica.
pixelfed looks nice. Instagram has been the only social I kept around because it's nice to look at pictures but they've recently transitioned to full on Tiktok/yt shorts competitor, I'd love to jump ship to something that's just photographs again.
Never tried lemmy, are the separate servers essentially "subreddits" ? That's cool that there aren't any global admins so each community really can have their own moderation rules.
I found it surprisingly hard to find live examples of sites running this.
The directory at https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/we-are-twtxt gave me an error, but I found it in the Internet Archive (19th September 2024):
https://web.archive.org/web/20240919022045/https://git.mills...
Here's a live example from that list: https://niplav.site/twtxt.txt - and that one shows ones its following, this one has recent posts (from December 2024): https://txt.sour.is/user/xuu/twtxt.txt
The last commit to https://github.com/buckket/twtxt/commits/master/ is October 2023, so I don't think this project is 100% thriving at the moment.
Update: Aha! Found https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/registry.html and via it https://registry.twtxt.org/api/plain/tweets which shows some recent content across the network.
Also https://registry.twtxt.org/api/plain/users looks to be a list of users, though I couldn't figure out how to paginate it (using ?page=3 doesn't seem to work, despite that being listed on the https://registry.twtxt.org/swagger-ui/ page)
The current list of active yarn.social/twtxt sites is at
https://feeds.twtxt.net/feeds (there are quite a lot)
The community name is YARN; 'twtxt' is the protocol name.
Thanks! I've filed a PR to add that to the documentation. https://github.com/buckket/twtxt/pull/183
because it's "for hackers"!
It's quite buggy. Any minor change from the norm (config directory, txt file directory) seemed to break it. Finally I went with the standards and it still had trouble. `twtxt following` gives you errors. At first I thought it was because I wasn't following anyone, even though I chose to follow the twtxt news feed, but I never got rid of the error. I got errors about "feed not available" even though the txt files were there (maybe version differences?)
It sounds kinda interesting, honestly, but I give up.
then you are not a hacker at heart :)
Or they have better things to do than debug someone else's pet project
Broken image and popup message that disappears after a few seconds on the home page. Yeah, no thanks.
I was using it for years before moving to Mastodon, then Nostr.
It did work rather well, is easy to code for, and I still have people pulling from my twtxt file, but it does get a bit tiresome managing follows etc with the clumsy apps.
And not having a decent mobile app made it less fun to use on what for me is social media's primary use case - while on the loo hahaha.
Related. Others?
A Decentralised Social Network - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33513022 - Nov 2022 (1 comment)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25246533 (Nov 2020)
Twtxt Is a Self-Hosted, Twitter-Like Decentralised MicroBlogging Platform - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25242996 - Nov 2020 (27 comments)
Show HN: Twtxt v0.0.7 Your self-hosted, decentralised Twitter -like - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23945300 - July 2020 (7 comments)
Twtxt.net – Attempting to respark the twtxt community - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23892491 - July 2020 (1 comment)
Twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23507640 - June 2020 (1 comment)
Twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23312756 - May 2020 (1 comment)
Show HN: Txtnish – a client for the microblogging platform twtxt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13742949 - Feb 2017 (4 comments)
Show HN: htwtxt – hosted twtxt server (written in Go) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11091592 - Feb 2016 (2 comments)
Show HN: Twtxt – Decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11043502 - Feb 2016 (65 comments)
nostr is the hackers microblog. Just sign things and relay them:
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/01.md
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42489954
Like mini usenet with signatures.
Not a bad idea, light enough to implement a telegram bot everyone can use or email or maybe a bitlbee plugin so you can have a twtxt channel.
But, what is it? can you PM someone? participate in a conversation? or is it just that, a microblog? Usability wise what will you do? keep a client running that always checks if new blogs have happened over, how many followers? I'm currently following 500 people, that's 500 connections if this takes off.
It would be nice if an rss client supported it, until then ehh
for another smolweb social network, check bubble running on gemini.
http://portal.mozz.us/gemini/git.skyjake.fi/bubble/main/
http://portal.mozz.us/spartan/hitchhiker-linux.org/gemlog/on...
the last url needs a gemini client to view. surprisingly bubble looks a bit like hackernews and has support for moderation
"Discussion forums, microblogging, and Git issue tracking for the Gemini community. You only need a Gemini client to participate. Welcome!"
gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/s/Bubble
This is literally just a shared text file with buzz words thrown in the title. You could achieve the same thing with a Google Drive link to a text file.
With a name like Twtxt how are you supposed to easily talk about it with other people? Not even one vowel
Not a huge problem: it existed for 9 years and no one is talking about it.
If it becomes popular, I’m pronouncing it “twixt”, even if it’s wrong.
I inferred Twittext so it's not ideally designed for virality
https://imgur.com/a/XtEuaEd
This has to be it.
The upvotes on the pronunciation in the sibling comments should be considered legally binding and will be the authoritative pronunciation. Upvote carefully.
I think I'd pronounce it as, Twit-ext?
This is correct. The rest are incorrect.
Not a Welsh speaker, I see
It kind of sounds like twitter extension. This is what i thought of it as when i first seen it. This can be very confusing.
Intuitively, I read it as "tweetext"
Huh, in my head I was reading it 'twit-text' (this is not meant to be a pejorative comment), but I guess that is ascribing it another 't' where there isn't one
There is a long history of confusing or weird project names in computing like sqlite, gif, Splunk, Hadoop, Coq, MongoDB (from humongous apparently), yacc, C, R, and X (the window manager; not a lang or the social media site).
Most of the community call it Yarn. They use twtxt as the protocol name - and it isn't like HTTP is one vowel.
Talk? You write about it, on a (mechanical) keyboard.
twit-text is how I would pronounce it.
I suppose that if one were motivated, one would run a https://github.com/plomlompom/htwtxt service and then point the audience to it.
Not clear that the juice would be worth the squeeze over, e.g. Mastadon.
It's called HTML + RSS.
I was about to ask… looks rss to me XD
perhaps someone can implement it in the bluesky pds as an additional feature https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds put caddy in front of it for brotli compression so it serves fast on 1k2 links
Title shouild be:
"Welcome to twtxt!"
What problem is this solving? Not a criticism, just genuinely curious. On X, I can follow hackers, I can block/mute and curate as I want. Just not sure who asked for this.
So how big is the Twtxt community? How many Twtxters?
I think I only ever interacted with 2 whilst I was experimenting with twtxt.
https://feeds.twtxt.net/feeds (There are hundreds of us!! HUNDREDS!!!) /s
Why do we even need a microblogging platform? Twitter turned into a dumpster fire. Why will these other alternatives not have the same fate?
We don't. If anything just using HTTP and HTML the way it was designed is fine. See https://indieweb.org
I’m inclined to agree. These post platforms are a race to the bottom
> Why do we even need a microblogging platform?
Diversity of options is great.
> Twitter turned into a dumpster fire
I disagree. I love the new Twitter.
You must like it for political reasons, because from a technical standpoint the new Twitter is a catastrophe. It doesn’t even work properly. The other day I typed in the URL of an account I wanted to check, from a browser where I wasn’t logged in, and I got an endless loop of redirects. Watching Musk tear down Twitter infrastructure over the last two years has been like watching the Notre Dame fire, except if it was set on purpose. It was a miracle of human accomplishment and now it’s a shell of its old self.
What do you like about it?
Also, I forgot that Mastadoon is/was also a thing. Are there any original ideas out there rather than another “Twitter but not Twitter” clone?
Twitter, but your tweets are stored on a blockchain with smart contracts written by LLMs. In Rust.
I actually liked bitclout, seemed like it would work really well for artists' fundraising for an album release or a tour etc. featured no-fee "tips" of all sizes right next to the like button and kept users addicted with day trading mechanics tied to artists' popularity. Money flowed freely across borders and moderation was going to be handled by clients.
afaik there was never any rugpull of the base currency, but it turned out to be a platform ideally suited to rugpulling and impersonating celebrities. Plus if you thought drama on Twitter was bad just try pinning your bank balance to individuals' reputations and see how well everyone gets along.
Peertube [0], Lemmy [1], and Pixelfed [2] all run on the same protocol as Mastodon. You can interact across all of them (e.g. Mastodon user replies to Peertube video post), but the presentation on each is very different.
There's more as well. Like Friendica [3] feels a little bit like Facebook, and Hubzilla [4] feels a bit like Google+ used to. Diaspora feels a bit more basic, but similar concept to Friendica.
All of them can cross interact.
[0] YouTube style - https://joinpeertube.org/
[1] Reddit-style - https://join-lemmy.org/
[2] Instagram-style - https://pixelfed.org/
[3] https://friendi.ca/
[4] https://hubzilla.org
pixelfed looks nice. Instagram has been the only social I kept around because it's nice to look at pictures but they've recently transitioned to full on Tiktok/yt shorts competitor, I'd love to jump ship to something that's just photographs again.
Never tried lemmy, are the separate servers essentially "subreddits" ? That's cool that there aren't any global admins so each community really can have their own moderation rules.
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