Twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers

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.

twtxt isn't very popular. I think the feed format itself is neat, other than the tab, but maybe there isn't enough of a niche for it.

I have implemented a twtxt version of the Atom and the JSON Feed feed [1] for my site at https://dbohdan.com/twtxt.txt. The generator I originally developed for the site creates twtxt feeds, too: https://github.com/tclssg/tclssg. I haven't seen it in another static site generator or plugin; please link if you know one.

The public-access Unix system tilde.institute has a twtxt registry: https://twtxt.tilde.institute/. You can see the user list at https://twtxt.tilde.institute/api/plain/users. The aggregator https://twtxt.tilde.institute/api/plain/tweets is currently filled with what looks like somebody protesting the request rate:

  quite https://lublin.se/twtxt.txt 2024-12-23T03:15:21-05:00 <ROBOT VOICE> THE LAST HUMAN POST ON THIS FEED IS MORE THAN FOUR YEARS OLD. PERHAPS TWTXT CLIENTS SHOULD THEN FETCH THE FEED *VERY* RARELY.
  quite https://lublin.se/twtxt.txt 2024-12-23T03:15:16-05:00 <ROBOT VOICE> THE LAST HUMAN POST ON THIS FEED IS MORE THAN FOUR YEARS OLD. PERHAPS TWTXT CLIENTS SHOULD THEN FETCH THE FEED *VERY* RARELY.
  quite https://lublin.se/twtxt.txt 2024-12-23T03:15:07-05:00 <ROBOT VOICE> THE LAST HUMAN POST ON THIS FEED IS MORE THAN FOUR YEARS OLD. PERHAPS TWTXT CLIENTS SHOULD THEN FETCH THE FEED *VERY* RARELY.
  [...]

because it's "for hackers"!

Great app name: ontheloo

then you are not a hacker at heart :)

Respectfully, 70 folks is not larger than I thought.

Writing evolved after visual imagery to solve the poor ability of visuals to express abstractions. It too is based on imagery, thats what script is after all, but leverages the emergent social pattern of literacy to convey highly encoded information.

This invention (that we now take for granted) has been so exalted in the minds of earlier generations that they would go to extremes to banish imagery (iconoclasts etc.)

It takes its most extreme form in mathematical script: concise expression of the most abstract ideas.

Commingling imagery and text has its many uses of course: try describing a graph or diagram or a real scene using text only. But for other purposes (literature) its a distraction that forces the brain to switch mode and diminishes the experience.

The ironic part is you post this on a throwback site where content is more important than presentation.

Let everyone make the things they want to make. Make something else? These people do you no harm, why pull their efforts down?

“When you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude people. So create”

- Why the Lucky Stiff

There is a cargo cult of absence of features because old cool developers are used to email, IRC, EMACS, etc (stuff they got acquainted with in their college days 30 years ago).

It's clear from the demonstration video alone that this is not an ASCII system, and indeed reading the doco confirms that the text files are considered to be UTF-8.

This gives some irony to your analysis. Because this system thus permits one of the the very same ancient expression-in-images systems that you are alluding to: hieroglyphs are in Unicode.

I expect that in the 9 years of its existence, almost no-one has ever used them in this system.

In this case, because it's a text file based system that works through the CLI. It is kind of ironic though that the "Demonstration" in the introduction is a video

I used to enjoy using browsers like W3M, if you can just throw assets at your favourite tool of choice, like an image viewer, a video player, it just feels better for me as I don't have to learn a different interface for every site I visit.

> I will never understand why all these minimalist content publishing systems pretend that visual imagery is unnecessary.

I don't think anybody is prevented from putting a link to an image, nor to build a client that autoload linked images (the same way that say, some gemini browsers like lagrange can be configured to show you images by default).

It's built with Python, where strings default to UTF-8. Did they invent their own strings and constrained them to ASCII?

Do you have the same view of books? You're condescending and refuse to spend time with books that don't have pictures?

some people like different things. imagine that.

What I like about nostr is the experimentation with different clients, and the fact that your identity is portable to any of them. It's just a really cool model.

I'm working on a nostr-based discussion site heavily inspired by HN/reddit: https://oddbean.com/

No login required, and you can switch to a different client any time you want. We try to keep the bitcoin/politics stuff to a minimum on the homepage. There's a lot of that on nostr, but also a lot of kind and thoughtful discussion about diverse subjects.

Like mini usenet with signatures.

The nostr tech itself is great.

The problem with nostr is that 95% of the conversations are about crypto.

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.

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?

Not a Welsh speaker, I see

Intuitively, I read it as "tweetext"

Talk? You write about it, on a (mechanical) keyboard.

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.

Most of the community call it Yarn. They use twtxt as the protocol name - and it isn't like HTTP is one vowel.

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.

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).

As its name says, "double u" is not just one but two vowels. (-:

twit-text is how I would pronounce it.

Does it support RSS paging?

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5005

You can't self host your X feed for a start.

Yup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42496587

I was about to ask… looks rss to me XD

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

Twitter, but your tweets are stored on a blockchain with smart contracts written by LLMs. In Rust.

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

We don't. If anything just using HTTP and HTML the way it was designed is fine. See https://indieweb.org

Twitter is precisely the reason we need these decentralized, niche platforms. It's a return to the norm prior to social media centralizing everything.

They won't avoid the same fate, because decay and entropy are inevitable. But they will last longer simply because fewer people know about them and use them.

I’m inclined to agree. These post platforms are a race to the bottom

These things are good or bad because of the community of people who use them, not the technology per se. And that community is shaped by both culture and moderators.

The original Web was the work of genious, but everything since is either adtech enshittification or cumbersome hacks.

The "simplest" requirement - decentralized discovery of what is out there, is essentially still unsolved. That is one of the main reasons we have centralized platforms of all types instead of some RSS on steroids design.

The second (and more difficult in sociopolitical terms) requirement that is still unsolved is the "active" web, decentralized POST-in on somebody else's server. Here you have social challenges (identity, spam, moderation, fake news etc).

We really need a good society adapted Web 3 evolution, because Web 2 has been a disaster that keeps on giving. But it will require genious at least commensurate with the original.

> 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.