@prologic @etux @xuu (#37xr3ra) This is the result so far in this veery quick piece of code:

$ ./twtxt-search-engine
...
All done!
Found 14909 twts in 344 feeds

@prologic @etux @xuu (#37xr3ra) Now I want to remove the “domain” restriction, add a rate-limit and try to crawl as much of the Twtxt wider network as I can and see how deep it goes 🤔

@prologic (#37xr3ra) Cool!

(#37xr3ra) @lyse @prologic very curious… i worked on a very similar track. i built a spider that will trace off any follows = comments and mentions from other users and came up with:

twters:  744
total:  52073

@lyse @xuu (#37xr3ra) Hmmm very interesting ! Let me put my code up somewhere

(#37xr3ra) @prologic It is pretty basic, and depends on some local changes i am still working out on my branch.. https://gist.github.com/JonLundy/dc19028ec81eb4ad6af74c50255e7cee

@xuu (#37xr3ra) I think what I have put together last night is a little different… 🤔 https://gist.github.com/prologic/c64a00affbf14eb3a508ce43ffce1cbb. – What you’ve got is a lot more code and looks way more polished 🤗 At a high-level what does yours do?

(#37xr3ra) Ahh I don’t think your code actually crawls the Twtxt space right? Just parses urls given to it and adds it to a database file?

(#37xr3ra) It might be worthwhile combining the two approaches and actually building a goodness to gracious search engine and crawler for twtxt? 🤔 🤣

(#37xr3ra) @prologic yeah it reads a seed file. I’m using mine. it scans for any mention links and then scans them recursively. it reads from http/s or gopher. i don’t have much of a db yet.. it just writes to disk the feed and checks modified dates.. but I will add a db that has hashs/mentions/subjects and such.

(#37xr3ra) @prologic the add function just scans recursivley everything.. but the idea is to just add and any new mentions then have a cron to update all known feeds

(#37xr3ra) Wait… So you actually wrote a more elaborate crawler without taking a shortcut like I did using colly (not that it really helps much) Hmmm? 🤔 Can we take it a bit further, make a daemon/server out of it, a web interface to search what it crawls using bleve and some tools (API, Web UI) to let people add more “feeds” to crawl? 🤔

@prologic (#37xr3ra) sounds about right. I tend to try to build my own before pulling in libs. learn more that way. I was looking at using it as a way to build my twt mirroring idea. and testing the lex parser with a wide ranging corpus to find edge cases. (the pgp signed feeds for one)

@prologic (#37xr3ra) in theory shouldn’t need to let users add feeds.. if they get mentioned by a tracked feed they will get added automagically. on a pod it would just need to scan the twtxt feed to know about everyone.

@xuu (#37xr3ra) This is true!

(#37xr3ra) As a quick experiment, I modified my code to remove the domain restrictions and low and behold:

All done!
Crawled 516 feeds
Found 52464 twts
Found 736 feeds

The Twtxt network is larger than I thought. A significant no. of feeds no longer work obviously, but that’s okay, we can prune dead feeds out.