I went straight to bed after posting this and slept for 3 hours. 😩 Can’t I just win the lottery and be done with this whole “money” thing? 🤪

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oof, well, good luck. Those multi-day meetings are usually really exhausting (and mostly pointless) in our company, hopefully it’s different at yours. ✌️

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Indeed, great news! If you need testers at some point, let me know. 😅

Lest we forget … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mp5gksq_OEI

… !

It’s one of those days.

It’s been a little over 14 years since Isis broke up and I have yet to find a band as good as them. Not a single song that disappoints (at least since the Oceanic album). Glad I could see them live a couple of times. // Isis - Grey Divide // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI2-8I3j4Vg

#NowPlaying

Great, now I fell into a rabbit hole of “old” music. 😂 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGNiXGX2nLU

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Venus?

@prologic Come on, that’s a little condescending, isn’t it? 😅

For the record, out of the 89 feeds that I follow, only a single one has more than one # url = field:

gemini://gemini.ctrl-c.club/~nristen/twtxt.txt

And I wonder if @nristen@gemini.ctrl-c.club is aware that the order of those fields matter. 🤔

@prologic Oh, wait, there’s already another thread about it. 😅

@prologic No, it’s all just speculation and I don’t like spreading rumors. 😅 It would be more interesting to hear from the twtxt folks themselves why they stopped working on the original twtxt.

@prologic

the right way to solve this is to use public/private key(s) where you actually have a public key fingerprint as your feed’s unique identity that never changes

Okay, this is interesting. How would this work in practice? 🤔

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org If the timestamp included a nanosecond part (which is not a valid twtxt feed at the moment, because it mandates RFC3339 timestamps and those only permit one subsecond digit), this could solve the editing problem with little effort. 🤔

Btw, @prologic, in my experience, people editing their twts is a much more common thing than people changing the URL of their feed. 😅 It breaks threading all the time.

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

@prologic @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, same. They say:

If you post quality content and you’ve developed a loyal audience, you should be able to ask your most passionate followers to support you with a premium subscription.

You already can ask your most passionate followers to support you: You can ask for donations.

I regularly donate to people if their content is great and if they actually ask for donations (many just don’t). The platforms for that already exist, I think. 🤔

I’m not interested in the slightest in stuff that has a paywall. “Subscribe for more content!” No, why, go away. Pages that do this immediately feel shady and not trust-worthy. 🤔

(Let’s not rush things, obviously. Such a change would have to be well thought through and actually be worth it. It’s not like the current state of Yarn/twtxt is completely unusable.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @prologic Sorry, I have hardly slept last night. 😅 I probably didn’t chose the best words to describe this. 🥴

Yes, I’m all for dedicated message IDs. That would be a whole new format then. But I would be fine with it.

Honestly, me too. When Yarn originally showed up, I was concerned that it would extend twtxt in dramatically incompatible ways or, worse, change it in a way so that you needed server software. 😅 The latter would have ruined it for me. A major reason why I still use twtxt/Yarn is that it’s still just a file you put somewhere. If there was the need to run a daemon, I’d give up and just use some ActivityPub thingy instead.

What I did not expect, however, was that the original twtxt itself would just … die. There has been no development in the original software anymore and virtually all the original feeds are dead. Some feeds are left, but they’re just used as an alternative to Atom/RSS for some blogs. I don’t know what happened behind the scenes that killed off twtxt (I have a few guesses, though), but the sad truth is that it’s gone.

So, yeah, maybe this gives us the freedom now to break with the original twtxt spec (if needed) and come up with a format that fixes the issues we’re seeing.

(Oh god. Are we re-inventing Usenet then? Again? 😂)

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://twtxt.net/search?q=tags: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. 😂

@bender@twtxt.net The size … it depends. 🥴

$ du -sh ~/Mail/twt
244M   /home/user/Mail/twt

But:

$ du -sh --apparent-size ~/Mail/twt
33M    /home/user/Mail/twt

There are about 60k twts in there.

Regarding one-way junk: True. Looks like I mostly unfollowed those, I don’t really have that in my inbox. 🤔

These are the Top 10, btw:

$ awk '/^From: / { user[$2]++ } END { for (u in user) { print user[u], u } }' * | sort -k1rn | head -n 10
24020 "prologic"
5269 "lyse"
3928 "movq"
2285 "adi"
1985 "abucci"
1713 "mckinley"
1415 "off_grid_living"
1352 "darch"
1280 "eaplmx"
956 "bender"

@bender@twtxt.net On twtxt, I follow all feeds that I can find (there are some exceptions, of course). There’s so little going on in general, it hardly matters. 😅

And I just realized: Mutt’s layout helps a lot. Skimming over new twts is really easy and it’s not a big loss if there are a couple of shitposts™ in my “timeline”. This is very different from Mastodon (both the default web UI and all clients I’ve tried), where the timeline is always huge. Posts take up a lot of space on screen. Makes me think twice if I want to follow someone or not. 😅

(I mostly only follow Hashtags on Mastodon anyway. It’s more interesting that way.)

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org @prologic @bender The twt was edited. In my cache, it also has hash st3wsda and it started like this:

(<a href="https://twtxt.net/twt/yqke7sq">#yqke7sq</a>) I've been sketching out some …

When fetching the feed now, the twt starts like this and the current twt gets the hash 6mdqxrq:

(<a href="https://twtxt.net/search?q=tags:yqke7sq">#yqke7sq</a>) I've been sketching out some …

This can’t be avoided, really. Publishing twts and then editing them is like doing a git push --force after rewriting the commit history. Chaos will ensue. 😅

@cuaxolotl@sunshinegardens.org Ah, thanks for reporting back! Okay, so you’re basically manually “crawling” feeds right now. 🤔 What do you think about the idea of adding something like # follow_notify = gemini://foo/bar to your feed’s metadata, so that clients who follow you can ping that URL every now and then? How would you even notice that, do you regularly read your gemini logs? 🤔

And the bonus read is also interesting:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20211129-00/?p=105979

Confession: I completely forgot that Alt+Tab existed in text mode. 🤦 It’s not even a hidden feature, it’s advertised right when you start a fullscreen dos box. Well, Alt+Tab wasn’t a thing I did regularly anyway – it was usually Ctrl+Esc to open the window list (which also worked in OS/2). 🤔 I think I only started using Alt+Tab when Windows 95 removed Ctrl+Esc (because it had no use anymore, it essentially got replaced by the tasklist).

Interesting read about the Windows 95 bluescreen by Raymond Chen:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20240903-00/?p=110205

All this Virtual Machine Manager stuff went completely over my head back then … 🤯

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Quick! Play the lottery! HURRY!