(#ckwbdwq) Disclaimer: Although I know the basis, I’m not an expert by any means. I like twtxt even with its disadvantages, blockchains are an interesting technology but it’s difficult to love them, although I’m not radicalized as I have written before. I don’t hate blockchains b/c I don’t want to spend my energy hating them.

So, when technology, monetary power, decision-making, and other sensitive topics are put together, it’s tricky to have a single definition.
A quick search on ‘Distributed vs Decentralized’ gave:

Decentralized systems offer power to the many, not just the few.
[…] Distributed systems can enable resource sharing and improve efficiency and performance. These systems can function with or without a central authority.

From the first result on Google: https://www.hivenet.com/post/decentralized-or-distributed-whats-the-big-difference

ChatGPT says:

[…] While both federated and decentralized platforms involve distributed systems, they differ in terms of control and decision-making. […] The key characteristic of a distributed platform is the distribution of workload and data across multiple nodes, allowing for parallel processing and faster response times.

From a long response of about 3,500 characters. It’s not a simple topic to grasp.

Why Google and GPT? I think those are the first sources for many people now. Perhaps not the most trustable sources if you ask me.

So I think having your vision on the topic would be enlightening. But losing it in the emerging flow of twts would be a shame.

(#ohrlr6a) When I talk about twtxt with friends, usually that question emerges.
What’s the difference between Federated, Distributed, and Decentralized?… And also the difference between platforms, systems, services, and such.
I remember we discussed that a few months ago.

I think you should have a post in your blog or similar as a future reference.

(#nqcozgq) Well, smol.pub has some unique features for the smol net community:
From the main page:

Smol Pub is tiny blogging service.
Web interface and CLI to manage your posts.
Accessible from Web, Gemini and Gopher.
Storage for your images.
Write custom CSS for web.
Attach your custom domain with SSL.
Export your posts.
No JavaScript, ads, or tracking technology.

I was using Gohugo and it was so painful to start writing, and push the HTML to the server, that I stopped writing. It was almost impossible to fix a typo on my phone or simply push a quick text.
Smol.pub is a typical blogging platform but compatible with Gemini, has a customizable interface and it just works.
And although is too simplistic, Gemtext works for me as an alternative to Markdown.

I wrote a bit about that here: https://text.eapl.mx/writing-in-2021

(#kwnxdia) That’s neat!
I don’t know what are you thinking of exactly. Yarn Pods?

As an example, my blog is ‘hosted’ on smol.pub with a perpetual key for 5 USD. I think that’s subsidized, m15o is paying to keep the lights on. But I like this service so much, that paying 0.5 or 1 dollar per month is nothing!

Compared with the effort of paying 2-5 USD/month for a VPS, setting up a Go environment, updating dependencies in a language I don’t master, tweaking things, and maintaining everything for a personal smol.pub instance. I tried to run it once, and I quit after a few hours.

(#iaiqdeq) It could be interesting.
As has been discussed, these services are ‘centralized’, although having mirrors hosted by volunteers syncing somehow, would be a good idea. So if one server disappears you can jump to another.

I lost track of Registries, but they seem to be down, which is an example of that problem:
https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/registry.html

And I’m aware of this kind of CSVs made by ‘scraping a social graph’, but they seem to be manually updated:
https://github.com/tkanos/we-are-twtxt

(#nrtxtpa) what do you have in mind?
I was using 6 USD servers from Digital Ocean, but saw that on Vultr they start at 2.5 USD.

VPS are great to learn, although paying a dollar for a service with no maintenance makes sense to me by all the time we save. The problem exists when you don’t use the service that much and have to pay anyway.

(#wwkox7q) there are many, many improvements on that logo

This is a good transitional one, IMO
https://pixelresort.gumroad.com/l/twitter-x

(#zdz7r4a) great song! 🎶

(#dyda3qa) that was my first option
https://emojigraph.org/regional-indicator-symbol-letter-t/

(#f3v3ufq) it also happened for my yarn Pod.
Paying for a service you are not using (that much) is a weird feeling.

But it’s a weird feeling too not paying for a service you are using 😆

What would be a good icon for twtxt?

I chose the hash emoji #️⃣, which has many variations: https://emojipedia.org/keycap-number-sign/

and I liked the tweoji one, I think it has a good license: CC-BY 4.0/MIT
https://github.com/twitter/twemoji#license

It would be nice to choose an Emoji/Image/Icon as a convention. What do you say?

(#myjczaq) Killing a personal VPS, created like 8 years ago, requires some mourning, strangely enough.

(#ricslja) And now I’m watching that recognition of valid links like eapl.me and 8.2 is broken on twtxt-php 😅
#ohMyGosh #prayForMeAgain

After breaking my VPS, and deciding to kill it, now eapl.me is up again, but with a Ionos shared hosting. twtxt-php on PHP 8.2 is working (after a few fixes), and I need to lift a few services more.

(#zs445zq) 😥

This model for a social platform looks interesting
https://www.are.na/about

(#6zukyvq) Hey! How are you doing?
I’m checking that a few of your twts are still dated in a future time. For example, this one I’m replying to appears to me like 16 minutes after the current time.

I got to say that I implemented that possibility just for your twtxt feed, so it’s not a big deal 😛

Enough of controversial topics for today. Let’s go back to the garden. 🌱

Have a good weekend everyone!

(#r63zi7a) I dislike many things about Web3 (not to be confused with Web 3.0). Decentralization is not one of the reasons, but the interests behind since they are not sustainable, in my opinion.

To know why I dislike it, I had to use it.
Briefly used https://3speak.tv since a few Latin ‘YouTubers’ I followed, said they were migrating to those platforms as they were earning more than the benefits from Ad impressions and Subscriptions, with less effort. They were receiving ‘likes’ more like a tips model. “I like your content, create more, take a dollar”.
All my content on YouTube is for free, so sincerely don’t know if that’s true, or if it was for a short period of time, but may be right.

(#dr3xrwq) In this kind of exercises, I like to propose some alternatives.

Perhaps instead of using TW/FB with my students, I could motivate them to join twtxt, run their own servers, and host their own data.
Teaching them how to make money without the dependence of giant corporations, which is not easy, but it’s feasible.

Well, that’s all that was on my mind, but it’s always an interesting topic to discuss with my friends while we drink a beer 🍻 or a good wine 🍷. Cheers!

(#dndgwsq) So, many new technologies were created on top of that ‘good’ system.
Proof-of-stake, Proof of authority, Proof of weight, and many more.
They are re-centralizing a decentralized system to hold monetary value (not digital cash, since that’s another topic).

Finally, when we mix a social network/media/platform with all those abstract technologies developed in the last 15 years to hold monetary value, we are in a crazy world of unfulfilled promises, but which people want.
I understand why that exists. Why generative AI is a trend now. Why Crypto was told as a future, and such.

So, answering the question:

How many people truly believe blockchain social networks are the future?

I think there is a significant amount of people. I saw it at events and conferences. If many people believe in that, and somehow benefit from it, it’s enough to start a movement. I’ve seen that in traditional streaming, video game stores, Roblox, and many more.

I think that Social media is toxic enough when attention and personal information are sold in exchange for a fun platform, and a free way to get in contact with friends and family.
But also it’s a tool for companies, big and small to sell stuff, which starts as something good, a way for small creatives to earn money from their craftsmanship.
But as has been discussed, soon an enshittification process begins.

As if likes, upvotes, hearts, and subscriptions weren’t narcissistic enough, let’s make people think someone wants to pay them with crypto to view their random posts online.

I’m with you on this idea. It could be a pyramid. But the promise of earning real money also happens with traditional platforms (Meta, TikTok and such).
When real money (or crypto money, or worthless digital points) is in the equation, strange behaviors start to appear in creators and followers.

(#r63zi7a) Hmmm… That’s a pretty sensitive topic here, so I don’t know if you want to read different ideas… And we could write a whole book, but for the sake of intellectual discussion, let’s throw some points here.

Disclaimer: I briefly worked for a small crypto company in 2021 on the controversial Pay-to-win model using Enjin, Ethereum, and such. I received payments on crypto and paid people in other countries, being cheaper and easier than national services. I don’t think I’m a crypto-bro, and I don’t want to work in that area anymore.

I don’t like to say “everything X is evil” or “everything Y is good”, based on beliefs, ideology, and tech-religion. But people need those. Even I need something to believe in. Decentralization is my current value.
I think that’s the radical point of Crypto vs Not-Crypto.
“You are with us, or against us.”

As a technology, blockchain is, IMO, an amazing tool for decentralization, excuse the comparison, similar to BitTorrent. Proof of Work is problematic and it’s showing that when many people use it, it’s an environmental disaster.

(#q2ru5na) 😆

Ok, a quick test: (Sorry for the spam, I think I need a test account)

http://example.com

https://example.com gemini://example.com
ftp://example.com spartan://example.com
newprotocol://example.com

Oops, I found a bug with links like this case:
https://github.com/eapl-gemugami/phpub2twtxt

I thought I fixed it 🤔
#infiniteBugFixing

(#4aptshq) Hey, sure! It’s available here:
https://github.com/eapl-gemugami/phpub2twtxt

I’m thinking of renaming the project and moving it outside of Github to make it more friendly for the community (Sourcehunt perhaps?).
But for now, you can find the crafted version for myself in that repo.

(#2fo7y6q) Well, I use Meta’s services about once a week to contact people who only use FB, IG, and WA (developers from my country on Groups, friends on Messenger, and family). Here everyone uses Whatsapp 24/7 for work and leisure, and mobile carriers offer free access to Meta apps, so it’s difficult to avoid using those 😅

I’m not a pictures person, so I push like 1 photo a year, but I adore microblogging: https://text.eapl.mx/microblogging

I use each service based on the kind of people I’m talking to, mainly to start conversations or share thoughts.
Twitter was like the default for creativity and arts 🎨💻, the reach and discovery of new people and content is decent (based on followers only), but a lot of people moved to Masto due to recent problems we all know.

No one uses Threads here (luckily) and I like twtxt a lot, but none of my close friends are here (yet) 😬

(#tdjzg2q) well, this fork of pubtwtxt (web app to push twts to your twtxt file) has too many changes and different goals now (self-hosting a micro Web platform for a single user), that perhaps it should have a different name like twtxt-php 🤔

(#qwzp7tq) 😄

A quick update to the twtxt-php client, now you can watch a twts for a user I’m following like: https://eapl.me/twtxt/?twts=https://lyse.isobeef.org/twtxt.txt

(#6mgvdoa) oops, you mean watching only the twts from a .txt or a user. That’s also a hidden feature but I can’t recall where it is 😅

(#wtonnrq) of course! I haven’t given myself time to document nor implement, but I hope finishing classes there is more focus for that…

Anyway, any suggestions are welcome!

(#6mgvdoa) well, the idea for that project is to self-host your personal interface to twtxt, more than having a server for many people.

Anyway, there is an undocumented feature to see someone else’s timeline
https://eapl.me/twtxt/?url=https://twtxt.net/user/marado/twtxt.txt

But it’s not finished yet, so it only shows some of the followers

(#red3neq) Love the colours 🌇 !

Yeah! This thing is loading Markdown links and images now 😄

https://eapl.me/twtxt/?hash=red3neq

A really interesting analysis of how to improve a micro-blogging platform based on user impressions:

Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t - Erin Kissane’s small internet website
https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt

Finally Friday! What are you doing this weekend?

(#gu5qfla) It sounds to me like those limits on password length… Like below 16 chars 🤨

And it happened as well with the CLI tool I used: https://github.com/rsc/2fa

So I had to make another on Python to support more chars (and to improve the fuzzy search like on some mobile apps). Is anyone interested in that? Could be useful for you.

I’m really surprised that some TOTP/2FA apps like Google Authenticator only support 6 or 8 digits, and even Aegis only supports 10. I know it could break things to allow 12 or 16, but… Come on! Is not that hard to allow any reasonable number!

Ha, this is amazing 😆
Now I have to find a use for it =P

https://thecanine.itch.io/winluncher

(#7dahtfa) And I added a reference implementation for Hash extension on PHP

https://github.com/eapl-gemugami/phpub2twtxt/blob/master/docs/03-hash-extension.md

(#kuz6cra)

Hey tell me about this I found on your feed? 🙏

Sure! By the way it would be great to have your thoughts!

I have started drafting those here:
https://github.com/eapl-gemugami/phpub2twtxt/blob/master/docs/02-metadata-extension.md

Those are: emoji (like on Gemini Station, an emoji instead of an image), lang (default language for every twt in the file, or specific for a single twt, like on Masto), version (to indicate which version of twtxt spec the txt file is using).

And I was checking that the hashing spec is prone to be extended from 7 characters to 10 or 11, so it would be great to know when that would happen.

Nice to greet you!

I’m reading “Everything is F*cked: A Book about Hope” again. An uncomfortable reading on why we need hope and how we try to achieve it.
It makes me think a lot about my biases, public and private…

Well, I think it’s moment to start finishing the work week and prepare for the weekend. 🤨

Today I found new -isms: Decentralism, federalism, centralism, distributism…

Interesting how information collides with politics and ideology 🤔
Buuut, that’s nothing to worry about (yet).

Could we replace traditional passwords with One Time Passwords?
We should start switching from 6 digits to many more, 10 at least or 16.

TOTP and lookup secrets as first factor authentication
https://github.com/ory/kratos/issues/2979

(#3o3xcjq) also, the new medication is making me sleep a lot…
I’ll take the opportunity to do so 😴

I’ve been really disconnected from twtxt due to work. Working on ETLs and Python all day long.

Not that bad, although I don’t want to work on the PHP client that much. Anyway, it has the min features to take a conversation, so it works as a minimalist client. 😅