(#2fkr5fq) Interesting. What about yarnd’s tendency to make posts disappear after some time?

(#fh6ymua) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I see where you’re coming from, but this sort of centralization goes against the spirit of twtxt in my mind.

(#kojyd3a) This is the first actual argument I’ve seen on the twtverse.

(#63usx6q) @prologic@twtxt.net Do you mean “deflation”?

How many forks deep is this Bitcoin conversation?

As @movq@www.uninformativ.de said:

Step 1, someone builds something which doesn’t support a “reply” feature at all. Step 2, the thing grows, now people want “reply”. Step 3, it gets confusing with all the linear replies and now people want “full threading”. That’s also basically what happened to twtxt/yarn. Maybe, over time, everything evolves into Usenet.

@prologic@twtxt.net, step 3 when? :)

(#7yh73ia) @prologic@twtxt.net I’m no economist, but printing more money is a definite factor. Just look at what happened to the Weimar Republic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_Republic

(#skbye2a) @prologic@twtxt.net If a government bans the currency, it wouldn’t have a hope of being enforced unless they could make all the internet service providers enforce a domain whitelist. Not a blacklist like the Great Firewall of China.

The GFW also does deep packet inspection, and perhaps that could be used (likely on a per-currency basis) to limit the access of nodes, but that can be circumvented with Tor bridges.

The government could cut off a country from the Internet like you said, but then you have bigger problems than your favorite internet currency being unusable. Even then, there would still be ways around it.

(#psek3ha) @rrraksamam@twtxt.net Sway

(#t7xx45a) @eaplmx@twtxt.net I just use stock Vim with no plugins. It does everything I need it to do.

(#2pc5uga) @prologic@twtxt.net I remember, quite some time ago, we were talking about wanting vi keys in Web browser text boxes. A few weeks ago, I found an extension that does a similar thing to this, it puts a Neovim client into your Web browser. https://github.com/glacambre/firenvim

(#ands4ba) @ocdtrekkie@twtxt.net My apologies, I mistyped.

I ducked out early this week, but it was a good chat with @prologic@twtxt.net and @ocdtrekkie@twtxt.net. Some things we talked about:

• The twtxt specification rewrite I’m working on
  
• @ocdtrekkie@twtxt.net’s work on tube
  
• Electron *shudder*
  
• JSON Feeds
  
• GitHub forking mysteries

(#zdoiiua) @tkanos@twtxt.net All the “decentralized software platforms” are starting to blur together.

(#gdfubhq) @prologic@twtxt.net I’ll be there.

(#wql4w5q) It also says “A specific ordering of the statuses is not mandatory,” implying that the order of the lines in the file is irrelevant. If newlines are separate posts with the same timestamp, the original line order becomes very relevant. I can see how a client (that doesn’t support this newline syntax) might display posts with the same timestamp in the wrong order because of this.

(#wql4w5q) @prologic@twtxt.net I don’t think the solution proposed there is a good one, and here are my reasons.

1. The specification says quite clearly, “The file must be encoded with UTF-8”. If an old piece of software can’t handle UTF-8, it can’t produce a valid twtxt feed at all.

2. I believe the intention behind this solution is to make it render in an acceptable fashion in clients that don’t support the convention, but I think it’s the opposite in reality. Separating posts like that could make it very frustrating to read in a feed. I would much rather have nothing or a replacement character separating logical lines.

3. I think it interferes quite heavily with human readability for the same reason. When reading a twtxt feed, it’s helpful to know that each line with a timestamp represents one post.

I just typed out a message here on Yarn, undid a few things with ctrl+z, and then tried to redo something with the vi redo key combination. That means it’s time to go to bed.

(#j5l4mla) @prologic@twtxt.net Markdown horizontal rules never worked on the Web client, as far as I know.

@darch@twtxt.net, I think that specific line had a use as a visual separator between the non-interactive text and the interactive buttons, but it’s not a hill I’m willing to die on.

(#j5l4mla) @prologic@twtxt.net @darch@twtxt.net It looks like the horizontal rules are completely gone, though. I thought they looked nice…

(#64wq5na) @prologic@twtxt.net Yes, I’ve been thinking of writing a new, unambiguous version of the original spec with some small changes to bring it in line with how feeds are actually being constructed in the wild. The comment syntax, for example, but not the Yarn extensions.

Is there community interest for such a thing?

(#luy6xva) Ah, cnbeta-com-rssding-yue.txt is hosted on feeds.twtxt.cc which isn’t blacklisted like feeds.twtxt.net is.

(#wzwth7a) Outside of this thread, this comment syntax has been used exactly twice when searching every known, currently accessible twtxt feed on the Web.

$ grep -r '@<[^ ]*>'
buckket.org.txt:2016-02-12T18:37:00+01:00	Hey @<http://vigintitres.eu/twtxt.txt>, @<teddy https://data.trafficking.agency/twtxt.txt> und @Jim@example.org was geht? Ich bin’s @GEHEIM@buckket.org!
[...]
hecanjog.com.txt:2020-09-03T17:36:00-05:00	@https://tilde.town/~lucidiot/twtxt.tx@ twtxt via DNS TXT would be insane and fun.

(#luy6xva) Here are the top ten feeds by size. @prologic@twtxt.net is artificially low on the list because it’s separated into chunks, and @movq@www.uninformativ.de is listed twice. Once as www.uninformativ.de, once as uninformativ.de. I blame yarnd.

du -b * | sort -nr | head -n 10
5253921	www.lord-enki.net.txt
842733	cnbeta-com-rssding-yue.txt
755925	search.twtxt.net.txt
654717	prologic.txt
394380	jlj.txt
371632	assets.txt
246520	off_grid_living.txt
243953	mckinley.txt
225256	www.uninformativ.de.txt
225256	uninformativ.de.txt

cnbeta-com-rssding-yue.txt seems to be a syndication feed for https://cnbeta.com/ in twtxt format, assets.txt is @maya@maya.land, and the rest are fairly self-explanatory.

(#luy6xva) @tkanos@twtxt.net Thank you very much. I thought a collection of every twtxt feed would weigh more than 14 MiB uncompressed.

(#wzwth7a) @tkanos@twtxt.net, do you have a dump of all the twtxt feeds from doing we-are-twtxt? If so, could you please upload a tarball somewhere or send me a magnet link? I want to grep it for this crazy mention syntax.

(#wzwth7a) For people using clients other than yarnd, does that appear as a valid mention? It’s valid according to the spec but I’ve never seen it in use anywhere.

Mentions are embedded within the text in either @<source.nick source.url> or @<source.url> format and should be expanded by the client, when rendering the tweets.

cc @movq@www.uninformativ.de @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Testing something… @@example.com

(#vfxgqmq) @screem@twtxt.net I think there is value in cryptocurrencies as long as they have sufficient privacy protections. If you have someone’s Bitcoin or Ethereum address, you can see every transaction he’s ever been involved in. Not enough people know that.

The value is in being able to send a scarce resource to anyone on the planet, any time of the day, any day of the week, and have it received in 20 minutes. As long as privacy is preserved, I think it’s great.

It’s completely useless in the context of a chat service, though. The blockchain nonsense was part of the reason why I ditched Session, but it was mostly the Electron client.

(#zdoe7hq) @screem@twtxt.net It is not a tough dilemma for me. A government has no right to perform mass surveillance on its citizens, treating everyone as if they were criminals. It starts with something we can all agree is reprehensible, and they say it stops there, but history tells us it never just stops there.

In addition, computers are really bad at their jobs. How many innocent people will be punished with a false positive? How many mothers will be punished for sending a photo of their newborn to the doctor?

I’m talking about punishment not only in the legal sense, but with the time, money, and worry associated with fighting legal punishment. Do you even trust your legal system enough that it will protect innocent people in these circumstances from having their lives ruined?

There are questions to be raised about the effectiveness of such a policy for its intended purpose but I’m running out of characters.

https://puri.sm/posts/internet-of-snitches/

(#vfxgqmq) @prologic@twtxt.net It’s proof of stake, so you need to stake 15,000 units of their cryptocurrency $OXEN, worth $3118 US, to run a “full service node” and 3750 $OXEN ($779 US) to run a “shared node”. If I understand correctly, only “full service nodes” can route Session messages.

If you don’t have enough $OXEN, you can pool what you do have with other people and run a node that way.

TL;DR: Not very easy. To help route Session messages at all, you have to buy in to their cryptocurrency.

Sources:

• https://loki.network/service-nodes/
  
• https://imaginary.stream/sn/