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It should be “No ads, no tracking, no content, only your data!”. Key value of Twitter is community and huge user base, I don’t see any point of using any copyc

by monkin 6y ago

It should be “No ads, no tracking, no content, only your data!”. Key value of Twitter is community and huge user base, I don’t see any point of using any copycat if there’s no one to follow. Same thing is with mastodon, sure there are few communities of devs and other wizards, but most of them are furries and other edgy and crunchy stuff for niche communities. And, that’s fine, at least for them, but most of the world just want to follow their loved artists or other creators.

cxr 6y ago
Many of the comments here are making this point and don't seem to understand twtxt. It's possible that the repo's README doesn't present what twtxt is as clearly as it could. The value proposition of twtxt is that it's stupid easy to "add" to your server while being good enough to be used for 80% of what you'd use Twitter or Mastodon for. You can trivially host your twtxt "account" on pretty much any server, including the one where your current website already lives, even if that server only supports static sites. This is because twtxt is more like RSS than like Twitter, albeit intended to be used in such a way that it's only appropriate for the sort of dispatches you broadcast through Twitter, rather than the totality of what RSS can be/is used for. The format also happens to score better on the human readability scale, too. Here's an example twtxt.txt feed: http://akkartik.name/twtxt.txt http://akkartik.name/twtxt.txt. That's it; if that were your feed, then that would be all your account data right there. (NB: Just so this comment isn't taken the wrong way—imagined subtext and whatnot—this comment has been written as a twtxt outsider. I'm not doing twtxt now, and I don't plan to.) PS: For anyone who is in the twtxt target audience, you should consider enabling CORS on your site, if possible. https://enable-cors.org/ https://enable-cors.org/
- monkin 6y ago
  > The value proposition of twtxt is that it's stupid easy to "add" to your server while being good enough to be used for 80% of what you'd use Twitter or Mastodon for. Maybe for HN users, but not for most of the everyday internet users. Something that people here tend to forget. :)
  - cxr 6y ago
    I see my postscript about imagined subtexts wasn't helpful. That HNers and programmers in general live in a filter bubble is not something I forget about at all. I've encountered my share of opposition for pointing this out, in fact. What's more is that this conversation is happening in a context—and it's a context where I explicitly made a reference to "twtxt['s] target audience". In comparison to setting up a Mastodon server, or getting Twitter to add support for ActivityPub, dropping a file somewhere is easy. So I don't really like quips like this. They're glib. As a person actually working on trying to fix the problem of computing being needlessly esoteric, I consider it to probably be harmful to that end, not helpful.

by monkin 6y ago

cxr 6y ago

Many of the comments here are making this point and don't seem to understand twtxt. It's possible that the repo's README doesn't present what twtxt is as clearly as it could. The value proposition of twtxt is that it's stupid easy to "add" to your server while being good enough to be used for 80% of what you'd use Twitter or Mastodon for. You can trivially host your twtxt "account" on pretty much any server, including the one where your current website already lives, even if that server only supports static sites. This is because twtxt is more like RSS than like Twitter, albeit intended to be used in such a way that it's only appropriate for the sort of dispatches you broadcast through Twitter, rather than the totality of what RSS can be/is used for. The format also happens to score better on the human readability scale, too. Here's an example twtxt.txt feed: http://akkartik.name/twtxt.txt http://akkartik.name/twtxt.txt. That's it; if that were your feed, then that would be all your account data right there. (NB: Just so this comment isn't taken the wrong way—imagined subtext and whatnot—this comment has been written as a twtxt outsider. I'm not doing twtxt now, and I don't plan to.) PS: For anyone who is in the twtxt target audience, you should consider enabling CORS on your site, if possible. https://enable-cors.org/ https://enable-cors.org/

monkin 6y ago
> The value proposition of twtxt is that it's stupid easy to "add" to your server while being good enough to be used for 80% of what you'd use Twitter or Mastodon for. Maybe for HN users, but not for most of the everyday internet users. Something that people here tend to forget. :)
- cxr 6y ago
  I see my postscript about imagined subtexts wasn't helpful. That HNers and programmers in general live in a filter bubble is not something I forget about at all. I've encountered my share of opposition for pointing this out, in fact. What's more is that this conversation is happening in a context—and it's a context where I explicitly made a reference to "twtxt['s] target audience". In comparison to setting up a Mastodon server, or getting Twitter to add support for ActivityPub, dropping a file somewhere is easy. So I don't really like quips like this. They're glib. As a person actually working on trying to fix the problem of computing being needlessly esoteric, I consider it to probably be harmful to that end, not helpful.