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Raw Text Club
- blippage 4y agoIt's surprising just how good plain text can look. The site is also available as a Gemini capsule: gemini://rawtext.club/ and gopher gopher://rawtext.club/
- adamgordonbell 4y agoNotably this page is HTML and not plain text. Here I fixed it for you ;) https://earthly-tools.com/text-mode?url=https://rawtext.club/ https://earthly-tools.com/text-mode?url=https://rawtext.club...
- kevincox 4y agoI much prefered the original with good line wrapping and clickable links. (Although for some reason a few of the paragraphs in the original were too wide for my screen)
- adamgordonbell 4y agoYeah, the hard wrapping of my link looks bad on my phone, unless I turn it sideways. But it looks good on my laptop. I guess html has benefits :) Does Gemini handle wrapping?
- JasonFruit 4y agoMost Gemini clients do decent wrapping, but it's pretty much up to them how that's done.
- agumonkey 4y agonice link, I shall make a bookmarklet
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- eterps 4y agoA tool that does the reverse would be nice. It would remove the fixed width formatting, detect paragraphs/headers/URLs and produce simple HTML so that you can read comfortably on any device form factor and click on links ;-)
- adamgordonbell 4y agoHmm, that would be cool. It almost sounds like converting from html to markdown and back to raw html would do the trick.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- speedgoose 4y ago> we're able to run a whole digital social club off it (a small VM) because we use text-based interfaces. I'm not sure it's really the reason. You could probably have performances in the same order of magnitude by sending JSON or simple HTML.
- echoradio 4y agoExcept those add layers of complexity. I don’t know if rawtext.club supports UTF-8, but if they only use ASCII, that would be a constraint I’m not sure can be matched in simplicity for both user and computer.
- speedgoose 4y agoBut it has nothing to do with performances.
- throwaway81523 4y ago> > (a small VM) By old standards it's a huge server with a gigabyte of RAM memory and tens of GB of disk (maybe even SSD). Traditional text BBS's ran on 8 bit microcomputers with 64KB of memory and maybe some floppy disks, or perhaps a hard disk in the tens of megabytes, I thought. I do like the idea of raw text. Leopold Kronecker famously said that God created ASCII, but Unicode is the work of man. Or something like that.
- speedgoose 4y agoCan't be him even with a time machine, ASCII is missing 4 letters of his language.
- avlevy-ms 4y agogp was making a reference to Kronecker's quote "Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht, alles andere ist Menschenwerk" (God made the integers, all else is the work of man)
- 4y ago
- anon96143 4y agoWish it explained more what it exactly is. AFAIK it's some kind of social network which can't be indexed by search engines so maybe more privacy friendly? I assume posting is somehow done using CLI but that's about it. If I want to know more I have to e-mail this guy to register and see for myself.
- Izmaki 4y agoNot just that, you have to convince the admin that you're good enough for their small society in the email...
- nmz 4y agoIt is their machine, So they should have the rights to admit whoever they want. but usually just with an email and a please is enough, the only downside to the tildeverse is if you're not woke they kick you out.
- sundarurfriend 4y ago> the only downside to the tildeverse Is rawtextclub related to tildeverse? I feel like I'm missing some context here without which this part of your comment seems like a non-sequitur.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Karrot_Kream 4y agoRTC, Tildeverse, Gemini, they all have a lot of overlap. They're usually cliquish communities with social and economic left values and are pretty hostile to those with different values. It is their circles after all so it's understandable, but it's a bit different from other net communities.
- sloum 4y ago
- keyle 4y agoI laughed at the VPS hosting flexing... pretending it's a grassroot movement running on limited resources. You're limited alright, in other ways. Run it from your basement on a pentium and I'll be impressed ;) Sorry I'm too old for this.
- iLoveOncall 4y agoRight, with those specs you could run any CMS-based website with images and everything and serve hundreds of users a day without any issue.
- Aeolun 4y agoWe can run the same on 32MB though. It’s just that you can’t get any VPS’es in that size any more.
- dorfsmay 4y agobuyvm.com rents 256MB VMs. vultr.com still has some 500MB VMs in some of their DCs. You could also run raspberry pi, or other small SBC form your home.
- billyhoffman 4y agoRaspberry Pis, old thinkpads, and the like are how most people host their Gemini capsules
- dorfsmay 4y agoThis? https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ Interesting, I did not know about it. Not related to the original link, right?
- ecliptik 4y agoRTC is semi-related to gemini://, they're both loosely affiliated with The Circumlunar Universe [1]. 1. https://phroxy.net/gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/1/universe https://phroxy.net/gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/1/...
- bradley_taunt 4y agoAs mentioned previously it is odd that the page is rendered in HTML and not pure plain text. For anyone interested in spinning up their own plain text blog/site, feel free to check out Shinobi (shameless plug) https://shinobi.website https://shinobi.website
- kissickas 4y agoHeads up, "ahead of it's time" should be "ahead of its time" Cool tool!
- bradley_taunt 4y agoYou are correct - fixed! Also thanks for the kind words :)
- NetOpWibby 4y agoThat ASCII art is cool af, wow. My blog[0] is also in plain text, I love it. As a designer, I’m my own worst client but redesigning my own sites multiple times a year was draining…if I design something to be super basic, I can’t get mad at it. About a year in so far, it’s working. —- [0]: https://blog.webb.page https://blog.webb.page
- bradley_taunt 4y agoThat looks fantastic. I'm always a sucker for simplicity.
- NetOpWibby 4y agoThanks!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- _8j50 4y agoHow does it work? End to end encryption? It looks centralized, so who is the person running it? The idea sounds nice. It would be amazing if there was a cli friendly lightweight alternative to matrix. I assume they use SSH for transport security. How do you discover content or message others though? If it were up to me, I would enforce PGP signing for all content and PGP encryption for private messages. The network's key will be ultimately trusted by all clients. When accounts are registered, their key is cross-signed. Standardize it a bit and keep it very simple so that others can spin up their own "network". Network capacity scaled by means of mirrors, typical OSS style. Ban==signature revocation. Come to think of it, why is this not a thing already?
- mastazi 4y agoThose that are complaining about the output being html are missing the fact that the content is accessible over http:// http://, gemini:// and gopher://, my guess is that they have libraries that convert the plain text of the home page to each of those formats and what you are seeing is the html conversion of the actual content, but that doesn't mean that the content itself is not indeed plain text. To those that are complaining about discoverability: go to the gemini and gopher versions of the home page, and you will find a list of content made available by the users in those respective formats, I'm guessing no users are publishing html content hence the list of user generated content (which is supposed to be at the bottom) is empty in the http version of the home page.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- chrismorgan 4y ago_ _ __ ____ _| |_ _ ___ __(_) \ V / _` | | || / -_|_-/_ \_/\__,_|_|\_,_\___/__(_) I… think that says “values:”, but it took me a while to decide, aided by what I might call the known-plaintext heading “rawtext.club” written in the same style.
- Aeolun 4y agoReads like valves to me
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- trumpablehump 4y agoFor "valves" there would be a stray underscore "_" on the right bottom corner of the second "v". To me it clearly is "values".
- dredmorbius 4y agoValues vs. Valves: figlet -f small Values vs. Valves __ __ _ __ __ _ \ \ / /_ _| |_ _ ___ ___ __ _____ \ \ / /_ _| |_ _____ ___ \ V / _` | | || / -_|_-< \ V (_-<_ \ V / _` | \ V / -_|_-< \_/\__,_|_|\_,_\___/__/ \_//__(_) \_/\__,_|_|\_/\___/__/
- yonrg 4y agoI bet this is output of % figlet -f small values: I think the default font (standard) is more readable. But they state, taking part is not easy:) % figlet values: _ __ ____ _| |_ _ ___ ___ _ \ \ / / _` | | | | |/ _ \/ __(_) \ V / (_| | | |_| | __/\__ \_ \_/ \__,_|_|\__,_|\___||___(_)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jes 4y agoI'm enough of a dinosaur that I think I'd be good just going back to the days of USENET, UUCP and rn.
- tenebrisalietum 4y agoI've been looking into UUCP recently and it's pretty awesome. I really like the "call" model and "hold and forwarding" features of UUCP: - All that's needed for two systems to exchange data is for one to call the other and it doesn't matter which side does or it how. - A UUCP node will hold messages received by one node, but intended for another, until it makes/receives a call from the destination system or intermediate. You can have a "leaf" system that calls into a hub system regularly but never receives calls, and it can still bidirectionally communicate due to the above. It'll be slow depending on the call schedule but it worked in the 70's. :) It's a lot of work though because you have to specify all your nodes, links, and forwarding manually. You also have to integrate it with your UNIX mailer to get standard mail tools working with it, but it wasn't too hard with postfix.
- jes 4y agoI liked it too, when I used it. It's been decades, though. I think you're right about the use model and its benefits. uw-beaver!tikal!jes :-)
- themadturk 4y agoI used UUCP on a Kaypro 10 CP/M machine in the early 90s to access email at a local ISP. It took some doing to get set up, but worked really well.
- jes 4y agoWas this a port to CP/M? The Kaypro 10 was a Z80A cpu, right?
- themadturk 4y agoI really don't remember anymore, but I know there was at least one version of UUCP on the old Oakland CP/M software archives. It was at least 1993 when I was doing this; CP/M was a hobby alongside my DOS machine.
- crtcl 4y ago
- howeyc 4y agoThis reminds me of a community of users that "tweet" by placing a line in a text file served at the root of their web servers. They follow by polling each other's text files. Simple format, something like "RFC3339 <message>" and you can mention by doing @nick<their txt url> or something like that. I forget the name and community though.
- zimpenfish 4y agotwtxt? https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ There's also yarn[1] which builds on twtxt to give you APIs and mobile clients, etc. [1] https://yarn.social https://yarn.social
- howeyc 4y agoYep, that's the one I remember.
- rvz 4y ago> RTC is a non-profit, do-it-yourself social network that uses a smaller, simpler, user-built toolkit. We are proudly the polar opposite of the big, exploitative, corporate-owned social media mega-sites. Not cool. Not easy. Not big. rawtext.club is what you make it. The point is that you can do a LOT using very minimal resources by stringing together command line tricks on a Linux system. Yeah. Of course, Who would not want to go back to the dark ages and strip everything down and go underground with the rest of the fringe projects that failed before it? Not to get too excited about creating a hidden sea chamber in the internet but I guess to each to their own? I don't think the typical regular blogger off the street would want to revert back to writing manuscripts to their readers for the sake of privacy or setting up their own instance themselves just to join an exclusive party of 5. If they won't do it with Mastodon why would they do it with this?
- peterkelly 4y agoI think the point is they want to create a small, hopefully high-quality community. It doesn't sound like it's something intended for the "typical regular blogger off the street". It's ok to build small, simple things. Not everything has to scale or be suitable for all users.
- egypturnash 4y agoI run a Mastodon instance and to be quite honest the fact that it’s kind of hidden and obscure is part of the appeal for me. It’s a nice quiet little place for me and some people I like to hang out. It’s never going to be huge, it doesn’t need to be huge, it just needs to be a place for me to talk to my friends. Not every social space needs to be planet-scale. RTC’s pitch doesn’t make me want to learn more but there are probably people here who are totally into what it’s offering.
- chadlavi 4y agoToo wide to read on a phone!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dredmorbius 4y agoFeature!
- lloydatkinson 4y agoAh yes, plain text. So, not responsive at all, needing constant side swiping on mobile and unnecessary eye strain on desktop due to no word wrapping on larger screens. At the very least use these 100 bytes of CSS so it’s readable. https://www.swyx.io/css-100-bytes https://www.swyx.io/css-100-bytes
- motogpjimbo 4y agoIf only the mobile computing revolution had been based around the form factor of the Psion Series 5...
- zzo38computer 4y agoI do not agree. I prefer it to not have any such CSS, and then I can specify what CSS I want, myself, if any; and otherwise have the client software make it suitable itself, for the width of its display, user's specified font sizes, colours (which may be different if a print out is made on paper, or if using a monochrome display), etc. (I find the default styles are mostly suitable.)
- lloydatkinson 4y agoOkay and now please list some browsers that are both wide spread and allow users to “specify their own CSS” for a site. There is absolutely nothing wrong with allowing a sane default that works for the 99.9% of people. The page already uses some crappy CSS that forces dark mode. Surely that isn’t OK if the user should be the one to need to supply their own CSS to use a site.
- lloydatkinson 4y agoThought so.
- buttocks 4y agoIt’s a 1990s BBS.
- fsiefken 4y agoCarl Newport wrote in his book Digital Minimalism (2019): "Our current relationship with the technologies of our hyper-connected world is unsustainable and is leading us closer to the quiet desperation that Thoreau observed so many years ago. But as Thoreau reminds us, “the sun rose clear” and we still have the ability to change this state of affairs. To do so, however, we cannot passively allow the wild tangle of tools, entertainments, and distractions provided by the internet age to dictate how we spend our time or how we feel. We must instead take steps to extract the good from these technologies while sidestepping what’s bad. We require a philosophy that puts our aspirations and values once again in charge of our daily experience, all the while dethroning primal whims and the business models of Silicon Valley from their current dominance of this role; a philosophy that accepts new technologies, but not if the price is the dehumanization Andrew Sullivan warned us about; a philosophy that prioritizes long-term meaning over short-term satisfaction. A philosophy, in other words, like digital minimalism." https://books.google.nl/books?id=S4NbDwAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1 https://books.google.nl/books?id=S4NbDwAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1
- bluehedgehog29 4y agoI read this book when it came out and once or twice since. Highly recommend it. The minimalist bit of the title does mislead some people into thinking it preaches "get rid of everything digital". But in practice, it is much more nuanced and helpful than that. The quote you extracted sums it up perfectly, it's much more about not passively embracing everything about everything digital. But more about only taking what's worthwhile from those platforms.
- dredmorbius 4y agoNB: Cal Newport. Not "Carl".
- dredmorbius 4y agoSee also Neil Postman, particularly Amusing Ourselves to Death, and Nicholas Carr, The Shallows. Ezra Klein with Nick Carr: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nicholas-carr-on-deep-reading-and-digital-thinking/id1081584611?i=1000480085743 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nicholas-carr-on-deep-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shallows_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shallows_(book)
- frazbin 4y agoSome day I'm gonna figure out what Eggdrop is.
- trumpablehump 4y agoEggdrop is a bot for IRC. IRC is a low-fidelity text-based real-time chat system. There are many IRC networks (there were many more 10-20 years ago) and on these networks there can be channels (chat rooms). Those channels are often topical, e.g. #gentoo, #massachussets or #electronics. Eggdrop is configurable with scripts and for what that allows I want to simply quote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggdrop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggdrop: Scripts are available to add and extend support for: online games, stats, user and channel management, information storage and lookup, greeting channel members, tracking last seen times, botnet management, anti-spam, file serving and distribution (usually via the DCC protocol), IRC services (similar to ChanServ and NickServ), and much more.
- tenebrisalietum 4y agoAn IRC server is extremely minimal. It: - keeps a list of nicknames<->IP sockets, - keeps a list of channels, which nicknames is in what channel, and the mode of each nickname in the channel (operator, etc.). First join command to a channel creates the channel and sets the creator with operator privileges. - when a command to send a message is received (which must specify a channel), it forwards the chat text to the appropriate sockets based who is in the channel. That's it. Honestly it's about the least you can do to turn TCP into a multiuser chat protocol. Because of this minimality, IRC was able to handle hundreds or thousands of simultaneous users on 1990 hardware. Channel operators can kick malicious users, set topics, etc. Again, when you create a channel, you're op. An operator can give operator privileges to other users, so it's possible for a channel to have multiple ops and they can look out for each other - if connected. When your TCP connection to IRC ends, classic IRC forgets all about you. If all channel operators lose their connection, then your channel may be opless and you might lose control of it. A classic IRC server is not like a modern chat server, it keeps no database or persistent record of chat text, nicknames, or channels. So you can't log off and back on and get your chat history, look at messages in the channel while you were gone, or get automatically joined back to the channels you were part of, or "own" channels. That was all offloaded to the client. Eggdrop was a program that would let you create an IRC bot - you would run this on your early 90's UNIX shell account you got from your university and it would stay connected when you weren't dialed in. Eggdrop will connect to the IRC server you tell it under the nickname you provide, join the channels you tell it, and then sits in the channel. You can give it op privileges, and would basically occupy the channel so it would not get taken over. It could also be set to auto-op people who joined (you could talk to the bot via IRC and authenticate). It was also possible to create multiple eggdrops that worked together and would look out for each others channels (a botnet) - ideally you would have multiple running from different IPs such as your friends from different universities. Eggdrop could also talk in the channel, respond to chat text in the channels, and provide access to files or memos. You could also telnet into the eggdrop directly and manage it, and talk with others on any botnet you setup. So if a channel or IRC server was being attacked or down, you had an out of band way to talk. Most modern IRC servers have "NickServ", "ChanServ" services that provide things like persistent users, channel ownership, and such, but that didn't come around until the 2000's I believe. You might still use an Eggdrop to do IRC games or file distribution.
- ecliptik 4y agoI have an RTC account (gemini link in bio), it's more of a pubnix than a social network - there are custom social oriented cli tools for posting internal text blogs, short message streams, BBS-like topic system, and others. Most of them are up on the RTC gitea instance [1]. Users log on infrequently, and you can catch up relatively quickly after not logging in for a couple of months. It's very asynchronous. My primary use of RTC is hosting a gemini capsule and gopherhole generated from my Jekyll blogs markdown posts using a hacky shell script and pandoc. 1. https://git.rawtext.club/explore/repos https://git.rawtext.club/explore/repos
- alfiedotwtf 4y agoI felt that should have redirected to https://rawtext.club/FILE_ID.DIZ https://rawtext.club/FILE_ID.DIZ :)
- permo-w 4y agothey say a picture paints a thousand words. sometimes I don't want to see a thousand words
- permo-w 4y agonot quite as extreme, but today I made a text-post only subreddit for discussion of [English] football topics, without the distractions of pictures and videos or news, if that interests anybeing
- blockarchitech 4y agoPLEASE NOTE THAT WE MAY BE SLOW IN RESPONDING TO NEW ACCOUNT REQUESTS. RTC APPEARED ON THE FRONT PAGE OF HACKER NEWS AND WE RECEIVED AN OVERWHELMING NUMBER OF NEW ACCOUNT APPLICATIONS AS A RESULTS. PLEASE BE PATIENT AS WE SORT THROUGH EVERYTHING. Hey, it's cool!