8 ms·
Twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers
- deadbabe 2y agoWith a name like Twtxt how are you supposed to easily talk about it with other people? Not even one vowel
- sn0n 2y agoI think I'd pronounce it as, Twit-ext?
- freetinker 2y agoThis is correct. The rest are incorrect.
- zeograd 2y agoIntuitively, I read it as "tweetext"
- PNewling 2y agoHuh, in my head I was reading it 'twit-text' (this is not meant to be a pejorative comment), but I guess that is ascribing it another 't' where there isn't one
- linsomniac 2y agoThe upvotes on the pronunciation in the sibling comments should be considered legally binding and will be the authoritative pronunciation. Upvote carefully.
- mikae1 2y agoTalk? You write about it, on a (mechanical) keyboard.
- Aloha 2y agotwit-text is how I would pronounce it.
- kstrauser 2y agoIf it becomes popular, I’m pronouncing it “twixt”, even if it’s wrong.
- guerrilla 2y agoThis has to be it.
- hackernewds 2y agoI inferred Twittext so it's not ideally designed for virality
- bookofjoe 2y agohttps://imgur.com/a/XtEuaEd https://imgur.com/a/XtEuaEd
- huijzer 2y agoThere is a long history of confusing or weird project names in computing like sqlite, gif, Splunk, Hadoop, Coq, MongoDB (from humongous apparently), yacc, C, R, and X (the window manager; not a lang or the social media site).
- elpocko 2y agoNot a huge problem: it existed for 9 years and no one is talking about it.
- tux 2y agoIt kind of sounds like twitter extension. This is what i thought of it as when i first seen it. This can be very confusing.
- smitty1e 2y agoI suppose that if one were motivated, one would run a https://github.com/plomlompom/htwtxt https://github.com/plomlompom/htwtxt service and then point the audience to it. Not clear that the juice would be worth the squeeze over, e.g. Mastadon.
- bityard 2y agoNot a Welsh speaker, I see
- shakna 2y agoMost of the community call it Yarn. They use twtxt as the protocol name - and it isn't like HTTP is one vowel.
- JdeBP 2y agoAs its name says, "double u" is not just one but two vowels. (-:
- fsiefken 2y agoperhaps someone can implement it in the bluesky pds as an additional feature https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds put caddy in front of it for brotli compression so it serves fast on 1k2 links
- simonw 2y agoI found it surprisingly hard to find live examples of sites running this. The directory at https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/we-are-twtxt https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/we-are-twtxt gave me an error, but I found it in the Internet Archive (19th September 2024): https://web.archive.org/web/20240919022045/https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/we-are-twtxt/src/branch/master/we-are-twtxt.txt https://web.archive.org/web/20240919022045/https://git.mills... Here's a live example from that list: https://niplav.site/twtxt.txt https://niplav.site/twtxt.txt - and that one shows ones its following, this one has recent posts (from December 2024): https://txt.sour.is/user/xuu/twtxt.txt https://txt.sour.is/user/xuu/twtxt.txt The last commit to https://github.com/buckket/twtxt/commits/master/ https://github.com/buckket/twtxt/commits/master/ is October 2023, so I don't think this project is 100% thriving at the moment. Update: Aha! Found https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/registry.html https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/registry.html and via it https://registry.twtxt.org/api/plain/tweets https://registry.twtxt.org/api/plain/tweets which shows some recent content across the network. Also https://registry.twtxt.org/api/plain/users https://registry.twtxt.org/api/plain/users looks to be a list of users, though I couldn't figure out how to paginate it (using ?page=3 doesn't seem to work, despite that being listed on the https://registry.twtxt.org/swagger-ui/ https://registry.twtxt.org/swagger-ui/ page)
- ahazred8ta 2y agoThe current list of active yarn.social/twtxt sites is at https://feeds.twtxt.net/feeds https://feeds.twtxt.net/feeds (there are quite a lot) The community name is YARN; 'twtxt' is the protocol name.
- simonw 2y agoThanks! I've filed a PR to add that to the documentation. https://github.com/buckket/twtxt/pull/183 https://github.com/buckket/twtxt/pull/183
- lofaszvanitt 2y agobecause it's "for hackers"!
- 2y ago
- dang 2y agoRelated. Others? A Decentralised Social Network - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33513022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33513022 - Nov 2022 (1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25246533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25246533 (Nov 2020) Twtxt Is a Self-Hosted, Twitter-Like Decentralised MicroBlogging Platform - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25242996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25242996 - Nov 2020 (27 comments) Show HN: Twtxt v0.0.7 Your self-hosted, decentralised Twitter -like - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23945300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23945300 - July 2020 (7 comments) Twtxt.net – Attempting to respark the twtxt community - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23892491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23892491 - July 2020 (1 comment) Twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23507640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23507640 - June 2020 (1 comment) Twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23312756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23312756 - May 2020 (1 comment) Show HN: Txtnish – a client for the microblogging platform twtxt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13742949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13742949 - Feb 2017 (4 comments) Show HN: htwtxt – hosted twtxt server (written in Go) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11091592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11091592 - Feb 2016 (2 comments) Show HN: Twtxt – Decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11043502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11043502 - Feb 2016 (65 comments)
- ruthmarx 2y agoSo how big is the Twtxt community? How many Twtxters?
- ahazred8ta 2y agohttps://feeds.twtxt.net/feeds https://feeds.twtxt.net/feeds (There are hundreds of us!! HUNDREDS!!!) /s
- zimpenfish 2y agoI think I only ever interacted with 2 whilst I was experimenting with twtxt.
- briandear 2y agoWhat problem is this solving? Not a criticism, just genuinely curious. On X, I can follow hackers, I can block/mute and curate as I want. Just not sure who asked for this.
- prmoustache 2y agoYou can't self host your X feed for a start.
- briandear 2y agoAlso, I forgot that Mastadoon is/was also a thing. Are there any original ideas out there rather than another “Twitter but not Twitter” clone?
- bityard 2y agoTwitter, but your tweets are stored on a blockchain with smart contracts written by LLMs. In Rust.
- jazzyjackson 2y agoI actually liked bitclout, seemed like it would work really well for artists' fundraising for an album release or a tour etc. featured no-fee "tips" of all sizes right next to the like button and kept users addicted with day trading mechanics tied to artists' popularity. Money flowed freely across borders and moderation was going to be handled by clients. afaik there was never any rugpull of the base currency, but it turned out to be a platform ideally suited to rugpulling and impersonating celebrities. Plus if you thought drama on Twitter was bad just try pinning your bank balance to individuals' reputations and see how well everyone gets along.
- shakna 2y agoPeertube [0], Lemmy [1], and Pixelfed [2] all run on the same protocol as Mastodon. You can interact across all of them (e.g. Mastodon user replies to Peertube video post), but the presentation on each is very different. There's more as well. Like Friendica [3] feels a little bit like Facebook, and Hubzilla [4] feels a bit like Google+ used to. Diaspora feels a bit more basic, but similar concept to Friendica. All of them can cross interact. [0] YouTube style - https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/ [1] Reddit-style - https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/ [2] Instagram-style - https://pixelfed.org/ https://pixelfed.org/ [3] https://friendi.ca/ https://friendi.ca/ [4] https://hubzilla.org https://hubzilla.org
- jazzyjackson 2y agopixelfed looks nice. Instagram has been the only social I kept around because it's nice to look at pictures but they've recently transitioned to full on Tiktok/yt shorts competitor, I'd love to jump ship to something that's just photographs again. Never tried lemmy, are the separate servers essentially "subreddits" ? That's cool that there aren't any global admins so each community really can have their own moderation rules.
- 2muchcoffeeman 2y agoWhy do we even need a microblogging platform? Twitter turned into a dumpster fire. Why will these other alternatives not have the same fate?
- qudat 2y agoI’m inclined to agree. These post platforms are a race to the bottom
- dontdoxxme 2y agoWe don't. If anything just using HTTP and HTML the way it was designed is fine. See https://indieweb.org https://indieweb.org
- andreygrehov 2y ago> Why do we even need a microblogging platform? Diversity of options is great. > Twitter turned into a dumpster fire I disagree. I love the new Twitter.
- velcrovan 2y agoWhat do you like about it?
- toomim 2y agoCommunity notes is really great. It's the best system for fact-checking anyone's ever come up with.
- ksenzee 2y agoYou must like it for political reasons, because from a technical standpoint the new Twitter is a catastrophe. It doesn’t even work properly. The other day I typed in the URL of an account I wanted to check, from a browser where I wasn’t logged in, and I got an endless loop of redirects. Watching Musk tear down Twitter infrastructure over the last two years has been like watching the Notre Dame fire, except if it was set on purpose. It was a miracle of human accomplishment and now it’s a shell of its old self.
- ynniv 2y agonostr is the hackers microblog. Just sign things and relay them: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/01.md https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/01.md https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42489954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42489954
- cbzbc 2y agoLike mini usenet with signatures.
- hoytech 2y agoWhat I like about nostr is the experimentation with different clients, and the fact that your identity is portable to any of them. It's just a really cool model. I'm working on a nostr-based discussion site heavily inspired by HN/reddit: https://oddbean.com/ https://oddbean.com/ No login required, and you can switch to a different client any time you want. We try to keep the bitcoin/politics stuff to a minimum on the homepage. There's a lot of that on nostr, but also a lot of kind and thoughtful discussion about diverse subjects.
- nunobrito 2y agoYes, with NOSTR you get the benefit of creating random accounts as well as reusing existing ones. Good work with the platform.
- nacs 2y agoThe nostr tech itself is great. The problem with nostr is that 95% of the conversations are about crypto.
- nmz 2y agoNot a bad idea, light enough to implement a telegram bot everyone can use or email or maybe a bitlbee plugin so you can have a twtxt channel. But, what is it? can you PM someone? participate in a conversation? or is it just that, a microblog? Usability wise what will you do? keep a client running that always checks if new blogs have happened over, how many followers? I'm currently following 500 people, that's 500 connections if this takes off. It would be nice if an rss client supported it, until then ehh
- codazoda 2y agoIt's quite buggy. Any minor change from the norm (config directory, txt file directory) seemed to break it. Finally I went with the standards and it still had trouble. `twtxt following` gives you errors. At first I thought it was because I wasn't following anyone, even though I chose to follow the twtxt news feed, but I never got rid of the error. I got errors about "feed not available" even though the txt files were there (maybe version differences?) It sounds kinda interesting, honestly, but I give up.
- lofaszvanitt 2y agothen you are not a hacker at heart :)
- shortrounddev2 2y agoOr they have better things to do than debug someone else's pet project
- fsiefken 2y agofor another smolweb social network, check bubble running on gemini. http://portal.mozz.us/gemini/git.skyjake.fi/bubble/main/ http://portal.mozz.us/gemini/git.skyjake.fi/bubble/main/ http://portal.mozz.us/spartan/hitchhiker-linux.org/gemlog/on_bubble_centralization_and_federation.gmi http://portal.mozz.us/spartan/hitchhiker-linux.org/gemlog/on... the last url needs a gemini client to view. surprisingly bubble looks a bit like hackernews and has support for moderation "Discussion forums, microblogging, and Git issue tracking for the Gemini community. You only need a Gemini client to participate. Welcome!" gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/s/Bubble
- dools 2y agoTitle shouild be: "Welcome to twtxt!"
- James_K 2y agoIt's called HTML + RSS.
- dirtysanchez 2y ago[dead]
- shark_laser 2y agoI was using it for years before moving to Mastodon, then Nostr. It did work rather well, is easy to code for, and I still have people pulling from my twtxt file, but it does get a bit tiresome managing follows etc with the clumsy apps. And not having a decent mobile app made it less fun to use on what for me is social media's primary use case - while on the loo hahaha.
- chickenfeed 2y agoGreat app name: ontheloo
- chickenfeed 2y agoBut perhaps, not so good, don't google that one.
- astrea 2y agoThis is literally just a shared text file with buzz words thrown in the title. You could achieve the same thing with a Google Drive link to a text file.
- block_dagger 2y agoBroken image and popup message that disappears after a few seconds on the home page. Yeah, no thanks.
- sssilver 2y agoI will never understand why all these minimalist content publishing systems pretend that visual imagery is unnecessary. Humans have expressed themselves in images long before they have expressed themselves in text. Any system that forces humans to express themselves purely in ASCII, monospace, and monochrome is crude and borderline disrespectful towards human expression. It made sense in 1983, when the technology to power these expressions was not prevalent. But why do this today? I know they exist, but who are the people who confine themselves this way? Is it acknowledged as an act of self-discipline or self-restraint? Some sort of an artistic statement? What is the process through which one arrives at "I will commit to this system, and always only communicate in written speech, laid out in uniform monochromatic typographic format. I will walk into these constraints voluntarily." Any medieval monk writing manuscripts, any ancient Greek or Roman or Egyptian or Chinese capturing history and literature on parchments would have gasped at such a thought.
- ipaddr 2y agoThe ironic part is you post this on a throwback site where content is more important than presentation.
- maximinus_thrax 2y agoAnd medieval monks in heaven are all gasping in unison
- sssilver 2y agoI gather from your text that you perceive images to be presentation and monochrome monospace text to be content. Isn't all expression in a nutshell an act of presenting content? Is emphasis content, or is it presentation? What about lowercase and uppercase? IS THAT CONTENT? Or "simply" presentation? All expression is an attempt for our content to be perceived as we intend. All expression is a presentation of our content, including the very text of it. The text itself is simply one of the dimensions of our content's presentation.
- troupo 2y agoHN is not a blogging site, and its content is ephemeral comments. It's main value is threaded discussions which excuses the archaic and limited tools.
- jimmySixDOF 2y agoSimon Willison has one of the more prolific microblogs going and just did a meta review on his approach including the mechanics (surprise surprise it's Django). Could be of interest to anyone double clicking this thread. My approach to running a link blog 22nd December 2024 https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/ https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/
- prologic 2y agoThe Twtxt/Yarn community is larger than you think. As the founder of Yarn.social[1] (which itself uses the Twtxt spec and extensions[2]) and operator of the "flagship" instance twtxt.net[3] I often interact with around ~70 folks (_not including news feeds_). [1]: https://yarn.social https://yarn.social [2]: https://twtxt.net https://twtxt.net [3]: https://twtxt.net https://twtxt.net
- cfiggers 2y agoRespectfully, 70 folks is not larger than I thought.
- prologic 2y agoYeah sure, but as I said the community is actually much larger. It is also very hard to measure because Twtxt/Yarn is what I call, "truly decentralised". However you are right, the search engine/crawler puts the active feeds at around ~1000 or so. So orders of magnitude smaller than any "big tech" social ecosystem, but that's kind of the appeal really.
- jazzyjackson 2y agoMan I remember when I had 70 friends on Myspace, that was an incredible amount of interaction in the day
- k0ns0l 2y agopass :/
- p4bl0 2y agoI built a very (very) similar tool called terss (for "terse" and "RSS") years ago in Bash on top of RSS feeds (using core-utils and more-utils — in particular for 2xml and xml2) for interoperability because it made the whole thing more easy to produce and consume with other tools. I'll try to find if I still have it around somewhere :). UPDATE: here it is: https://code.up8.edu/pablo/myutils/-/blob/master/terss https://code.up8.edu/pablo/myutils/-/blob/master/terss
- James_K 2y agoDoes it support RSS paging? https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5005 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5005
- brisky 2y agoAnother decentralized feed alternative: https://github.com/really-simple-decentralized-syndication https://github.com/really-simple-decentralized-syndication