cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/40941829
Details at https://twtxt.dev/ and elsewhere. This has been in development since 2016. All you do is create a txt file in www or html and include info like
# nick = username # url = https://example.com/posts.txt # avatar = https://example.com/avatar.png # description = Describe thisto then begin posting using a command like like
echo -e "$(date -u +'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ')\tHello to all of you out there! >> posts.txtThere are various registries and places you can submit your user via curl to become more discoverable by others. Also tons of spin-offs that add support for fancier markdown and such, but haven’t tried those yet.
Read about it when playing with Gemini (the protocol, not Google garbage), but just like Twitter, did not find a good use for it. Saw maybe one page promoting it.
What do you think of Gemini? I’m currently confused by it, haha
Love the simplicity and pragmatism of both protocol and gemtext markup (not so sure on TLS requirements though). I even use gemtext to write pages for my web site / gemini capsule.
How is this more useful than just posting to an rss feed? Not trying to be snarky, just curious about the design
I’ve never heard of twtxt. When you say ‘posting entirely as plain text’, are you posting as plain text to a blog, forum, etc from the cli?
Yeah, not heard of this either
Following the cross-post to the site: https://twtxt.dev/ it seems this has been going for ~10 years!
It’s basically plain text tweets
Bookmarked. I’ll add it to the things you can do from the cli, like get the weather, which is pretty cool.
It’s…a web-accessible log file, basically. Timestamp-and-status, line after line, and “clients” read it periodically to report updates. My now-defunct feed has a couple of comments (
# ...) at the top for the URL and my “user ID,” but I don’t remember if they were requirements, conveniences, or just a cargo cult thing.If I remember right, you host a text file on your server. You write short Twitter style texts and can @ mention others and reply to their posts.
It’s been a while since I played with it, so I might be wrong.
Neat. The cli is so powerful. I probably haven’t even explored 1% of what it can do.
Here is an example for someone rendering the twtxt file, including the user icons in a manner that clearly resembles normal microblogging: https://twtxt.net/ or you can see my twtxt file directly as https://txt.livingcartoon.org/latest.txt
Does this work with a central server of some sort or is it decentralized and the only thing we have are text files and clients, and the clients handle everything else?
You simply host the txt file. It doesn’t get more decentralized, to the point that centralization is the tricky part here.
And then you follow/subscribe other peoples feeds? And your client fetches them? but theres no such thing as a “global feed”?
It is simply a line of text, so you could always relay it into whatever system. Did you see the example where people have made it into a multi-user version on same server? https://twtxt.net/ There are also relays you can submit to to centralize.
Cool.
