Anyone using twtxt? It is for posting entirely as plain text.
from kiol@discuss.online to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 08 Jun 10:48
https://discuss.online/post/40942174

cross-posted from: discuss.online/post/40941829

Details at 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 this

to 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.txt

There 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.

#selfhosted

threaded - newest

irmadlad@lemmy.world on 08 Jun 14:04 next collapse

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?

Cyber@feddit.uk on 08 Jun 15:39 next collapse

Yeah, not heard of this either

Following the cross-post to the site: twtxt.dev it seems this has been going for ~10 years!

It’s basically plain text tweets

irmadlad@lemmy.world on 08 Jun 15:45 collapse

Bookmarked. I’ll add it to the things you can do from the cli, like get the weather, which is pretty cool.

shertson@lemmy.world on 08 Jun 15:55 next collapse

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.

irmadlad@lemmy.world on 08 Jun 16:03 collapse

Neat. The cli is so powerful. I probably haven’t even explored 1% of what it can do.

jcolag@lemmy.sdf.org on 08 Jun 16:36 next collapse

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.

kiol@discuss.online on 08 Jun 15:10 collapse

Here is an example for someone rendering the twtxt file, including the user icons in a manner that clearly resembles normal microblogging: twtxt.net or you can see my twtxt file directly as txt.livingcartoon.org/latest.txt

irmadlad@lemmy.world on 09 Jun 06:53 next collapse

Cool.

somegeek@programming.dev on 09 Jun 13:22 collapse

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?

kiol@discuss.online on 09 Jun 13:46 collapse

You simply host the txt file. It doesn’t get more decentralized, to the point that centralization is the tricky part here.

somegeek@programming.dev on 09 Jun 13:53 collapse

And then you follow/subscribe other peoples feeds? And your client fetches them? but theres no such thing as a “global feed”?

kiol@discuss.online on 09 Jun 14:49 collapse

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? twtxt.net There are also relays you can submit to to centralize.

TORFdot0@lemmy.world on 08 Jun 22:17 next collapse

How is this more useful than just posting to an rss feed? Not trying to be snarky, just curious about the design

Yaky@slrpnk.net on 09 Jun 05:58 collapse

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.

kiol@discuss.online on 09 Jun 08:19 collapse

What do you think of Gemini? I’m currently confused by it, haha

Yaky@slrpnk.net on 09 Jun 11:54 collapse

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.