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Raw Text Club

rawtext.club

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Carl 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

I 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.

NB: Cal Newport. Not "Carl".

See 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-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shallows_(book)

As far as I'm concerned they're basically domain squatters. I'm a fan of things that are text-driven, but they want you to answer questions about your ethics or something to join. That has nothing to do with raw text or the original ethos of the Internet. They are just some social club trying to be edgy.

They even point you to actual text driven communities like SDF and tilde.club, which are both great. That's the best thing on their site.

> 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.

Except 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.

But it has nothing to do with performances.

> > (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.

Can't be him even with a time machine, ASCII is missing 4 letters of his language.

gp 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)

But most BBSes were heavy on ANSI and ANSI art so I don't think "raw text" is an accurate recollection.

Wish 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.

Not just that, you have to convince the admin that you're good enough for their small society in the email...

It 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.

> 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.

RTC, 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.

I have not been on an official tilde server (I wouldnt join because they have a code of conduct which I think infantilises adult humans)... but I am on a few pubnixes (circumlunar.space, rawtext.club, colorfield.space) and know a large number of folks that do not align with social and economic left values on these servers. Honestly, most of us stay out of political discussion on the servers and mostly talk about tech or sometimes philosophy (which can have political elements to it). Anecdotal, of course, so ymmv... but so long as you arent being a jerk to other people I've not seen any issues with people having diverging views of those sorts on these servers (at least the ones I have been on).

> the only downside to the tildeverse is if you're not woke they kick you out.

Heh?

So basically, if you behave like an asshole on their machine, they kick you out? Seems fair.

That seems reasonable to me. Small groups can be easily torn apart bad bad actors. Even well meaning folks that just don't vibe well can really hae a large effect on small intentional communities. It isnt about being good enough, by my reading, it is about a good fit.

It’s a single computer that allows ssh and tmux with irc, email, and other text based commands to communicate with each other.

I 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

This 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.

twtxt?

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

Yep, that's the one I remember.

It'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/

How 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?

Ah 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

If only the mobile computing revolution had been based around the form factor of the Psion Series 5...

I 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.)

Okay 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.

Thought so.

I'm enough of a dinosaur that I think I'd be good just going back to the days of USENET, UUCP and rn.

I'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.

I 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 :-)

I 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.

Was this a port to CP/M? The Kaypro 10 was a Z80A cpu, right?

I 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.

If you want a "modern" take on UUCP, there's NNCP [1] which encrypts packets and offers a TCP transfer mode out of the box. It also has the concept of multicast arenas to send packets to multiple hosts at a time. There's no real concept of paths, but you can write one atop NNCP if you'd like.

[1a]: https://www.complete.org/nncp/ a site with info about NNCP

[1b]: http://www.nncpgo.org/ the official site.

There's also a Matrix room and an IRC channel for questions and general community if you're interested.

If you want to set up a NNTP server, you can do so; I have my own NNTP server set up, and others can also do. I wrote a program called "sqlnetnews"; there is also "WendzelNNTP"; and you can also use some of the more complicated ones such as INN, etc.

I really appreciate the advice. I'll check it out.

If you want a "modern" take on UUCP, there's NNCP [1] which encrypts packets and offers a TCP transfer mode out of the box.

[1a]: https://www.complete.org/nncp/ a site with info about NNCP

[1b]: http://www.nncpgo.org/ the official site.

There's also a Matrix room and an IRC channel for questions and general community if you're interested.

PLEASE 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!

they say a picture paints a thousand words. sometimes I don't want to see a thousand words

I felt that should have redirected to https://rawtext.club/FILE_ID.DIZ :)

Some day I'm gonna figure out what Eggdrop is.

Eggdrop 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: 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.

An 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.

Excellent description. I haven't thought about IRC since I was a kid (and not a software engineer). This brings about beautiful nostalgia and new found sense of elegance.

Fond memories of staying up late into the night.

not 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

It’s a 1990s BBS.

Those that are complaining about the output being html are missing the fact that the content is accessible over 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.

As 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

Heads up, "ahead of it's time" should be "ahead of its time"

Cool tool!

You are correct - fixed! Also thanks for the kind words :)

That 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

That looks fantastic. I'm always a sucker for simplicity.

Thanks!

Notably this page is HTML and not plain text.

Here I fixed it for you ;)

https://earthly-tools.com/text-mode?url=https://rawtext.club...

I 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)

Yeah, 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?

Most Gemini clients do decent wrapping, but it's pretty much up to them how that's done.

nice link, I shall make a bookmarklet

A 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 ;-)

Hmm, that would be cool. It almost sounds like converting from html to markdown and back to raw html would do the trick.

            _             _ 
  __ ____ _| |_  _ ___ __(_)
  \ 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.

Reads like valves to me

For "valves" there would be a stray underscore "_" on the right bottom corner of the second "v". To me it clearly is "values".

Values vs. Valves:

  figlet -f small Values vs. Valves

  __   __    _                         __   __    _            
  \ \ / /_ _| |_  _ ___ ___ __ _____   \ \ / /_ _| |_ _____ ___
   \ V / _` | | || / -_|_-< \ V (_-<_   \ V / _` | \ V / -_|_-<
    \_/\__,_|_|\_,_\___/__/  \_//__(_)   \_/\__,_|_|\_/\___/__/

I 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 / (_| | | |_| |  __/\__ \_
    \_/ \__,_|_|\__,_|\___||___(_)

I 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.

Right, with those specs you could run any CMS-based website with images and everything and serve hundreds of users a day without any issue.

We can run the same on 32MB though. It’s just that you can’t get any VPS’es in that size any more.

buyvm.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.

Raspberry Pis, old thinkpads, and the like are how most people host their Gemini capsules

This?

https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

Interesting, I did not know about it.

Not related to the original link, right?

RTC 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/...

Indeed. I run my gemini capsule off of a Raspberry Pi 3 using FreeBSD. The one thing about Pi's is that they sip energy. I was using about 2.4W, so I estimated running costs at less than £7pa.

I've no doubt that one could serve gopher pages using a microcontroller like the ESP-32. Gemini would be more difficult, due to encryption requirements.

Readers may also be interested to learn of the Spartan protocol, which is basically Gemini without the encryption and a more flexibly upload option. Spartan hasn't really caught on yet, though.

I've also heard of a protocol called Mercury, which I assume is similar to Gemini, but even simpler. I've not read up about it, though.

Yeah, this got me:

> RESOURCE MINIMALISM. rawtext.club runs on a tiny cloud-based VPS with 1 GB of memory and a 25 GB disk.

Nothing "tiny" about this!

Too wide to read on a phone!

Feature!

> 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?

I 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.

I 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.

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