We need a textodon (text-only Fediverse hub) | Hacker News Reader

We need a textodon (text-only Fediverse hub)

bluelander.bearblog.dev

79 pointsaabbcc124164 comments

> there really oughta be a text-only implementation of mastodon or one of the other fediverse ecosystems

Something like this that I know of, in a very simplified form.

> twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers.

> So you want to get some thoughts out on the internet in a convenient and slick way while also following the gibberish of others? Instead of signing up at a closed and/or regulated microblogging platform, getting your status updates out with twtxt is as easy as putting them in a publicly accessible text file. The URL pointing to this file is your identity, your account. twtxt then tracks these text files, like a feedreader, and builds your unique timeline out of them, depending on which files you track. The format is simple, human readable, and integrates well with UNIX command line utilities.

https://github.com/buckket/twtxt

I have used this format a little bit when I first found out about it. But haven’t felt like adding any more entries to my twtxt file beyond the ones that I added to it in the first couple of days of having set it up.

Warning: People using twtxt seem to be adding feeds indiscriminately so that they will follow your feed several years after you announced it as gone. HTTP response codes like “404 Not Found“ and “410 Gone” will not make them stop.

That seems fixable if we were to build a new client / protocol

The current protocol already has a perfectly clean "this has gone away forever, stop checking" result code, and it is being ignored. What will a new client or protocol do to fix that?

you now have 15 protocols

Apreche suggested that ActivityPub is text (json) only already so we can avoid the 19th protocol :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34805222

Give it a bit longer, and we'll just be able to say "927", and everyone will know what you mean.

But for now, https://xkcd.com/927/

That reminds me of the story where prisoners tell each other jokes by number:

https://groups.google.com/g/rec.humor/c/Pu-ZIoTMk7U

I propose a new protocol, xkcd://<comic nr>

Such as xkcd://927

I recognise the quote every time. But I do not plan on learning the individual numbers of any of the xkcd strips. Recognising the quotes is enough for me.

Nine-hundred and twenty seven.

(Un)fortunately for you, human memory and cognition is weird.

927.

So by the time you reach this sentence in comment, the number 900, which is Yoda's age in the original Star Wars, plus the number 27, which is 3 cubed, as well as the name of the "27-club", will have appeared three times if you count my previous comment.

That number, 927, should stick out in your brain as being the number for the XKCD strip about standards.

It's possible that the mnemonic, and the repetition is enough for that number to permanently lodge itself in your brain. Or not.

Bro is hacking brain memories via HN comments now :sweating:

It is text only, sort of. The ActivityPub protocol is basically just JSON, which is text. It's the Mastodon software that chooses to go above and beyond merely implementing that spec and doing things like fetching and hosting images, making a federated timeline, etc.

What we really need is an ActivityPub protocol reference app. An ActivityPub server that is built to the spec and nothing more. All it does is have inboxes, outboxes, and shuttle the JSON messages back and forth. No web UI. No nothing else. Just ActivityPub. Then it can be entirely up to users to provide their own client software of their choosing to engage with the platform.

https://git.sr.ht/~mariusor/fedbox seems to be trying to do that.

Indeed.

I'm the one developing that, any questions or feedback I'll be glad to hear it, and thank you for your interest. :)

The sourcehut one is the non canonical repository, the canonical one is at https://github.com/go-ap/fedbox as the application serves as a testing bed for the GoActivityPub library that I'm working on, which is under the go-ap github organization.

I'd be very glad if any other Go developers interested in interacting with the fediverse take a look and see if they can use it.

I do have a question for you, how's brutalinks development coming along? I'd love to run it witg federation.

In a slump at the moment, I am developing some lateral functionality in a single instance application with a JS frontend on top of fedbox, but as soon as I finish with that I'll be back to brutalinks.

Thanks! I am going to try this out.

I've had this idea a while ago for a "SocialOS," an operating system for developers to build social media services, and your descriptions sounds frighteningly close

In all honesty, this is exactly what the Gemini network feels like, especially with capsules like Antenna, Midnight.pub and probably others.

Let me advertise my own CLI browsers which will turn the whole web, including pictures, into a text-only-verse ;-)

https://sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk/

Offpunk is great. Thanks for making it! I use it at least weekly (there is not all that much traffic on gemini that I follow so I can catch up in one or two evenings per week).

One fun side-effect of Offpunk is that it fulfills a dream I had about web browsers for many years but never tried to do anything about as I never had enough disk space for it anyway: It by default saves every page I look at in a cache that never expires. So I know if I ever read anything on gemini I can grep in my own local cache and find it again without having to rely on it to still exist somewhere in the cloud.

One of the achievement I’m the proudest about Offpunk is being able to blur the line between web and gemini and do what you explain on the web.

With more than one year of full time browsing using offpunk, my cache is around 15Go, which is not that much.

It should be possible to build a mastodon server that provides a gemini interface.

Maybe it’s more about the client. Toot is a good CLI client. I may add mastodon support into offpunk someday.

yeah this is 100% what gemini is[1].

for browsing geminispace, i highly recommend the lagrange browser[2]. or amfora for terminal[3].

[1] https://gemini.circumlunar.space

[2] https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/

[3] https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora

I love this concept, and the name is really fun! I guess you have now booked my upcoming weekend for my play time! :-)

A somewhat related aside/question for the crowd- I've been hosting my own website for a little while with no issues, but I also don't really have any media stuff up on there. I added a wiki recently and have really enjoyed working on it. But, right now, that also has no media stuff on it, and I think I would like it to, but I also feel like this is one of those "haha you thought this would be easy? fuck you' things.

I'm not worried about it from a normal usage standpoint. The website isn't interactive, I plan on being the only person with edit privileges on the wiki, for example. But I feel like based on things I've read, mostly on HN over the years, that this is opening a...different sort of box of worms than I already have open. Easier DDOS? Abuse of my image hosting, killing my monthly bandwidth allotment? I really don't want to have to set up a CDN just to host a wiki that is averaging less than one not-me viewer per month...

Am I paranoid, or just uninformed?

It depends on your hosting situation, but unless you're using a hosting plan with bandwidth allotments from like 1993, you definitely don't need to worry about that. My host gives me like 2TB of bandwidth per month for $10/mo, and even with an article with several images hitting the front-page of HN for a full day, I think I used less than 1/3 of that allotment.

And unless you're doing something really... bizarre... no one is going to spend their resources to DDoS your personal blog :)

What's your barometer for "bizzare" though?

The sad reality is that anyone running a website on the Internet these days is target for a DDoS, you only have to piss off the wrong somebody with 5 cents of sense and $50 of Bitcoin. Your personal website about birds you saw could get DDoSed by your neighbor who thinks you're lying about seeing more birds than him. To be clear, most sites will be unmolested and if it's a small personal site, just taking it down until the attacker gets bored is certainly one option. But if it's something business related you don't really have that option.

To be blunt, I don't think any of that is very likely.

I wouldn't have either. Then, a week ago, a newly created Twitter account started following me, using my wife's first name and part of our address as the display name, and using a picture of our house as the profile picture. Look, I know that tweeting under my real name and owning a house in the US means that the amount of effort required to actually find all that stuff is pretty minimal...I didn't do anything much more bizarre than complain about Elon turning Twitter to shit, and it's a pretty good guess that that's what they were upset about since the account was only following me and Elon.

People be wilding out there man.

One way to reduce harm from DDOS is to host the content with decentralized protocol e.g. ipfs and link the images or even the entire website through public gateway.

That's not ideal as it just shifts the problem to the gateway. Maybe NDN (named data network) could help if more routers support that.

Hmm, how about go "all-in" with the text-only approach and dispense with the database backend as well (use the filesystem-as-database). In a sense focus on the absolutely minimum resources and layers, avoid any moving parts and fragility and deliver the basic activitypub federation experience but in a very solid way?

Would this be attractive to more people than a niche? Not clear, but coupled with a performant language it might be "blazing fast" while very economical.

> use the filesystem-as-database

I have seen at least one ActivityPub server that does this. The name eludes me right now but it definitely exists.

edit: aha, 'kseistrup posted it - https://epicyon.net

Also my project, mentioned elsewhere in the thread: https://github.com/go-ap/fedbox, supports filesystem storage directly. It's built in Go, but even like that, some other storage backends are faster than the raw filesystem.

From a quick look, seems to only support C2S for talking to clients? Are there any clients or web frontends that talk C2S? They mostly seem to use the MastoAPI.

It has a reddit/hn like link aggregator and discussion platform that uses it as a back end: https://brutalinks.tech

Aha, cool, I'll have a look at that as well, ta!

this is interesting. the architecture might be a good introduction to activitypub servers - https://gitlab.com/bashrc2/epicyon/-/blob/main/README_archit...

I mean that's just "write the blog/activitypub in something that's not RoR or other just as slow stack". "Just" that.

With SQLite and maybe a tiny bit of caching you can also get "no external DB deps" easily

I’d love to see a “solo install” fediverse/activitypub setup. Like a true microblog, where my domain is just my content and people find/follow me based on my domain.

I guess it’s really just an evolution of RSS.

I’m running a Mastodon instance right now that people are free to join but it feels too heavy handed. I’d love a sports car not a school bus, if that makes sense.

You could do that with e.g. https://microblog.pub/

Epicyon is also easy to set up:

⌘ https://epicyon.net/

Gemini is a bit like that (on a small scale). Basically everyone have their own tiny server somewhere to post on, and there is a widely adopted standard for how to publish "gemlogs" using just standard gemtext with links that begin with an ISO-date to produce something like RSS but much simpler. And then there is the Antenna site that anyone can broadcast their gemlog updates to by just pasting the gemlog URL in a form (and also various other gemlog aggregators, but Antenna seems to be the most popular one?).

Antenna would never scale the way it works now. Most things about Gemini probably would not scale. But there seems to be a low risk that it grows too much anyway.

I’m working on CalmGuava Mastodon for business[0]. The goal is to trim the fat and improve the “single entity” experience.

[0] - https://calmguava.com

the fediverse and business right now mix about as well as oil and water but it will be interesting to see how that evolves as it becomes mainstream.

Sure except that's up to instance owners. For instance tapbots (the makers of tweetbot (RIP, king) and Ivory (so good)) makes clients for mastodon and have made their own mastodon instance for their accounts. Nothing is stopping them from doing that. They have both 'people' accounts and 'app' accounts. Again nothing to stop them from doing that.

If some admin of some other mastodon server is so against any kind of commercialization of the mastodon timeline they are absolutely welcome to add the tapbots mastodon instance to their killfile and it's gone for people who host their accounts at that instance. They won't be able to see any posts sourced from the tapbots instance. However I don't think this is very likely and if they did this I suspect over time they would attract less and less users.

I do suspect more instance owners will be happy to block other instances that advertise themselves as 'free speech havens' or whatever the 4-chan kids are calling their 'wretched hives of scum and villainy' these days. I suspect most of their users will care less about those kinds of blocks.

It's very analogous to running your own mailservers.

Yeah I'm kinda in the same place. I'd like to see a fully mastodon compatible (like I can use a third party client like Ivory) but designed, and I'm not sure how to say this, to be less scalable and thus simpler. I'd like to run more than one account out of it, but less than maybe 20.

So far it hasn't been too much of a nightmare to run the 'full meal deal' but as someone that managed to avoid ruby for their whole career I find that I do not fully understand all the intricacies. Like I'm not sure a more svelte mastodon really needs a redis server, etc.

Akkoma (a Pleroma fork) is pretty well suited for this for microblogging.

I run my own single-user instance at https://ublog.fedi.bbrks.me

At some point, I plan on expanding that fedi subdomain into more federated/ActivityPub accounts of mine, like pixelfed for photos.

That does seem like interesting avenue. Just present blog as single user site then allow federated comments, with maybe some banlist if you get some unsavory commenters.

Tho that gets to the same problem as we had already - nothing stopping spammer from just creating new domain for each comment

Maybe this https://github.com/cloudflare/wildebeest ?

check out https://microblog.pub/

It's called Usenet Newsgroups.

Exactly

You could use something like honk and post nothing but text yourself:

⌘ https://honk.tedunangst.com/u/tedu (you _can_ post images, so the top posts of that timeline is a poor example right now)

Source et cetera available from https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/honk

GotoSocial would be another option (also in Go with SQLite backend.) Although you'll need a front-end because it doesn't ship with one.

https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial

I was on this track for a while for a text-based dating app: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JzfNncWJs5km06dx9ejdFl8u...

But it turns out with some user research that people really want photos so my thinking has evolved to something more standard.

Markdown really seems like more sensible target for the "microblogging" than text or HTML. All the formatting you need for even a proper blogpost, readable plaintext, with extensions can even be pretty useful for programming stuff

This is exactly what I’ve been thinking. Either set up an SSG just for tweets or incorporate into another site. Have an RSS feed set up for the tweets collection and then have some automation service like Zapier, IFTTT etc listen to that feed and then post the tweet on your platform of choice. You can be running a Git Based client side CMS like Tina CMS to add new tweets easily if you don’t want to add the markdown files manually. The only thing you don’t get is the ability to interact with anyone on the platforms. There’s probably some bright spark who can figure that part out using web mentions or something similar.

Pleromas MRF can do this rather trivially. Pretty sure a wildcard in the right mrf_simple field would take care of all incoming statuses.

Removing the upload on the userside would maybe be more work, I don't think it's a setting?

It would be fun to build a TUI Fediverse app using Textual[0] or something

[0] https://github.com/Textualize/textual

I'm pretty sure both Mastodon and Pleroma can be set to only relay images instead of cacheing them, ones posted by local users are ofc hosted.

I think its a good idea to build a fediverse server that doesn't host media at all.

So Usenet?

Gopher?

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