Twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers | Hacker News Reader

Twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers

twtxt.readthedocs.io

310 pointsGedxx115 comments

I found it surprisingly hard to find live examples of sites running this.

The directory at 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...

Here's a live example from that list: 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

The last commit to 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 and via it https://registry.twtxt.org/api/plain/tweets which shows some recent content across the network.

Also 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/ page)

The current list of active yarn.social/twtxt sites is at

https://feeds.twtxt.net/feeds (there are quite a lot)

The community name is YARN; 'twtxt' is the protocol name.

Thanks! I've filed a PR to add that to the documentation. https://github.com/buckket/twtxt/pull/183

because it's "for hackers"!

twtxt isn't very popular. I think the feed format itself is neat, other than the tab, but maybe there isn't enough of a niche for it.

I have implemented a twtxt version of the Atom and the JSON Feed feed [1] for my site at https://dbohdan.com/twtxt.txt. The generator I originally developed for the site creates twtxt feeds, too: https://github.com/tclssg/tclssg. I haven't seen it in another static site generator or plugin; please link if you know one.

The public-access Unix system tilde.institute has a twtxt registry: https://twtxt.tilde.institute/. You can see the user list at https://twtxt.tilde.institute/api/plain/users. The aggregator https://twtxt.tilde.institute/api/plain/tweets is currently filled with what looks like somebody protesting the request rate:

  quite https://lublin.se/twtxt.txt 2024-12-23T03:15:21-05:00 <ROBOT VOICE> THE LAST HUMAN POST ON THIS FEED IS MORE THAN FOUR YEARS OLD. PERHAPS TWTXT CLIENTS SHOULD THEN FETCH THE FEED *VERY* RARELY.
  quite https://lublin.se/twtxt.txt 2024-12-23T03:15:16-05:00 <ROBOT VOICE> THE LAST HUMAN POST ON THIS FEED IS MORE THAN FOUR YEARS OLD. PERHAPS TWTXT CLIENTS SHOULD THEN FETCH THE FEED *VERY* RARELY.
  quite https://lublin.se/twtxt.txt 2024-12-23T03:15:07-05:00 <ROBOT VOICE> THE LAST HUMAN POST ON THIS FEED IS MORE THAN FOUR YEARS OLD. PERHAPS TWTXT CLIENTS SHOULD THEN FETCH THE FEED *VERY* RARELY.
  [...]

[1] This is why you shouldn't include the word "feed" in the name of your standard for feeds.

Related. Others?

A Decentralised Social Network - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33513022 - Nov 2022 (1 comment)

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 - Nov 2020 (27 comments)

Show HN: Twtxt v0.0.7 Your self-hosted, decentralised Twitter -like - 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 - July 2020 (1 comment)

Twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers - 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 - May 2020 (1 comment)

Show HN: Txtnish – a client for the microblogging platform twtxt - 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 - Feb 2016 (2 comments)

Show HN: Twtxt – Decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11043502 - Feb 2016 (65 comments)

I 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.

Great app name: ontheloo

But perhaps, not so good, don't google that one.

It'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.

then you are not a hacker at heart :)

Or they have better things to do than debug someone else's pet project

The 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 [2]: https://twtxt.net [3]: https://twtxt.net

Respectfully, 70 folks is not larger than I thought.

Yeah 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.

Man I remember when I had 70 friends on Myspace, that was an incredible amount of interaction in the day

I 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.

The ironic part is you post this on a throwback site where content is more important than presentation.

And medieval monks in heaven are all gasping in unison

I 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.

HN 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.

Let everyone make the things they want to make. Make something else? These people do you no harm, why pull their efforts down?

“When you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude people. So create”

- Why the Lucky Stiff

I figure there's value in sharing why one would not want to use something that's being shared/offered here.

Hacker News is a discussion platform. People submit ideas with the expectation that the community would find them interesting enough to discuss them.

When someone submits an idea of text-only content publishing, is it not perfectly reasonable to discuss one's thoughts on that idea, whatever they happen to be? And if those thoughts didn't resonate or apply, would lack of upvotes not conveniently push these thoughts to the bottom of the page where most never reach?

If I was an author of such a platform/idea/product, these are exactly the kind of responses I'd be most interested in reading. Not the feel-good high-fives, but the "what did I miss that others find important"s.

I think it’s turned into the place to submit work when you want as much harsh feedback as possible. You can get upvotes but need to run the gauntlet of “why isn’t it open source/here’s a better app/this is dumb” etc. Top comments are often pretty caustic, so that’s the culture we’ve built. I guess if you want to sharpen your offering really fast, this is optimal.

“Any system that forces humans to express themselves purely in ASCII, monospace, and monochrome is crude and borderline disrespectful towards human expression.”

What is the outcome you’re hoping for, by giving that feedback? Should we kill the authors now or just shun them until they give us pictures?

Edit: every single system makes choices. You either try please everyone or you choose a set of people to focus on. This one isn’t for you, and that’s ok. It may fail and that’s ok too. I don’t think it’s disrespectful to human expression, if anything it’s a form of human expression.

First time I heard of _why - interesting dev story. Thanks!

In this case, because it's a text file based system that works through the CLI. It is kind of ironic though that the "Demonstration" in the introduction is a video

It's built with Python, where strings default to UTF-8. Did they invent their own strings and constrained them to ASCII?

Do you have the same view of books? You're condescending and refuse to spend time with books that don't have pictures?

Books and social media platforms are actually two different things

You forgot to mention the differences you find important and why they ought to be important to the authors of the project in TFA.

> I will never understand why all these minimalist content publishing systems pretend that visual imagery is unnecessary.

I don't think anybody is prevented from putting a link to an image, nor to build a client that autoload linked images (the same way that say, some gemini browsers like lagrange can be configured to show you images by default).

It's clear from the demonstration video alone that this is not an ASCII system, and indeed reading the doco confirms that the text files are considered to be UTF-8.

This gives some irony to your analysis. Because this system thus permits one of the the very same ancient expression-in-images systems that you are alluding to: hieroglyphs are in Unicode.

I expect that in the 9 years of its existence, almost no-one has ever used them in this system.

The word "ASCII" was a grotesque, artistic verbal presentation choice for the substance of content I intended to convey :)

I figured it supports UTF-8. I believe the gist of my point is still valid.

Images are content. Layout is content. Typesetting is content. All are components of expression.

Alas, it isn't valid if one goes beyond even reading the doco.

The underlying library that the tool uses, click (https://click.palletsprojects.com/en/stable/), turns out to include the idea that the "tweet" strings can contain ECMA-48 control sequences.

This permits not only boldface and italics, but also (on very old terminals and very modern terminal emulators) underline, strikethrough, faint, reverse video, invisible, and even 8 whole colours. (-:

Again, though, I expect that in the 9 years of the system's existence, no-one has actually used this in earnest.

In part, this is because the default mode seems to be to apply a regular expression substitution to attempt to strip out control sequences, because of course ECMA-48 and ECMA-35 are over-expressive permitting things like OSC, NEL, PM, APC, cursor motions ("layout is content"), insert/delete/erase, and code page changes.

Amusingly, the regular expression substitution is not based upon an understanding of ECMA-35 and is faulty.

> The word "ASCII" was a grotesque, artistic verbal presentation choice for the substance of content I intended to convey :)

Is this GPT generated? I find it hard to believe someone actually talks/writes like this.

I promise it isn’t. English however isn’t my native language — I grew up in Armenia, with Armenian as my native tongue and Russian as my first “foreign” language.

Interesting. I'm in a similar situation, but my first foreign language was French. I believe the source of English education makes a difference. In my case, it was Rambo movies :))

Writing evolved after visual imagery to solve the poor ability of visuals to express abstractions. It too is based on imagery, thats what script is after all, but leverages the emergent social pattern of literacy to convey highly encoded information.

This invention (that we now take for granted) has been so exalted in the minds of earlier generations that they would go to extremes to banish imagery (iconoclasts etc.)

It takes its most extreme form in mathematical script: concise expression of the most abstract ideas.

Commingling imagery and text has its many uses of course: try describing a graph or diagram or a real scene using text only. But for other purposes (literature) its a distraction that forces the brain to switch mode and diminishes the experience.

> It takes its most extreme form in mathematical script: concise expression of the most abstract ideas.

Yet one thing that these minimalistic text-based interfaces are terrible for is rendering mathematical notation.

> But for other purposes (literature) its a distraction that forces the brain to switch mode and diminishes the experience.

Yet we do not (typically) consume literature in a monospace, typographically impoverished form.

They must live and die by their choices but I am defending the category as a whole. Both limitations can be lifted without altering the essence of a distraction free reading flow.

> Yet one thing that these minimalistic text-based interfaces are terrible for is rendering mathematical notation.

You can notate mathematics using text. In fact the mathematic notation rendered to vector graphics/bitmaps is typically rendered from such text-based notation.

Mathematics is increasingly done using text-based notation (e.g. Lean, Mathematica, SymPy), which I actually prefer because it's typically unambiguous unlike the traditional notation with wildly varying conventions and a lot left implicit or even ill-defined.

> mathematic notation rendered to vector graphics/bitmaps are typically rendered from such text-based notation

What everyone was impatiently waiting for: LaTeX microblogging !

But seriously, a specialized Bluesky client could easily do that for scientific communities - no need to reinvent the whole stack.

One complaint is LaTeX isn't semantic, but visual markup.

Of course. But good luck trying to render LaTeX in a text terminal.

Oh, SymPy looks great!

It is, at least for basic stuff. The biggest problem is that one forgets to solve stuff by hand after getting used to SymPy doing it automatically.

Sometimes SymPy fails at problems that Mathematica can solve though. And Mathematica is expensive pain.

I mean as a mathematical notation, not as a solver.

There is a cargo cult of absence of features because old cool developers are used to email, IRC, EMACS, etc (stuff they got acquainted with in their college days 30 years ago).

Emacs allows inlince images since the first X-based release, even more with Emacs. Inline images on Email and everything.

Also, Email itself supports MIME too.

But no image will be concise enough against a good wall of text explaining it.

30 years ago was 1994. People used to post images under Usenet too. But a lot of these images without some annotation they are useless.

I used to enjoy using browsers like W3M, if you can just throw assets at your favourite tool of choice, like an image viewer, a video player, it just feels better for me as I don't have to learn a different interface for every site I visit.

some people like different things. imagine that.

nostr is the hackers microblog. Just sign things and relay them:

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/01.md

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42489954

Like mini usenet with signatures.

What 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/

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.

Yes, with NOSTR you get the benefit of creating random accounts as well as reusing existing ones. Good work with the platform.

The nostr tech itself is great.

The problem with nostr is that 95% of the conversations are about crypto.

With a name like Twtxt how are you supposed to easily talk about it with other people? Not even one vowel

I think I'd pronounce it as, Twit-ext?

This is correct. The rest are incorrect.

Intuitively, I read it as "tweetext"

Huh, 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

The upvotes on the pronunciation in the sibling comments should be considered legally binding and will be the authoritative pronunciation. Upvote carefully.

Talk? You write about it, on a (mechanical) keyboard.

twit-text is how I would pronounce it.

If it becomes popular, I’m pronouncing it “twixt”, even if it’s wrong.

This has to be it.

I inferred Twittext so it's not ideally designed for virality

https://imgur.com/a/XtEuaEd

There 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).

Not a huge problem: it existed for 9 years and no one is talking about it.

It kind of sounds like twitter extension. This is what i thought of it as when i first seen it. This can be very confusing.

I suppose that if one were motivated, one would run a 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.

Not a Welsh speaker, I see

Most of the community call it Yarn. They use twtxt as the protocol name - and it isn't like HTTP is one vowel.

As its name says, "double u" is not just one but two vowels. (-:

for another smolweb social network, check bubble running on gemini.

http://portal.mozz.us/gemini/git.skyjake.fi/bubble/main/

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

Simon 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/

I 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

Does it support RSS paging?

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5005

Another decentralized feed alternative: https://github.com/really-simple-decentralized-syndication

Not 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

This 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.

What 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.

You can't self host your X feed for a start.

It's called HTML + RSS.

I was about to ask… looks rss to me XD

Yup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42496587

Also, I forgot that Mastadoon is/was also a thing. Are there any original ideas out there rather than another “Twitter but not Twitter” clone?

Twitter, but your tweets are stored on a blockchain with smart contracts written by LLMs. In Rust.

I 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.

Peertube [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/

[1] Reddit-style - https://join-lemmy.org/

[2] Instagram-style - https://pixelfed.org/

[3] https://friendi.ca/

[4] https://hubzilla.org

pixelfed 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.

A server can have many subreddits (called communities). You can obviously subscribe to a community with an account from any other server.

lol this was not at all obvious to me at first glance from the framing of 'choose a server', but I guess that's the whole value proposition of activitypub is it doesn't matter what server I started on.

So how big is the Twtxt community? How many Twtxters?

I think I only ever interacted with 2 whilst I was experimenting with twtxt.

https://feeds.twtxt.net/feeds (There are hundreds of us!! HUNDREDS!!!) /s

perhaps someone can implement it in the bluesky pds as an additional feature https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds put caddy in front of it for brotli compression so it serves fast on 1k2 links

Title shouild be:

"Welcome to twtxt!"

pass :/

Why do we even need a microblogging platform? Twitter turned into a dumpster fire. Why will these other alternatives not have the same fate?

I’m inclined to agree. These post platforms are a race to the bottom

We don't. If anything just using HTTP and HTML the way it was designed is fine. See https://indieweb.org

> 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.

What do you like about it?

Community notes is really great. It's the best system for fact-checking anyone's ever come up with.

You 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.

That was the case long before Musk took over. Twitter has always been an observer-hostile site, that's the whole reason why nitter and co exist.

> It was a miracle of human accomplishment and now it’s a shell of its old self.

You must dislike him for political reasons, because from an accomplishment standpoint he is still a miracle.

The original Web was the work of genious, but everything since is either adtech enshittification or cumbersome hacks.

The "simplest" requirement - decentralized discovery of what is out there, is essentially still unsolved. That is one of the main reasons we have centralized platforms of all types instead of some RSS on steroids design.

The second (and more difficult in sociopolitical terms) requirement that is still unsolved is the "active" web, decentralized POST-in on somebody else's server. Here you have social challenges (identity, spam, moderation, fake news etc).

We really need a good society adapted Web 3 evolution, because Web 2 has been a disaster that keeps on giving. But it will require genious at least commensurate with the original.

How do you know what’s happening elsewhere? Other than having relations, it falls under reporters to propagate news. How do you meet new people? You go to special events and gatherings. The web is already linked, but we have special nodes like search engines, directories, and forums that are information hubs.

Creating a website was always easy. The minimum html you need is very small, and all you have to do is copy the files with an ftp client. Then tools like wordpress came and it became even easier.

What social medias have done was to put everyone in the same space. First there were walls and you just have to build your own information hub. Now, the platform is providing you its own like a private television service (including ads) whether you like it or not.

No need to invent a new version of the web, we can always go back to what was working and is still working.

These things are good or bad because of the community of people who use them, not the technology per se. And that community is shaped by both culture and moderators.

I disagree. The shape of the instrument makes some sounds easier to make than others. Pianos are inherently polyphonic while trumpets play one note at a time. Anything made in the shape of twitter will result in twitter like behavior.

The medium is the message. Any microcblogging platform that tracks and displays engagement inherently optimizes for short form swipes and "rebuttals" and outright lies. The "real time feed" nature optimizes for taking zero time or effort to confirm anything that anyone says. Nearly everything that "breaks" on twitter and doesn't make it to actual reports was an outright lie.

You can't put a necessary amount of nuance in 140 characters.

Twitter is precisely the reason we need these decentralized, niche platforms. It's a return to the norm prior to social media centralizing everything.

They won't avoid the same fate, because decay and entropy are inevitable. But they will last longer simply because fewer people know about them and use them.

Broken image and popup message that disappears after a few seconds on the home page. Yeah, no thanks.

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