31
Anyone using twtxt? It is for posting entirely as plain text. (discuss.online)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
16 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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 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.

all 16 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
    • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

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

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
    •
    [–] 2 points 5 months ago (11 children)

    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?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 11 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] [S] 3 points 5 months ago (5 children)

    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

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (3 children)

    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?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] [S] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

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

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •