@andros You seem to be a bit ahead of your time: https://darch.dk/timeline/conv/jl2mf2a

Yes it seem to work(ish) on timeline at least: https://darch.dk/timeline/post/imopblq

just for the record I didn't say I was leaving the twtxt 'community' (did I?) but than I have other priorities to focus on in the following months. Please don't be condescending, is not cool.

Development of Timeline (PHP client) has been stale for some reasons, a few of them in my side, so I think it won't be updated to the new thread model, at least pretty soon. So is not that I'll stop using twtxt, just the client I use won't be compatible with the new model in July.

I'm with @andros and @eapl.me on this one. But I have also lost interest in twtxt lately and currently rethinking what digital tools truly add value to my life. So I will not spending my time on adding more complexity to Timeline. Still a big thanks to you @prologic for all the great work you have done and all the nice conversations both here and on our video calls.

July 1st. 63 days from now to implement a backward-incompatible change, apparently not open to other ideas like replacing blake with SHA, or discussing implementation challenges for other languages and platforms. Finally just closing #18, #19 and #20 without starting a proper discussion and ignoring a 'micro consensus' feels... not right.

I don't know what to think rather than letting it rest (May will be busy here) and focus on other stuff in the future.

twt-hash-v2.md#implementation-timeline

@prologic I have:

• jenny
• buckket's original (patched, or not)
• tt/tt2
• Timeline
• Twtxtory
• Yarnd

@kat saving you a bookmark:

The following flags no longer exist:

--max-cache-items
--max-cache-ttl

Instead use --max-age-days, which controls how much of the cache is pulled back for Timeline, Discover and Mentions views.

hehe, just catching up on this thread! I've replied in another that using periods/dots sounds good to me as it's usual in domains, but perhaps some agreement would be needed. For now I think any character is valid as long as it is not a space. For example we are using this for PHP twtxt.php#L153

on timeline the mention looks OK. Is there an issue on Yarn?

It's an interesting topic. For example on Bsky it's natural to allow domains https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutorial

Although TwiXter only allows (letters A-Z, numbers 0-9 and of underscores) https://help.x.com/en/managing-your-account/x-username-rules

by commenting out DMs are you giving up on simplicity? See the Metadata extension holding the data inside comments, as the client doesn't need to show it inside the timeline.

I don't think that commenting out DMs as we are doing for metadata is giving up on simplicity (it's a feature already), and it helps to hide unwanted DMs to clients that will take months to add it's support to something named... an extension.

For some other extensions in https://twtxt.dev/extensions.html (for example the reply-to hash <a href="?search=abcdfeg" class="tag">#abcdfeg</a> or the mention @ < example http://example.org/twtxt.txt >) is not a big deal. The twt is still understandable in plain text. For DM, it's only interesting for you if you are the recipient, otherwise you see an scrambled message like 1234567890abcdef=. Even if you see it, you'll need some decryption to read it. I've said before that DMs shouldn't be in the same section that the timeline as it's confusing.

So my point stands, and as I've said before, we are discussing it as a community, so let's see what other maintainers add to the convo.

@bender You said:

as long as those working on clients can reach an agreement on how to move forward. That has proven, though, to be a pickle in the past.

I think this is because we probably need to start thinking about three different aspects to the ecosystem and document them out:

• Specifications (as they are now)
• Server recommendations (e.g: Timeline, yarnd, etc)
• Client recommendations (e.g: jenny, tt, tt2, twet, etc)

@bender I noticed that although the Discover view (and your own Timeline) is much improved with a MaxAgeDays configuration at the pod level, that now some profiles are rather empty. This is only because well, they're a bit "inactive" so to speak 🗣️ Not sure what to do about this at the moment... Open to ideas? 💡

Timeline of Evolution of Twtxt/Yarn.social:

• 2016 – Twtxt created by John Downey: plain text + HTTP = minimalist microblogging
• 2017–2019 – Community builds CLI tools, but adoption remains niche
• 2020 – Yarn.social launched by @prologic with federation, threading, UI
• 2021–2023 – Pods sync, user mentions, blocking, search, and media support added
• 2024+ – Yarn.social becomes the reference Twtxt platform, with active federated pods

@andros I give you not creating another file, but then I'd vote for commenting out DMs. See https://eapl.me/timeline/post/z5e2bna

It's easier to find the DM in comments from your side, than asking all the client maintainers to add the regex =P You can even use a Modified comment, such as #! <DM content> Or something like that

This approach is retro-compatible with current and older clients.

my main itch with the DMs extensions is that these messages are intended to be private, not public information. That's why other extensions make sense, but DMs are another kind of feature. TwiXter, Mastodon, FB and some other services usually hide the DMs in another section, so they are not mixed with the public timeline.

I find the DM topic interesting, I even made an indie experiment for a centralized messaging system here https://github.com/eapl-gemugami/owl. Although, as I've said a few times here, I'm not particularly interested in supporting it on microblogging, as I don't use it that much. In the rare case I've used them, I don't have to manage public and private keys, and finally none of my acquaintances use encrypted email. Nothing personal against anyone, and although I like to debate and even fight, it's not the case here. This proposal is the only one allowing DMs on twtxt, and if the community wants it, I'll support it, with my personal input, of course.

A good approach I could find with a good compromise between compatibility with current clients and keeping these messages private is 'hiding' the DMs in comments. For example: `# 2025-04-13T11:02:12+02:00

well, I suggested that in https://eapl.me/timeline/conv/k2ob6bq

The idea was to help those following the spec in https://twtxt.dev/exts/directmessage.Html, to replicate the steps and validate whether your implementation gives the same result.

BTW, you could add a link to the spec in the echo web.

https://github.com/sorenpeter/timeline

sorry @prologic, timeline doesn't autocomplete the mentions yet, and it was 'difficult' to look for your URL from the phone.

Timeline and twtxt-php, don't support Gemini, only HTTP/S, as a design choice (although originally it was intended to work on Gemtext, it was a niche inside a niche, so it was discarded very soon).

At the moment of building the engine there weren't many Gemini URLs supporting twtxt 1.1 (with twtxt.dev extensions). Also User-Agent won't work there, and many Gemini URLs are a mirror of the HTTP one, so I think is not strictly necessary.

my 2c

do you mind sharing a picture ?

I can't find something similar here, but my wife gave this one last year, and I've been using it a bit. I'd say it's useful as you've shared.

We also have a shared calendar in the kitchen for family events, and it's working great.

hi! I hope you can see this message

As in https://eapl.me/timeline/post/s7gv6zq I changed my URL to experiment on this exact situation, and deleted the symlink on my server, so now tw.txt is the only way to get the file, although I could bring it back, what does everyone say?

also @Andros, I see that if I open that URL on my browser, I see weird characters in the .txt file: description = 🏗 Perhaps your nginx server is missing a Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 header? https://serverfault.com/a/975289

In timeline it looks OK however, I think it's relying on

The file must be encoded with UTF-8 of the original spec: https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/twtxtfile.html

Testing out this image upload feature...

@falsifian it look like your markdown image tags are missing the protocol part (https://) so they don't render at least on my server: https://darch.dk/timeline/conv/3vtnszq

Added support for uploading images to to #Timeline Right now you need to copy the markdown code yourself, but next up would be to lean some JS or use HTMX to make the process more smooth.

that's a fair point.

Perhaps, since Twitter in 2006 never implemented read flags, every derivative microblogging system never saw that as an expected feature. This is curious because Twitter started with SMS, where on our phones we can mark messages as read or unread. I think it all comes from the difference between reading an email (directed to you) vs. reading public posts (like a blog or a 'wall,' where you don't mark posts as read). It's not necessary to mark it as 'read', you just jump over it.

Reading microblogging posts in an email program is not common, I think, and I haven't really used it, so I cannot say how it works, and whether it would be better for me or not. However, I've used Thunderbird as a feed reader, and I understand the advantages when reading blog posts.

About read flags being simple, well... we just had a discussion this morning about how tracking read messages would require a lot of rethinking for clients such as timeline where no state is stored. Even considering some kind of 'notification of unread messages or mentions' is not expected for those minimalist client, so it's an interesting compromise to think about.

@aelaraji I've been noticing the same, so I opened an issue now (https://github.com/sorenpeter/timeline/issues/55) and then we will have to look into it.

interesting idea. I'm not personally interested on having DM conversations on twtxt (for now), although I see the community could be interested in.

I'd suggest to enable the Discussion section in your Github repo to receive comments, as we did for timeline https://github.com/sorenpeter/timeline/discussions

hmm any ideas how to fix this case when there is no nick and it on a shared tilde hosting? http://darch.dk/timeline/profile?url=https://tilde.club/~deepend/twtxt.txt

I've implemented Use only nick as handle if nick and domain is the same · sorenpeter/timeline@8c12444

See it live at:

• nick = domain: https://darch.dk/timeline/profile?url=https://eapl.me/tw.txt
• nick ≠ domain: https://darch.dk/timeline/profile?url=https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt
• no nick, use domain: https://darch.dk/timeline/profile?url=https://akkartik.name/twtxt.txt

I'm not sure I like the leading @ thou...

@prologic Well I just mirrored yarnd's JSON in my webfinger endpoint and lookup, so not much else to do for standardization.

And for people who don't like PHP you can always just go with Added WebFinger support to my email address using one rewrite rule and one static file. or simply putting a static JSON in place for .well-know/webfinger

I like the cleaness and indiewebness of using just domains for handles/shorthands similar to blusky, but the situations with more users on the same domain and that people in the fediverse (threads too?) are already familiar with the syntax speaks for webfinger. And since we already got support for webfinger in both yarnd and timeline it makes sense to stick with it.

BTW I'm watching that darch has already worked on that, interesting https://github.com/sorenpeter/timeline/blob/main/_webfinger-endpoint/.well-known/webfinger/index.php

@aelaraji https://github.com/sorenpeter/timeline/commit/555baefcd0e75e6a281472994e8eb7ae9b5d2a1c

or timeline.txt ;)

@eapl.mx Yes, the idea is to add User Agent support to #Timeline. Right now it just adds every request to a growing log file, but I have also been working on a way to analyse it, so it only saves the time of the latest request. I'm not sure how to make it part of timeline itself, since it requeses that you redirect/rewrite from twtAgent.php to the acctual twtxt.txt Help with making Timeline send proper User Agents to others would be much appreciated:)

@eapl.mx Super to see you got webmentions working too :)

EDIT: A webmention was send to: https://eapl.mx/timeline/webmention (Status: 202)

I'm giving a shot talk about twtxt/yarn/timeline tommow around noon CET at Piksel Festival in Norway. More info and link for live stream at: https://24.piksel.no (So I will most likely not be joining the call)

@bender The tagline of Timeline is "a single user twtxt/yarn pod" not just a yarn pod. Similar to GNU/Linux. When we came up with the concept of Yarn Social it was a way to rebrand twtxt with the extensions that makes conversations like this possible.

Hey! I tried running Timeline on my server with the default PHP version (8.3) and it's giving me a few errors https://eapl.me/timeline/ I should be sending a PR soon to fix it ;)

@2024-10-08T19:36:38-07:00 Thanks for the followup. I agrees with most of it - especially:

Please nobody suggest sticking the content type in more metadata. 🙄

Yes, URL can be considered ugly, but they work and are understandable by both humans and machines. And its trivial for any client to hide the URLs used as reference in replies/treading.

Webfinger can be an add-on to help lookup people, and it can be made independent of the nick by just serving the same json regardless of the nick as people do with static sites and a as I implemented it on darch.dk (wf endpoint). Try RANDOMSTRING@darch.dk on http://darch.dk/wf-lookup.php (wf lookup) or RANDOMSTRING@garrido.io on https://webfinger.net

Thank you @aelaraji, I'm glad you like it. I use PHP because it's everywhere on cheap hosting and no need for the user to log into a terminal to setup it up. Timeline is not mean to be use locally. For that I think something like twtxt2html is a better fit. (and happy to see you using simple.css on you new log page;)

It looks okay on my timeline: http://darch.dk/timeline/conv/omu7e4q

@Prologic can you pleas fix this line in your twtxt.txt: # follow = dbucklin@www.davebucklin.com https://www.davebucklin.com/twtxt.txt?nick=dbucklin

It is cause this weird effect on my timeline, where you are now called dbucklin http://darch.dk/timeline/?profile=https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt

@prologic and @bender for a start a single user twtxt/yarn pod could look like this 😉

The wording can be more subtle like "This feed have not seen much activity within the last year" and maybe adding a UI like I did in timeline showing time ago for all feeds

I agree that it good to clean up the Mastodon re-feeds, but it should also be okay for anyone to spin up a twtxt.txt just for syndicating they stuff from blog or what ever.

The "not receiving replies" could partly be fixed by implementing a working webmentions for twtxt.txt

Just fleshed out the README for timeline at https://github.com/sorenpeter/timeline - Comments/corrections and PRs are welcome:)

@bender you can over at http://darch.dk/timeline/conv/ba3xbfa or by looking at the raw txt https://lyse.isobeef.org/twtxt.txt I can't help it that twtxt.net only have temporary caching ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Thanks for your feedback @lyse. For some reason i missed it until now. For now I have implemented endpoint discovery for #webmentions as a metadata field in the twtxt.txt like this: # webmention = http://darch.dk/timeline/webmention

Added support for #tag clouds and #search to timeline. Based on code from @dfaria.eu🙏 Live at: http://darch.dk/timeline/?profile=https://darch.dk/twtxt.txt