@prologic I will pull the email. The year is about right.

According to a very old email one of my more personal family domains was registered in 2013 making it 12 years old, so I was closed 🤣 my public facing one is much much older 🤣

@andros About the URL, since it no longer used for hashing there might be no need to change it. I agree that we keep all the parts that already are out there for the most parts. Instead of a contact field you could also just use links like: link = Email mailto:user@example.dk or link = Signal https://signal.me/sthF4raI5Lg_ybpJwB1sOptDla4oU7p[...]

@andros Thanks for consolidating a lot of good ideas. Especially how you have deiced to just extend the mention syntax for location-based treads. This might even be backward compatible with older (pre-yarn) clients. What about using Z for UTC +00:00- is that allowed in your specs? Regarding url = I would suggest to only allow one and the maybe add url_old = or url_alt = !? I'm still not a fan of a DM feature, even thou it helps that i have now been split out into a separate feed file. Instead if would suggest a contact = field for where people can put an email or other id/link for an established chat protocol like signal or matrix.

I also fundamentally do not believe in the notion that Twtxt should be readable and writable by humans. We've thrown this "argument" around in support of some of the proposals, and I just don't buy it (sorry). As an analogy, nobody writes Email by hand and transmits them to mail servers vai SMTP by hand. We use tools to do this. Twtxt/Yarn should be the same IMO.

Just like we don't write emails by hand anymore (See: #a3adoka), we don’t manually write Twts or update our twtxt.txt feeds. Instead, we use modern Twtxt clients that conform to the specifications at Twtxt.dev for a seamless, automated experience. #Twtxt #Twt #UserExperience

Nobody writes emails by hand using RFC 5322 anymore, nor do we manually send them through telnet and SMTP commands. The days of crafting emails in raw format and dialing into servers are long gone. Modern email clients and services handle it all seamlessly in the background, making email easier than ever to send and receive—without needing to understand the protocols or formats behind it! #Email #SMTP #RFC #Automation

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

@andros how often do you send a private message on the Fediverse? How often do you send PGP/SMIME encrypted emails? Are there other tools that are more suitable for the task? If implementing direct/private messages on twtxt scratches an itch (you know, that hobbyist itch we all get from time to time), then don't give up so easily. Worse comes to worse, and your feed becomes too noisy, people can simply unfollow/mute.

I really don't care about direct messages here, but I might be on that bottom 1%!

Twtxt was made for nerds, by nerds. I'd like to change that. It's by nerds/hackers, for nerds/hackers and friends of these. It doesn't have to be hacky all the time, as you don't need to be a nerd to have a blog. But, for that to happen, someone has to build the tools to improve UX.

by design there really is no way to easily discovers others Yeah, I agree, and although there are directories of email addresses, usually you don't want that, unless you are a 'public figure'. I couldn't say that a microblogging is a "social network" by default, as a blog is not either. At the same time, people would expect to find new people and conversations, as you'd do in a forum.

I think of two features on top of the current spec:

• Clients showing a few posts of what your following are watching but you don't, so perhaps you find something interesting to follow next. Or that feature of "Your 'followings' are following these accounts/people". (Hard to explain in english, but I hope you get the idea)
• Sharing your .txt into some directory, saying "Hey, I have this twtxt URL, I want to be discovered". I'm thinking of something like the Federated tab on Mastodon.

2 is a great idea, you should suggest it in that blog post.

About 1, well, I think anyone has an email address and only about 5% use a Feed, so it makes sense to offer what most people use 🤔

I have applied your comments, and I tried to add you as an editor but couldn't find your email address. Please request editing access if you wish.

Also, could you elaborate on how you envision migrating with a script? You mean that the client of the file owner could massively update URLs in old twts ?

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.

@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

@eapl.me here are my replies (somewhat similar to Lyse's and James')

1. Metadata in twts: Key=value is too complicated for non-hackers and hard to write by hand. So if there is a need then we should just use #NSFS or the alt-text file in markdown image syntax ![NSFW](url.to/image.jpg) if something is NSFW

2. IDs besides datetime. When you edit a twt then you should preserve the datetime if location-based addressing should have any advantages over content-based addressing. If you change the timestamp the its a new post. Just like any other blog cms.

3. Caching, Yes all good ideas, but that is more a task for the clients not the serving of the twtxt.txt files.

4. Discovery: User-agent for discovery can become better. I'm working on a wrapper script in PHP, so you don't need to go to Apaches log-files to see who fetches your feed. But for other Gemini and gopher you need to relay on something else. That could be using my webmentions for twtxt suggestion, or simply defining an email metadata field for letting a person know you follow their feed. Interesting read about why WebMetions might be a bad idea. Twtxt being much simple that a full featured IndieWeb sites, then a lot of the concerns does not apply here. But that's the issue with any open inbox. This is hard to solve without some form of (centralized or community) spam moderation.

5. Support more protocols besides http/s. Yes why not, if we can make clients that merge or diffident between the same feed server by multiples URLs

6. Languages: If the need is big then make a separate feed. I don't mind seeing stuff in other langues as it is low. You got translating tool if you need to know whats going on. And again when there is a need for easier switching between posting to several feeds, then it's about building clients with a UI that makes it easy. No something that should takes up space in the format/protocol.

7. Emojis: I'm not sure what this is about. Do you want to use emojis as avatar in CLI clients or it just about rendering emojis?

@mckinley Thanks for the feedback.

1. Yeah I agrees that nick sound not be part of syntax. Any valid URL to a twtxt.txt-file should be enough and is more clear, so it is not confused with a email (one of the the issues with webfinger and fedivese handles)
2. I think any valid URL would work, since we are not bound to look for exact matches. Accepting both http and https as well as a gemni and gophe could all work as long as the path to the twtxt.txt is the same.
3. My idea is that you quote the timestamp as it is in the original twtxt.txt that you are referring to, so you can do it by simply copy/pasting. Also what are the change that the same human will make two different posts within the same second?!

Regarding the whole cryptographic keys for identity, to me it seems like an unnecessary layer of complexity. If you move to a new house or city you tell people that you moved - you can do the same in a twtxt.txt. Just post something like "I move to this new URL, please follow me there!" I did that with my feeds at least twice, and you guys still seem to read my posts:)

For following notifications I would say use webmetion refering to the the line in your twtxt.txt as per: https://darch.dk/mentions-twtxt Or send them an email, so it would be an idea to add a # contact = mailto:me@domain.net to ones twtxt.txt

you need to send an email @quark if you want an account. I know that it might not be very profitable. Maybe Odo can disclose it if I give him a new bucket.