@andros Sorry I missed your messages to #twtxt on IRC. There are people there, but it can take several hours to get a response. E.g. I check it every day or two. I recommend using an IRC bouncer. To answer your question about registries, I used a couple of registries when I first started out, to try to find feeds to follow, but haven't since then. I don't remember which ones, but they were easy to find with web searches.

More thoughts about changes to twtxt (as if we haven't had enough thoughts):

1. There are lots of great ideas here! Is there a benefit to putting them all into one document? Seems to me this could more easily be a bunch of separate efforts that can progress at their own pace:

1a. Better and longer hashes.

1b. New possibly-controversial ideas like edit: and delete: and location-based references as an alternative to hashes.

1c. Best practices, e.g. Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

1d. Stuff already described at dev.twtxt.net that doesn't need any changes.

2. We won't know what will and won't work until we try them. So I'm inclined to think of this as a bunch of draft ideas. Maybe later when we've seen it play out it could make sense to define a group of recommended twtxt extensions and give them a name.

3. Another reason for 1 (above) is: I like the current situation where all you need to get started is these two short and simple documents:

I wrote some code to try out non-hash reply subjects formatted as (replyto ), while keeping the ability to use the existing hash style.

I don't think we need to decide all at once. If clients add support for a new method then people can use it if they like. The downside of course is that this costs developer time, so I decided to invest a few hours of my own time into a proof of concept.

With apologies to @movq for corrupting jenny's beautiful code. I don't write this expecting you to incorporate the patch, because it does complicate things and might not be a direction you want to go in. But if you like any part of this approach feel free to use bits of it; I release the patch under jenny's current LICENCE.

Supporting both kinds of reply in jenny was complicated because each email can only have one Message-Id, and because it's possible the target twt will not be seen until after the twt referencing it. The following patch uses an sqlite database to keep track of known (url, timestamp) pairs, as well as a separate table of (url, timestamp) pairs that haven't been seen yet but are wanted. When one of those "wanted" twts is finally seen, the mail file gets rewritten to include the appropriate In-Reply-To header.

Patch based on jenny commit 73a5ea81.

https://www.falsifian.org/a/oDtr/patch0.txt

Not implemented:

• Composing twts using the (replyto ...) format.
• Probably other important things I'm forgetting.

(replyto http://darch.dk/twtxt.txt 2024-09-15T12:50:17Z) Hmm, but yarnd also isn't showing these twts as being part of a thread. @prologic you said yarnd respects customs subjects. Shouldn't these twts count as having a custom subject, and get threaded together?

(replyto http://darch.dk/twtxt.txt 2024-09-15T12:50:17Z) yarnd just doesn't render the subject. Fair enough. It's (replyto http://darch.dk/twtxt.txt 2024-09-15T12:50:17Z), and if you don't want to go on a hunt, the twt hash is weadxga: https://twtxt.net/twt/weadxga

(replyto http://darch.dk/twtxt.txt 2024-09-15T12:50:17Z) @sorenpeter I like this idea. Just for fun, I'm using a variant in this twt. (Also because I'm curious how it non-hash subjects appear in jenny and yarn.)

URLs can contain commas so I suggest a different character to separate the url from the date. Is this twt I've used space (also after "replyto", for symmetry).

I think this solves:

• Changing feed identities: although @mckinley points out URLs can change, I think this syntax should be okay as long as the feed at that URL can be fetched, and as long as the current canonical URL for the feed lists this one as an alternate.
• editing, if you don't care about message integrity
• finding the root of a thread, if you're not following the author

An optional hash could be added if message integrity is desired. (E.g. if you don't trust the feed author not to make a misleading edit.) Other recent suggestions about how to deal with edits and hashes might be applicable then.

People publishing multiple twts per second should include sub-second precision in their timestamps. As you suggested, the timestamp could just be copied verbatim.

@prologic earlier you suggested extending hashes to 11 characters, but here's an argument that they should be even longer than that.

Imagine I found this twt one day at https://example.com/twtxt.txt :

2024-09-14T22:00Z

@movq Is there a good way to get jenny to do a one-off fetch of a feed, for when you want to fill in missing parts of a thread? I just added @slashdot to my private follow file just because @prologic keeps responding to the feed :-P and I want to know what he's commenting on even though I don't want to see every new slashdot twt.

Does anyone care about the 140-char limit recommended by the #twtxt spec? I have been trying to respect it but wonder if it's wasted effort.

Hello twtxt! I'm James (or @falsifian). I live in Toronto. Recent interests include space complexity, simple software, and science fiction.