[HN Gopher] Raw Text Club
___________________________________________________________________
Raw Text Club
Author : tsujp
Score : 162 points
Date : 2022-06-18 08:21 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rawtext.club)
(TXT) w3m dump (rawtext.club)
| bradley_taunt wrote:
| As mentioned previously it is odd that the page is rendered in
| HTML and not pure plain text.
|
| For anyone interested in spinning up their own plain text
| blog/site, feel free to check out Shinobi (shameless plug)
|
| https://shinobi.website
| [deleted]
| kissickas wrote:
| Heads up, "ahead of it's time" should be "ahead of its time"
|
| Cool tool!
| bradley_taunt wrote:
| You are correct - fixed! Also thanks for the kind words :)
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| That ASCII art is cool af, wow. My blog[0] is also in plain
| text, I love it. As a designer, I'm my own worst client but
| redesigning my own sites multiple times a year was
| draining...if I design something to be super basic, I can't get
| mad at it. About a year in so far, it's working.
|
| ---
|
| [0]: https://blog.webb.page
| bradley_taunt wrote:
| That looks fantastic. I'm always a sucker for simplicity.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Thanks!
| permo-w wrote:
| they say a picture paints a thousand words. sometimes I don't
| want to see a thousand words
| chadlavi wrote:
| Too wide to read on a phone!
| [deleted]
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Feature!
| badrabbit wrote:
| How does it work? End to end encryption? It looks centralized, so
| who is the person running it?
|
| The idea sounds nice. It would be amazing if there was a cli
| friendly lightweight alternative to matrix.
|
| I assume they use SSH for transport security. How do you discover
| content or message others though?
|
| If it were up to me, I would enforce PGP signing for all content
| and PGP encryption for private messages. The network's key will
| be ultimately trusted by all clients. When accounts are
| registered, their key is cross-signed. Standardize it a bit and
| keep it very simple so that others can spin up their own
| "network". Network capacity scaled by means of mirrors, typical
| OSS style. Ban==signature revocation. Come to think of it, why is
| this not a thing already?
| anon96143 wrote:
| Wish it explained more what it exactly is. AFAIK it's some kind
| of social network which can't be indexed by search engines so
| maybe more privacy friendly? I assume posting is somehow done
| using CLI but that's about it. If I want to know more I have to
| e-mail this guy to register and see for myself.
| Izmaki wrote:
| Not just that, you have to convince the admin that you're good
| enough for their small society in the email...
| nmz wrote:
| It is their machine, So they should have the rights to admit
| whoever they want. but usually just with an email and a
| please is enough, the only downside to the tildeverse is if
| you're not woke they kick you out.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| > the only downside to the tildeverse
|
| Is rawtextclub related to tildeverse? I feel like I'm
| missing some context here without which this part of your
| comment seems like a non-sequitur.
| [deleted]
| gnubison wrote:
| > the only downside to the tildeverse is if you're not woke
| they kick you out.
|
| Heh?
| permo-w wrote:
| not quite as extreme, but today I made a text-post only subreddit
| for discussion of [English] football topics, without the
| distractions of pictures and videos or news, if that interests
| anybeing
| mastazi wrote:
| Those that are complaining about the output being html are
| missing the fact that the content is accessible over http://,
| gemini:// and gopher://, my guess is that they have libraries
| that convert the plain text of the home page to each of those
| formats and what you are seeing is the html conversion of the
| actual content, but that doesn't mean that the content itself is
| not indeed plain text.
|
| To those that are complaining about discoverability: go to the
| gemini and gopher versions of the home page, and you will find a
| list of content made available by the users in those respective
| formats, I'm guessing no users are publishing html content hence
| the list of user generated content (which is supposed to be at
| the bottom) is empty in the http version of the home page.
| [deleted]
| frazbin wrote:
| Some day I'm gonna figure out what Eggdrop is.
| trumpablehump wrote:
| Eggdrop is a bot for IRC. IRC is a low-fidelity text-based
| real-time chat system. There are many IRC networks (there were
| many more 10-20 years ago) and on these networks there can be
| channels (chat rooms). Those channels are often topical, e.g.
| #gentoo, #massachussets or #electronics.
|
| Eggdrop is configurable with scripts and for what that allows I
| want to simply quote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggdrop:
| Scripts are available to add and extend support for: online
| games, stats, user and channel management, information storage
| and lookup, greeting channel members, tracking last seen times,
| botnet management, anti-spam, file serving and distribution
| (usually via the DCC protocol), IRC services (similar to
| ChanServ and NickServ), and much more.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| An IRC server is extremely minimal. It:
|
| - keeps a list of nicknames<->IP sockets,
|
| - keeps a list of channels, which nicknames is in what channel,
| and the mode of each nickname in the channel (operator, etc.).
| First join command to a channel creates the channel and sets
| the creator with operator privileges.
|
| - when a command to send a message is received (which must
| specify a channel), it forwards the chat text to the
| appropriate sockets based who is in the channel.
|
| That's it. Honestly it's about the least you can do to turn TCP
| into a multiuser chat protocol. Because of this minimality, IRC
| was able to handle hundreds or thousands of simultaneous users
| on 1990 hardware.
|
| Channel operators can kick malicious users, set topics, etc.
| Again, when you create a channel, you're op. An operator can
| give operator privileges to other users, so it's possible for a
| channel to have multiple ops and they can look out for each
| other - if connected.
|
| When your TCP connection to IRC ends, classic IRC forgets all
| about you. If all channel operators lose their connection, then
| your channel may be opless and you might lose control of it. A
| classic IRC server is not like a modern chat server, it keeps
| no database or persistent record of chat text, nicknames, or
| channels. So you can't log off and back on and get your chat
| history, look at messages in the channel while you were gone,
| or get automatically joined back to the channels you were part
| of, or "own" channels. That was all offloaded to the client.
|
| Eggdrop was a program that would let you create an IRC bot -
| you would run this on your early 90's UNIX shell account you
| got from your university and it would stay connected when you
| weren't dialed in. Eggdrop will connect to the IRC server you
| tell it under the nickname you provide, join the channels you
| tell it, and then sits in the channel.
|
| You can give it op privileges, and would basically occupy the
| channel so it would not get taken over. It could also be set to
| auto-op people who joined (you could talk to the bot via IRC
| and authenticate). It was also possible to create multiple
| eggdrops that worked together and would look out for each
| others channels (a botnet) - ideally you would have multiple
| running from different IPs such as your friends from different
| universities.
|
| Eggdrop could also talk in the channel, respond to chat text in
| the channels, and provide access to files or memos.
|
| You could also telnet into the eggdrop directly and manage it,
| and talk with others on any botnet you setup. So if a channel
| or IRC server was being attacked or down, you had an out of
| band way to talk.
|
| Most modern IRC servers have "NickServ", "ChanServ" services
| that provide things like persistent users, channel ownership,
| and such, but that didn't come around until the 2000's I
| believe. You might still use an Eggdrop to do IRC games or file
| distribution.
| wnolens wrote:
| Excellent description. I haven't thought about IRC since I
| was a kid (and not a software engineer). This brings about
| beautiful nostalgia and new found sense of elegance.
|
| Fond memories of staying up late into the night.
| keyle wrote:
| I laughed at the VPS hosting flexing... pretending it's a
| grassroot movement running on limited resources. You're limited
| alright, in other ways.
|
| Run it from your basement on a pentium and I'll be impressed ;)
|
| Sorry I'm too old for this.
| [deleted]
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Right, with those specs you could run any CMS-based website
| with images and everything and serve hundreds of users a day
| without any issue.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| Yeah, this got me:
|
| > RESOURCE MINIMALISM. rawtext.club runs on a tiny cloud-based
| VPS with 1 GB of memory and a 25 GB disk.
|
| Nothing "tiny" about this!
| Aeolun wrote:
| We can run the same on 32MB though. It's just that you can't
| get any VPS'es in that size any more.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| buyvm.com rents 256MB VMs. vultr.com still has some 500MB VMs
| in some of their DCs.
|
| You could also run raspberry pi, or other small SBC form your
| home.
| billyhoffman wrote:
| Raspberry Pis, old thinkpads, and the like are how most
| people host their Gemini capsules
| blippage wrote:
| Indeed. I run my gemini capsule off of a Raspberry Pi 3
| using FreeBSD. The one thing about Pi's is that they sip
| energy. I was using about 2.4W, so I estimated running
| costs at less than PS7pa.
|
| I've no doubt that one could serve gopher pages using a
| microcontroller like the ESP-32. Gemini would be more
| difficult, due to encryption requirements.
|
| Readers may also be interested to learn of the Spartan
| protocol, which is basically Gemini without the
| encryption and a more flexibly upload option. Spartan
| hasn't really caught on yet, though.
|
| I've also heard of a protocol called Mercury, which I
| assume is similar to Gemini, but even simpler. I've not
| read up about it, though.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| This?
|
| https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
|
| Interesting, I did not know about it.
|
| Not related to the original link, right?
| ecliptik wrote:
| RTC is semi-related to gemini://, they're both loosely
| affiliated with The Circumlunar Universe [1].
|
| 1. https://phroxy.net/gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space
| :70/1/...
| fsiefken wrote:
| Carl Newport wrote in his book Digital Minimalism (2019):
|
| "Our current relationship with the technologies of our hyper-
| connected world is unsustainable and is leading us closer to the
| quiet desperation that Thoreau observed so many years ago. But as
| Thoreau reminds us, "the sun rose clear" and we still have the
| ability to change this state of affairs.
|
| To do so, however, we cannot passively allow the wild tangle of
| tools, entertainments, and distractions provided by the internet
| age to dictate how we spend our time or how we feel. We must
| instead take steps to extract the good from these technologies
| while sidestepping what's bad. We require a philosophy that puts
| our aspirations and values once again in charge of our daily
| experience, all the while dethroning primal whims and the
| business models of Silicon Valley from their current dominance of
| this role; a philosophy that accepts new technologies, but not if
| the price is the dehumanization Andrew Sullivan warned us about;
| a philosophy that prioritizes long-term meaning over short-term
| satisfaction.
|
| A philosophy, in other words, like digital minimalism."
|
| https://books.google.nl/books?id=S4NbDwAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1
| bluehedgehog29 wrote:
| I read this book when it came out and once or twice since.
| Highly recommend it.
|
| The minimalist bit of the title does mislead some people into
| thinking it preaches "get rid of everything digital". But in
| practice, it is much more nuanced and helpful than that.
|
| The quote you extracted sums it up perfectly, it's much more
| about not passively embracing everything about everything
| digital. But more about only taking what's worthwhile from
| those platforms.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| See also Neil Postman, particularly _Amusing Ourselves to
| Death_ , and Nicholas Carr, _The Shallows_.
|
| Ezra Klein with Nick Carr:
|
| https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nicholas-carr-on-deep-...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shallows_(book)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| NB: _Cal_ Newport. Not "Carl".
| chrismorgan wrote:
| _ _ __ ____ _| |_ _ ___ __(_) \ V / _`
| | | || / -_|_-/_ \_/\__,_|_|\_,_\___/__(_)
|
| I... _think_ that says "values:", but it took me a while to
| decide, aided by what I might call the known-plaintext heading
| "rawtext.club" written in the same style.
| [deleted]
| yonrg wrote:
| I bet this is output of % figlet -f small
| values:
|
| I think the default font (standard) is more readable. But they
| state, taking part is not easy:) % figlet
| values: _ __ ____ _| |_ _ ___ ___
| _ \ \ / / _` | | | | |/ _ \/ __(_) \ V / (_| | |
| |_| | __/\__ \_ \_/ \__,_|_|\__,_|\___||___(_)
| Aeolun wrote:
| Reads like valves to me
| trumpablehump wrote:
| For "valves" there would be a stray underscore "_" on the
| right bottom corner of the second "v". To me it clearly is
| "values".
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Values vs. Valves: figlet -f small Values vs.
| Valves __ __ _ __
| __ _ \ \ / /_ _| |_ _ ___ ___ __ _____
| \ \ / /_ _| |_ _____ ___ \ V / _` | | || / -_|_-< \ V
| (_-<_ \ V / _` | \ V / -_|_-<
| \_/\__,_|_|\_,_\___/__/ \_//__(_) \_/\__,_|_|\_/\___/__/
| [deleted]
| buttocks wrote:
| It's a 1990s BBS.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| I felt that should have redirected to
| https://rawtext.club/FILE_ID.DIZ :)
| blippage wrote:
| It's surprising just how good plain text can look.
|
| The site is also available as a Gemini capsule:
| gemini://rawtext.club/ and gopher gopher://rawtext.club/
| ecliptik wrote:
| I have an RTC account (gemini link in bio), it's more of a pubnix
| than a social network - there are custom social oriented cli
| tools for posting internal text blogs, short message streams,
| BBS-like topic system, and others. Most of them are up on the RTC
| gitea instance [1].
|
| Users log on infrequently, and you can catch up relatively
| quickly after not logging in for a couple of months. It's very
| asynchronous.
|
| My primary use of RTC is hosting a gemini capsule and gopherhole
| generated from my Jekyll blogs markdown posts using a hacky shell
| script and pandoc.
|
| 1. https://git.rawtext.club/explore/repos
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| Notably this page is HTML and not plain text.
|
| Here I fixed it for you ;)
|
| https://earthly-tools.com/text-mode?url=https://rawtext.club...
| eterps wrote:
| A tool that does the reverse would be nice. It would remove the
| fixed width formatting, detect paragraphs/headers/URLs and
| produce simple HTML so that you can read comfortably on any
| device form factor and click on links ;-)
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| Hmm, that would be cool. It almost sounds like converting
| from html to markdown and back to raw html would do the
| trick.
| [deleted]
| kevincox wrote:
| I much prefered the original with good line wrapping and
| clickable links.
|
| (Although for some reason a few of the paragraphs in the
| original were too wide for my screen)
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| Yeah, the hard wrapping of my link looks bad on my phone,
| unless I turn it sideways. But it looks good on my laptop.
|
| I guess html has benefits :) Does Gemini handle wrapping?
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Most Gemini clients do decent wrapping, but it's pretty
| much up to them _how_ that 's done.
| [deleted]
| agumonkey wrote:
| nice link, I shall make a bookmarklet
| howeyc wrote:
| This reminds me of a community of users that "tweet" by placing a
| line in a text file served at the root of their web servers. They
| follow by polling each other's text files.
|
| Simple format, something like "RFC3339 <message>" and you can
| mention by doing @nick<their txt url> or something like that.
|
| I forget the name and community though.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| twtxt?
|
| https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
|
| There's also yarn[1] which builds on twtxt to give you APIs and
| mobile clients, etc.
|
| [1] https://yarn.social
| howeyc wrote:
| Yep, that's the one I remember.
| rvz wrote:
| > RTC is a non-profit, do-it-yourself social network that uses a
| smaller, simpler, user-built toolkit. We are proudly the polar
| opposite of the big, exploitative, corporate-owned social media
| mega-sites. Not cool. Not easy. Not big. rawtext.club is what you
| make it. The point is that you can do a LOT using very minimal
| resources by stringing together command line tricks on a Linux
| system.
|
| Yeah. Of course, Who would not want to go back to the dark ages
| and strip everything down and go underground with the rest of the
| fringe projects that failed before it? Not to get too excited
| about creating a hidden sea chamber in the internet but I guess
| to each to their own?
|
| I don't think the typical regular blogger off the street would
| want to revert back to writing manuscripts to their readers for
| the sake of privacy or setting up their own instance themselves
| just to join an exclusive party of 5.
|
| If they won't do it with Mastodon why would they do it with this?
| peterkelly wrote:
| I think the point is they want to create a small, hopefully
| high-quality community. It doesn't sound like it's something
| intended for the "typical regular blogger off the street".
|
| It's ok to build small, simple things. Not everything has to
| scale or be suitable for all users.
| jes wrote:
| I'm enough of a dinosaur that I think I'd be good just going back
| to the days of USENET, UUCP and rn.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| I've been looking into UUCP recently and it's pretty awesome.
|
| I really like the "call" model and "hold and forwarding"
| features of UUCP:
|
| - All that's needed for two systems to exchange data is for one
| to call the other and it doesn't matter which side does or it
| how.
|
| - A UUCP node will hold messages received by one node, but
| intended for another, until it makes/receives a call from the
| destination system or intermediate.
|
| You can have a "leaf" system that calls into a hub system
| regularly but never receives calls, and it can still
| bidirectionally communicate due to the above. It'll be slow
| depending on the call schedule but it worked in the 70's. :)
|
| It's a lot of work though because you have to specify all your
| nodes, links, and forwarding manually. You also have to
| integrate it with your UNIX mailer to get standard mail tools
| working with it, but it wasn't too hard with postfix.
| jes wrote:
| I liked it too, when I used it. It's been decades, though. I
| think you're right about the use model and its benefits.
|
| uw-beaver!tikal!jes :-)
| themadturk wrote:
| I used UUCP on a Kaypro 10 CP/M machine in the early 90s to
| access email at a local ISP. It took some doing to get set
| up, but worked really well.
| jes wrote:
| Was this a port to CP/M? The Kaypro 10 was a Z80A cpu,
| right?
| zzo38computer wrote:
| If you want to set up a NNTP server, you can do so; I have my
| own NNTP server set up, and others can also do. I wrote a
| program called "sqlnetnews"; there is also "WendzelNNTP"; and
| you can also use some of the more complicated ones such as INN,
| etc.
| jes wrote:
| I really appreciate the advice. I'll check it out.
| speedgoose wrote:
| > we're able to run a whole digital social club off it (a small
| VM) because we use text-based interfaces.
|
| I'm not sure it's really the reason. You could probably have
| performances in the same order of magnitude by sending JSON or
| simple HTML.
| echoradio wrote:
| Except those add layers of complexity.
|
| I don't know if rawtext.club supports UTF-8, but if they only
| use ASCII, that would be a constraint I'm not sure can be
| matched in simplicity for both user and computer.
| speedgoose wrote:
| But it has nothing to do with performances.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| > > (a small VM)
|
| By old standards it's a huge server with a gigabyte of RAM
| memory and tens of GB of disk (maybe even SSD). Traditional
| text BBS's ran on 8 bit microcomputers with 64KB of memory and
| maybe some floppy disks, or perhaps a hard disk in the tens of
| megabytes, I thought.
|
| I do like the idea of raw text. Leopold Kronecker famously said
| that God created ASCII, but Unicode is the work of man. Or
| something like that.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Can't be him even with a time machine, ASCII is missing 4
| letters of his language.
| crtcl wrote:
| tpoacher wrote:
| i think you're interpreting "offline" here differently (i.e.
| "in real life") to what was intended (i.e. "asynchronously").
| crtcl wrote:
| No I think my interpretation was correct, from the context.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Ah yes, plain text. So, not responsive at all, needing constant
| side swiping on mobile and unnecessary eye strain on desktop due
| to no word wrapping on larger screens.
|
| At the very least use these 100 bytes of CSS so it's readable.
|
| https://www.swyx.io/css-100-bytes
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I do not agree. I prefer it to not have any such CSS, and then
| I can specify what CSS I want, myself, if any; and otherwise
| have the client software make it suitable itself, for the width
| of its display, user's specified font sizes, colours (which may
| be different if a print out is made on paper, or if using a
| monochrome display), etc. (I find the default styles are mostly
| suitable.)
| motogpjimbo wrote:
| If only the mobile computing revolution had been based around
| the form factor of the Psion Series 5...
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(page generated 2022-06-18 23:01 UTC)