[HN Gopher] Twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging s...
___________________________________________________________________
Twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for
hackers
Author : Gedxx
Score : 297 points
Date : 2024-12-22 20:51 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (twtxt.readthedocs.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (twtxt.readthedocs.io)
| deadbabe wrote:
| With a name like Twtxt how are you supposed to easily talk about
| it with other people? Not even one vowel
| sn0n wrote:
| I think I'd pronounce it as, Twit-ext?
| freetinker wrote:
| This is correct. The rest are incorrect.
| zeograd wrote:
| Intuitively, I read it as "tweetext"
| PNewling wrote:
| Huh, in my head I was reading it 'twit-text' (this is not
| meant to be a pejorative comment), but I guess that is
| ascribing it another 't' where there isn't one
| linsomniac wrote:
| The upvotes on the pronunciation in the sibling comments should
| be considered legally binding and will be the authoritative
| pronunciation. Upvote carefully.
| mikae1 wrote:
| Talk? You write about it, on a (mechanical) keyboard.
| Aloha wrote:
| twit-text is how I would pronounce it.
| kstrauser wrote:
| If it becomes popular, I'm pronouncing it "twixt", even if it's
| wrong.
| guerrilla wrote:
| This has to be it.
| hackernewds wrote:
| I inferred Twittext so it's not ideally designed for virality
| bookofjoe wrote:
| https://imgur.com/a/XtEuaEd
| huijzer wrote:
| There is a long history of confusing or weird project names in
| computing like sqlite, gif, Splunk, Hadoop, Coq, MongoDB (from
| humongous apparently), yacc, C, R, and X (the window manager;
| not a lang or the social media site).
| elpocko wrote:
| Not a huge problem: it existed for 9 years and no one is
| talking about it.
| tux wrote:
| It kind of sounds like twitter extension. This is what i
| thought of it as when i first seen it. This can be very
| confusing.
| smitty1e wrote:
| I suppose that if one were motivated, one would run a
| https://github.com/plomlompom/htwtxt service and then point the
| audience to it.
|
| Not clear that the juice would be worth the squeeze over, e.g.
| Mastadon.
| bityard wrote:
| Not a Welsh speaker, I see
| shakna wrote:
| Most of the community call it Yarn. They use twtxt as the
| protocol name - and it isn't like HTTP is one vowel.
| JdeBP wrote:
| As its name says, "double u" is not just one but _two_ vowels.
| (-:
| fsiefken wrote:
| perhaps someone can implement it in the bluesky pds as an
| additional feature https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds put
| caddy in front of it for brotli compression so it serves fast on
| 1k2 links
| simonw wrote:
| I found it surprisingly hard to find live examples of sites
| running this.
|
| The directory at https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/we-are-twtxt
| gave me an error, but I found it in the Internet Archive (19th
| September 2024):
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240919022045/https://git.mills...
|
| Here's a live example from that list:
| https://niplav.site/twtxt.txt - and that one shows ones its
| following, this one has recent posts (from December 2024):
| https://txt.sour.is/user/xuu/twtxt.txt
|
| The last commit to
| https://github.com/buckket/twtxt/commits/master/ is October 2023,
| so I don't think this project is 100% thriving at the moment.
|
| Update: Aha! Found
| https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/registry.html and via
| it https://registry.twtxt.org/api/plain/tweets which shows some
| recent content across the network.
|
| Also https://registry.twtxt.org/api/plain/users looks to be a
| list of users, though I couldn't figure out how to paginate it
| (using ?page=3 doesn't seem to work, despite that being listed on
| the https://registry.twtxt.org/swagger-ui/ page)
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| The current list of active yarn.social/twtxt sites is at
|
| https://feeds.twtxt.net/feeds (there are quite a lot)
|
| The community name is YARN; 'twtxt' is the protocol name.
| simonw wrote:
| Thanks! I've filed a PR to add that to the documentation.
| https://github.com/buckket/twtxt/pull/183
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| because it's "for hackers"!
| networked wrote:
| twtxt isn't very popular. I think the feed format itself is
| neat, other than the tab, but maybe there isn't enough of a
| niche for it.
|
| I have implemented a twtxt version of the Atom and the JSON
| Feed feed [1] for my site at https://dbohdan.com/twtxt.txt. The
| generator I originally developed for the site creates twtxt
| feeds, too: https://github.com/tclssg/tclssg. I haven't seen it
| in another static site generator or plugin; please link if you
| know one.
|
| The public-access Unix system tilde.institute has a twtxt
| registry: https://twtxt.tilde.institute/. You can see the user
| list at https://twtxt.tilde.institute/api/plain/users. The
| aggregator https://twtxt.tilde.institute/api/plain/tweets is
| currently filled with what looks like somebody protesting the
| request rate: quite https://lublin.se/twtxt.txt
| 2024-12-23T03:15:21-05:00 <ROBOT VOICE> THE LAST HUMAN POST ON
| THIS FEED IS MORE THAN FOUR YEARS OLD. PERHAPS TWTXT CLIENTS
| SHOULD THEN FETCH THE FEED *VERY* RARELY. quite
| https://lublin.se/twtxt.txt 2024-12-23T03:15:16-05:00 <ROBOT
| VOICE> THE LAST HUMAN POST ON THIS FEED IS MORE THAN FOUR YEARS
| OLD. PERHAPS TWTXT CLIENTS SHOULD THEN FETCH THE FEED *VERY*
| RARELY. quite https://lublin.se/twtxt.txt
| 2024-12-23T03:15:07-05:00 <ROBOT VOICE> THE LAST HUMAN POST ON
| THIS FEED IS MORE THAN FOUR YEARS OLD. PERHAPS TWTXT CLIENTS
| SHOULD THEN FETCH THE FEED *VERY* RARELY. [...]
|
| [1] This is why you shouldn't include the word "feed" in the
| name of your standard for feeds.
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _A Decentralised Social Network_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33513022 - Nov 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25246533 (Nov 2020)
|
| _Twtxt Is a Self-Hosted, Twitter-Like Decentralised
| MicroBlogging Platform_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25242996 - Nov 2020 (27
| comments)
|
| _Show HN: Twtxt v0.0.7 Your self-hosted, decentralised Twitter
| -like_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23945300 - July
| 2020 (7 comments)
|
| _Twtxt.net - Attempting to respark the twtxt community_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23892491 - July 2020 (1
| comment)
|
| _Twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for
| hackers_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23507640 - June
| 2020 (1 comment)
|
| _Twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for
| hackers_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23312756 - May
| 2020 (1 comment)
|
| _Show HN: Txtnish - a client for the microblogging platform
| twtxt_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13742949 - Feb 2017
| (4 comments)
|
| _Show HN: htwtxt - hosted twtxt server (written in Go)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11091592 - Feb 2016 (2
| comments)
|
| _Show HN: Twtxt - Decentralised, minimalist microblogging
| service for hackers_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11043502 - Feb 2016 (65
| comments)
| ruthmarx wrote:
| So how big is the Twtxt community? How many Twtxters?
| zimpenfish wrote:
| I think I only ever interacted with 2 whilst I was
| experimenting with twtxt.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| https://feeds.twtxt.net/feeds (There are hundreds of us!!
| HUNDREDS!!!) /s
| briandear wrote:
| What problem is this solving? Not a criticism, just genuinely
| curious. On X, I can follow hackers, I can block/mute and curate
| as I want. Just not sure who asked for this.
| prmoustache wrote:
| You can't self host your X feed for a start.
| briandear wrote:
| Also, I forgot that Mastadoon is/was also a thing. Are there any
| original ideas out there rather than another "Twitter but not
| Twitter" clone?
| bityard wrote:
| Twitter, but your tweets are stored on a blockchain with smart
| contracts written by LLMs. In Rust.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I actually liked bitclout, seemed like it would work really
| well for artists' fundraising for an album release or a tour
| etc. featured no-fee "tips" of all sizes right next to the
| like button and kept users addicted with day trading
| mechanics tied to artists' popularity. Money flowed freely
| across borders and moderation was going to be handled by
| clients.
|
| afaik there was never any rugpull of the base currency, but
| it turned out to be a platform ideally suited to rugpulling
| and impersonating celebrities. Plus if you thought drama on
| Twitter was bad just try pinning your bank balance to
| individuals' reputations and see how well everyone gets
| along.
| shakna wrote:
| Peertube [0], Lemmy [1], and Pixelfed [2] all run on the same
| protocol as Mastodon. You can interact across all of them (e.g.
| Mastodon user replies to Peertube video post), but the
| presentation on each is very different.
|
| There's more as well. Like Friendica [3] feels a little bit
| like Facebook, and Hubzilla [4] feels a bit like Google+ used
| to. Diaspora feels a bit more basic, but similar concept to
| Friendica.
|
| All of them can cross interact.
|
| [0] YouTube style - https://joinpeertube.org/
|
| [1] Reddit-style - https://join-lemmy.org/
|
| [2] Instagram-style - https://pixelfed.org/
|
| [3] https://friendi.ca/
|
| [4] https://hubzilla.org
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| pixelfed looks nice. Instagram has been the only social I
| kept around because it's nice to look at pictures but they've
| recently transitioned to full on Tiktok/yt shorts competitor,
| I'd love to jump ship to something that's just photographs
| again.
|
| Never tried lemmy, are the separate servers essentially
| "subreddits" ? That's cool that there aren't any global
| admins so each community really can have their own moderation
| rules.
| n_plus_1_acc wrote:
| A server can have many subreddits (called communities). You
| can obviously subscribe to a community with an account from
| any other server.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| lol this was not at all obvious to me at first glance
| from the framing of 'choose a server', but I guess that's
| the whole value proposition of activitypub is it doesn't
| matter what server I started on.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| Why do we even need a microblogging platform? Twitter turned into
| a dumpster fire. Why will these other alternatives not have the
| same fate?
| qudat wrote:
| I'm inclined to agree. These post platforms are a race to the
| bottom
| dontdoxxme wrote:
| We don't. If anything just using HTTP and HTML the way it was
| designed is fine. See https://indieweb.org
| andreygrehov wrote:
| > Why do we even need a microblogging platform?
|
| Diversity of options is great.
|
| > Twitter turned into a dumpster fire
|
| I disagree. I love the new Twitter.
| velcrovan wrote:
| What do you like about it?
| toomim wrote:
| Community notes is really great. It's the best system for
| fact-checking anyone's ever come up with.
| ksenzee wrote:
| You must like it for political reasons, because from a
| technical standpoint the new Twitter is a catastrophe. It
| doesn't even work properly. The other day I typed in the URL
| of an account I wanted to check, from a browser where I
| wasn't logged in, and I got an endless loop of redirects.
| Watching Musk tear down Twitter infrastructure over the last
| two years has been like watching the Notre Dame fire, except
| if it was set on purpose. It was a miracle of human
| accomplishment and now it's a shell of its old self.
| t-3 wrote:
| That was the case long before Musk took over. Twitter has
| always been an observer-hostile site, that's the whole
| reason why nitter and co exist.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| > It was a miracle of human accomplishment and now it's a
| shell of its old self.
|
| You must dislike him for political reasons, because from an
| accomplishment standpoint he is still a miracle.
| openrisk wrote:
| The original Web was the work of genious, but everything since
| is either adtech enshittification or cumbersome hacks.
|
| The "simplest" requirement - decentralized discovery of what is
| out there, is essentially still unsolved. That is one of the
| main reasons we have centralized platforms of all types instead
| of some RSS on steroids design.
|
| The second (and more difficult in sociopolitical terms)
| requirement that is still unsolved is the "active" web,
| decentralized POST-in on somebody else's server. Here you have
| social challenges (identity, spam, moderation, fake news etc).
|
| We really need a good society adapted Web 3 evolution, because
| Web 2 has been a disaster that keeps on giving. But it will
| require genious at least commensurate with the original.
| skydhash wrote:
| How do you know what's happening elsewhere? Other than having
| relations, it falls under reporters to propagate news. How do
| you meet new people? You go to special events and gatherings.
| The web is already linked, but we have special nodes like
| search engines, directories, and forums that are information
| hubs.
|
| Creating a website was always easy. The minimum html you need
| is very small, and all you have to do is copy the files with
| an ftp client. Then tools like wordpress came and it became
| even easier.
|
| What social medias have done was to put everyone in the same
| space. First there were walls and you just have to build your
| own information hub. Now, the platform is providing you its
| own like a private television service (including ads) whether
| you like it or not.
|
| No need to invent a new version of the web, we can always go
| back to what was working and is still working.
| pjc50 wrote:
| These things are good or bad because of the community of people
| who use them, not the technology per se. And that community is
| shaped by both culture and moderators.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I disagree. The shape of the instrument makes some sounds
| easier to make than others. Pianos are inherently polyphonic
| while trumpets play one note at a time. Anything made in the
| shape of twitter will result in twitter like behavior.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The medium is the message. Any microcblogging platform that
| tracks and displays engagement inherently optimizes for short
| form swipes and "rebuttals" and outright lies. The "real time
| feed" nature optimizes for taking zero time or effort to
| confirm anything that anyone says. Nearly everything that
| "breaks" on twitter and doesn't make it to actual reports was
| an outright lie.
|
| You can't put a necessary amount of nuance in 140 characters.
| ynniv wrote:
| nostr is the hackers microblog. Just sign things and relay them:
|
| https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/01.md
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42489954
| cbzbc wrote:
| Like mini usenet with signatures.
| hoytech wrote:
| What I like about nostr is the experimentation with different
| clients, and the fact that your identity is portable to any of
| them. It's just a really cool model.
|
| I'm working on a nostr-based discussion site heavily inspired
| by HN/reddit: https://oddbean.com/
|
| No login required, and you can switch to a different client any
| time you want. We try to keep the bitcoin/politics stuff to a
| minimum on the homepage. There's a lot of that on nostr, but
| also a lot of kind and thoughtful discussion about diverse
| subjects.
| nunobrito wrote:
| Yes, with NOSTR you get the benefit of creating random
| accounts as well as reusing existing ones. Good work with the
| platform.
| nacs wrote:
| The nostr tech itself is great.
|
| The problem with nostr is that 95% of the conversations are
| about crypto.
| nmz wrote:
| Not a bad idea, light enough to implement a telegram bot everyone
| can use or email or maybe a bitlbee plugin so you can have a
| twtxt channel.
|
| But, what is it? can you PM someone? participate in a
| conversation? or is it just that, a microblog? Usability wise
| what will you do? keep a client running that always checks if new
| blogs have happened over, how many followers? I'm currently
| following 500 people, that's 500 connections if this takes off.
|
| It would be nice if an rss client supported it, until then ehh
| codazoda wrote:
| It's quite buggy. Any minor change from the norm (config
| directory, txt file directory) seemed to break it. Finally I went
| with the standards and it still had trouble. `twtxt following`
| gives you errors. At first I thought it was because I wasn't
| following anyone, even though I chose to follow the twtxt news
| feed, but I never got rid of the error. I got errors about "feed
| not available" even though the txt files were there (maybe
| version differences?)
|
| It sounds kinda interesting, honestly, but I give up.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| then you are not a hacker at heart :)
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Or they have better things to do than debug someone else's
| pet project
| fsiefken wrote:
| for another smolweb social network, check bubble running on
| gemini.
|
| http://portal.mozz.us/gemini/git.skyjake.fi/bubble/main/
|
| http://portal.mozz.us/spartan/hitchhiker-linux.org/gemlog/on...
|
| the last url needs a gemini client to view. surprisingly bubble
| looks a bit like hackernews and has support for moderation
|
| "Discussion forums, microblogging, and Git issue tracking for the
| Gemini community. You only need a Gemini client to participate.
| Welcome!"
|
| gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/s/Bubble
| dools wrote:
| Title shouild be:
|
| "Welcome to twtxt!"
| James_K wrote:
| It's called HTML + RSS.
| bfung wrote:
| I was about to ask... looks rss to me XD
| p4bl0 wrote:
| Yup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42496587
| shark_laser wrote:
| I was using it for years before moving to Mastodon, then Nostr.
|
| It did work rather well, is easy to code for, and I still have
| people pulling from my twtxt file, but it does get a bit tiresome
| managing follows etc with the clumsy apps.
|
| And not having a decent mobile app made it less fun to use on
| what for me is social media's primary use case - while on the loo
| hahaha.
| chickenfeed wrote:
| Great app name: ontheloo
| chickenfeed wrote:
| But perhaps, not so good, don't google that one.
| astrea wrote:
| This is literally just a shared text file with buzz words thrown
| in the title. You could achieve the same thing with a Google
| Drive link to a text file.
| block_dagger wrote:
| Broken image and popup message that disappears after a few
| seconds on the home page. Yeah, no thanks.
| sssilver wrote:
| I will never understand why all these minimalist content
| publishing systems pretend that visual imagery is unnecessary.
|
| Humans have expressed themselves in images long before they have
| expressed themselves in text.
|
| Any system that forces humans to express themselves purely in
| ASCII, monospace, and monochrome is crude and borderline
| disrespectful towards human expression.
|
| It made sense in 1983, when the technology to power these
| expressions was not prevalent. But why do this today? I know they
| exist, but who are the people who confine themselves this way? Is
| it acknowledged as an act of self-discipline or self-restraint?
| Some sort of an artistic statement? What is the process through
| which one arrives at "I will commit to this system, and always
| only communicate in written speech, laid out in uniform
| monochromatic typographic format. I will walk into these
| constraints voluntarily."
|
| Any medieval monk writing manuscripts, any ancient Greek or Roman
| or Egyptian or Chinese capturing history and literature on
| parchments would have gasped at such a thought.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The ironic part is you post this on a throwback site where
| content is more important than presentation.
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| And medieval monks in heaven are all gasping in unison
| sssilver wrote:
| I gather from your text that you perceive images to be
| presentation and monochrome monospace text to be content.
|
| Isn't all expression in a nutshell an act of _presenting
| content_?
|
| Is _emphasis_ content, or is it presentation? What about
| lowercase and uppercase? IS THAT CONTENT? Or "simply"
| presentation?
|
| All expression is an attempt for our content to be perceived
| as we intend. All expression is a presentation of our
| content, including the very text of it. The text itself is
| simply one of the dimensions of our content's presentation.
| troupo wrote:
| HN is not a blogging site, and its content is ephemeral
| comments.
|
| It's main value is threaded discussions which excuses the
| archaic and limited tools.
| richardw wrote:
| Let everyone make the things they want to make. Make something
| else? These people do you no harm, why pull their efforts down?
|
| "When you don't create things, you become defined by your
| tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude
| people. So create"
|
| - Why the Lucky Stiff
| sssilver wrote:
| I figure there's value in sharing why one would not want to
| use something that's being shared/offered here.
|
| Hacker News is a discussion platform. People submit ideas
| with the expectation that the community would find them
| interesting enough to discuss them.
|
| When someone submits an idea of text-only content publishing,
| is it not perfectly reasonable to discuss one's thoughts on
| that idea, whatever they happen to be? And if those thoughts
| didn't resonate or apply, would lack of upvotes not
| conveniently push these thoughts to the bottom of the page
| where most never reach?
|
| If I was an author of such a platform/idea/product, these are
| exactly the kind of responses I'd be most interested in
| reading. Not the feel-good high-fives, but the "what did I
| miss that others find important"s.
| richardw wrote:
| I think it's turned into the place to submit work when you
| want as much harsh feedback as possible. You can get
| upvotes but need to run the gauntlet of "why isn't it open
| source/here's a better app/this is dumb" etc. Top comments
| are often pretty caustic, so that's the culture we've
| built. I guess if you want to sharpen your offering really
| fast, this is optimal.
|
| "Any system that forces humans to express themselves purely
| in ASCII, monospace, and monochrome is crude and borderline
| disrespectful towards human expression."
|
| What is the outcome you're hoping for, by giving that
| feedback? Should we kill the authors now or just shun them
| until they give us pictures?
|
| Edit: every single system makes choices. You either try
| please everyone or you choose a set of people to focus on.
| This one isn't for you, and that's ok. It may fail and
| that's ok too. I don't think it's disrespectful to human
| expression, if anything it's a form of human expression.
| abudimir wrote:
| First time I heard of _why - interesting dev story. Thanks!
| benjifri wrote:
| In this case, because it's a text file based system that works
| through the CLI. It is kind of ironic though that the
| "Demonstration" in the introduction is a video
| cess11 wrote:
| It's built with Python, where strings default to UTF-8. Did
| they invent their own strings and constrained them to ASCII?
|
| Do you have the same view of books? You're condescending and
| refuse to spend time with books that don't have pictures?
| juliangmp wrote:
| Books and social media platforms are actually two different
| things
| cess11 wrote:
| You forgot to mention the differences you find important
| and why they ought to be important to the authors of the
| project in TFA.
| prmoustache wrote:
| > I will never understand why all these minimalist content
| publishing systems pretend that visual imagery is unnecessary.
|
| I don't think anybody is prevented from putting a link to an
| image, nor to build a client that autoload linked images (the
| same way that say, some gemini browsers like lagrange can be
| configured to show you images by default).
| JdeBP wrote:
| It's clear from the demonstration video alone that this is not
| an ASCII system, and indeed reading the doco confirms that the
| text files are considered to be UTF-8.
|
| This gives some irony to your analysis. Because this system
| thus permits one of the the very same ancient expression-in-
| images systems that you are alluding to: hieroglyphs are in
| Unicode.
|
| I expect that in the 9 years of its existence, almost no-one
| has ever used them in this system.
| sssilver wrote:
| The word "ASCII" was a grotesque, artistic verbal
| presentation choice for the substance of content I intended
| to convey :)
|
| I figured it supports UTF-8. I believe the gist of my point
| is still valid.
|
| Images are content. Layout is content. Typesetting is
| content. All are components of expression.
| JdeBP wrote:
| Alas, it isn't valid if one goes beyond even reading the
| doco.
|
| The underlying library that the tool uses, click
| (https://click.palletsprojects.com/en/stable/), turns out
| to include the idea that the "tweet" strings can contain
| ECMA-48 control sequences.
|
| This permits not only boldface and italics, but also (on
| very old terminals and very modern terminal emulators)
| underline, strikethrough, faint, reverse video, invisible,
| and even 8 whole colours. (-:
|
| Again, though, I expect that in the 9 years of the system's
| existence, no-one has actually used this in earnest.
|
| In part, this is because the default mode seems to be to
| apply a regular expression substitution to attempt to strip
| out control sequences, because of course ECMA-48 and
| ECMA-35 are over-expressive permitting things like OSC,
| NEL, PM, APC, cursor motions ("layout is content"),
| insert/delete/erase, and code page changes.
|
| Amusingly, the regular expression substitution is not based
| upon an understanding of ECMA-35 and is faulty.
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| > The word "ASCII" was a grotesque, artistic verbal
| presentation choice for the substance of content I intended
| to convey :)
|
| Is this GPT generated? I find it hard to believe someone
| actually talks/writes like this.
| openrisk wrote:
| Writing evolved _after_ visual imagery to solve the poor
| ability of visuals to express abstractions. It too is based on
| imagery, thats what script is after all, but leverages the
| emergent social pattern of _literacy_ to convey highly encoded
| information.
|
| This invention (that we now take for granted) has been so
| exalted in the minds of earlier generations that they would go
| to extremes to banish imagery (iconoclasts etc.)
|
| It takes its most extreme form in mathematical script: concise
| expression of the most abstract ideas.
|
| Commingling imagery and text has its many uses of course: try
| describing a graph or diagram or a real scene using text only.
| But for other purposes (literature) its a distraction that
| forces the brain to switch mode and diminishes the experience.
| Sharlin wrote:
| > It takes its most extreme form in mathematical script:
| concise expression of the most abstract ideas.
|
| Yet one thing that these minimalistic text-based interfaces
| are terrible for is rendering mathematical notation.
|
| > But for other purposes (literature) its a distraction that
| forces the brain to switch mode and diminishes the
| experience.
|
| Yet we do not (typically) consume literature in a monospace,
| typographically impoverished form.
| openrisk wrote:
| They must live and die by their choices but I am defending
| the category as a whole. Both limitations can be lifted
| without altering the essence of a distraction free reading
| flow.
| jampekka wrote:
| > Yet one thing that these minimalistic text-based
| interfaces are terrible for is rendering mathematical
| notation.
|
| You can notate mathematics using text. In fact the
| mathematic notation rendered to vector graphics/bitmaps is
| typically rendered from such text-based notation.
|
| Mathematics is increasingly done using text-based notation
| (e.g. Lean, Mathematica, SymPy), which I actually prefer
| because it's typically unambiguous unlike the traditional
| notation with wildly varying conventions and a lot left
| implicit or even ill-defined.
| liotier wrote:
| > mathematic notation rendered to vector graphics/bitmaps
| are typically rendered from such text-based notation
|
| What everyone was impatiently waiting for: LaTeX
| microblogging !
|
| But seriously, a specialized Bluesky client could easily
| do that for scientific communities - no need to reinvent
| the whole stack.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| One complaint is LaTeX isn't semantic, but visual markup.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Of course. But good luck trying to _render_ LaTeX in a
| text terminal.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Oh, SymPy looks great!
| jampekka wrote:
| It is, at least for basic stuff. The biggest problem is
| that one forgets to solve stuff by hand after getting
| used to SymPy doing it automatically.
|
| Sometimes SymPy fails at problems that Mathematica can
| solve though. And Mathematica is expensive pain.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| There is a cargo cult of absence of features because old cool
| developers are used to email, IRC, EMACS, etc (stuff they got
| acquainted with in their college days 30 years ago).
| anthk wrote:
| Emacs allows inlince images since the first X-based release,
| even more with Emacs. Inline images on Email and everything.
|
| Also, Email itself supports MIME too.
|
| But no image will be concise enough against a good wall of
| text explaining it.
|
| 30 years ago was 1994. People used to post images under
| Usenet too. But a lot of these images without some annotation
| they are useless.
| chickenfeed wrote:
| I used to enjoy using browsers like W3M, if you can just throw
| assets at your favourite tool of choice, like an image viewer,
| a video player, it just feels better for me as I don't have to
| learn a different interface for every site I visit.
| ulbu wrote:
| some people like different things. imagine that.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| Simon Willison has one of the more prolific microblogs going and
| just did a meta review on his approach including the mechanics
| (surprise surprise it's Django). Could be of interest to anyone
| double clicking this thread.
|
| My approach to running a link blog 22nd December 2024
|
| https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/
| prologic wrote:
| The Twtxt/Yarn community is larger than you think. As the founder
| of Yarn.social[1] (which itself uses the Twtxt spec and
| extensions[2]) and operator of the "flagship" instance
| twtxt.net[3] I often interact with around ~70 folks (_not
| including news feeds_).
|
| [1]: https://yarn.social [2]: https://twtxt.net [3]:
| https://twtxt.net
| cfiggers wrote:
| Respectfully, 70 folks is not larger than I thought.
| k0ns0l wrote:
| pass :/
| p4bl0 wrote:
| I built a very (very) similar tool called _terss_ (for "terse"
| and "RSS") years ago in Bash on top of RSS feeds (using core-
| utils and more-utils -- in particular for 2xml and xml2) for
| interoperability because it made the whole thing more easy to
| produce and consume with other tools. I'll try to find if I still
| have it around somewhere :).
|
| UPDATE: here it is:
| https://code.up8.edu/pablo/myutils/-/blob/master/terss
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