Broader protocol support for TWTXT
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I found recently a microblogging platform: twtxt [0].

It's main selling point is that it's decentralized and minimalist. The 
concept is simple: write your thoughts in a plain text file, one per 
line, prefixed with the date, and share it with others [1] :

2020-10-21T21:34:47+02:00        I am trying twtxt!197
1970-01-01T00:00:00+00:00        It's a Unix system!

You « follow » people by fetching their twtxt.txt file periodically, 
and display all entries sorted by date. Multiple clients exist, and the 
format is simple enough to build a working client in a few minutes. 

Once your file is updated, you must share it with other users. There is 
a myriad of network protocols that can be used for this purpose: gopher 
of course, but also gemini, IMAP,  FTP, SSH, SMB, WebDav, ... Heck, 
even HTTP !

However as I've found out after a few days of using it, all clients and 
user directories (registry.twtxt.org, twtxt.tilde.institute, twtxt,xyz, 
...) only support HTTP links. This doesn't really fit the « built for 
hackers », and « minimalist » promise from the description.

I love the simplicity of the specification. All it does is specifying a 
format for people to share thoughts around the world, in the most 
elegant way possible: plain text. This leaves the door open to so many 
ways to share and update this file, and enforcing the use of HTTP on 
its users can only deserve it. The gopher amd gemini community are 
particularly aware of the beauty of plain text, and twtxt totally fits 
this universe, so I think it would clearly be a benefit to just not 
exclude them.

This post is a call to developers to add more protocol support to their 
twtxt clients. Not everyone is running an HTTP server, or wants to.

Let's make twtxt truly decentralized, and open !
-- 
~wgs

PS: I would like to say « thank you » to vain [2][3] for being the 
first person ever to follow, and metion my name on twtxt, thus proving 
that it's possible ! 

[0]: https://twtxt.readthedocs.io
[1]: gopher://g.nixers.net/0/~z3bra/twtxt.txt
[2]: gopher://uninformativ.de
[3]: https://www.uninformativ.de/twtxt.txt
20201021.2249