@prologic Yeah all good! The only thing that was out of the ordinary I guess was that initial problem I had with the open registration flag not working, which I worked around. But if that's the first you've ever heard of it, maybe it was something odd in my config/build.
Okie dokie, PSA: Anyone following me that wants to still follow me, please do so at my new feed here: https://yarn.andrewjvpowell.com/user/eldersnake/twtxt.txt. As the nicks are the same, you'll have to unfollow my current/old one.
@prologic Ahh! I didn't even think of that problem. I was planning to. I did even have my feed copied over, but deleted it because I realised anyone following both would have doubled up posts. What's the best course here you reckon?
@eldersnake @prologic If it goes down at anytime now it'll simply be the rate limiting, which I'll work on over time. Shouldn't happen often, and I could technically mitigate it a bit by scheduling Pagekite to restart every so often, but not ideal.
@prologic Just realised I replied to you my hosted pod, which you can't see. Should be working now, if you try follow me on there.https://yarn.andrewjvpowell.com/user/eldersnake/twtxt.txt
@prologic How did you find that? xD Yeah only just connected up the domain. I have the certs, but thing I can't wrap my head around is using SSL certs with yarn on port 8000. 443 is tied up with my website.
what's even worse is I've seen domain sellers put those niche domains on mega sale for the first year, like $1.70 or so for a year, then the price jumps up anywhere between $30-70 per year depending on the domain thereafter. But the first year is more than enough time for spammers to do their thing.
Hopefully haven't offended anyone's eyes with this 😎
But hey, it will likely be a one person Pod so I guess I can go nuts.
@prologic Supplying open_registrations: true in settings.yaml also wouldn't work unless the default was compiled to true in options.go first, but it respects it being turned true|false afterwards. Hmm.
@prologic Yeah, regardless of using the '-R' flag or the long form, every time I would fire up yarnd it would report registrations as being closed and saying neither of the flags were supplied (they were). And sure enough it was showing as closed on the actual webpage. Changing the default in options.go let me register my account, and then turning off Open Registrations in Pod Settings worked to turn if off again.
@prologic The main thing I can't work out for the life of me is where the raw user txtxt.txt file is 🤔 I did a find everywhere, lol!
@prologic Will do! I should probably let you know yarnd was ignoring the '-R' open registration flag, I had to edit the default value in options.go and compile it that way. Probably something to put in a bug report but I also can't yet discount me having done something silly on my end yet...
Got Yarn (yarnd) built and running on my Raspberry Pi. All goes well I might eventually migrate to my own Pod? :P Depending on how much I have to deal with rate limits via Pagekite, otherwise might have to shift it over to a VPS.
@eldersnake They're not currently taking new subscription plans for some reason at the moment, so signing up and removing the rate limits entirely doesn't seem to be an option ATM.
Figured out my Pagekite "troubles" I think. Don't know how I missed this, although the docs and website aren't always as clear as could be, but turns out non-subscription accounts have a rate limit. In the case of free trial accounts, it's only 5 unique connections (IP addresses, user agents etc) per 3 hours. I was easily hitting this just through testing in multiple browsers, CURL and anyone else visiting. Chucking a few bucks their way lifts that limit to 8 connections per 3/4 of an hour, which is much better but still.
@prologic Ha! I just assumed the DM didn't send because of the other issue.
@prologic @adi Seems to be fine now. Interesting thing is this morning I did try to post and it showed up like this in my twtxt.txt: `2021-09-16T02021-09-16T23:32:57Z
@prologic I think I first noticed it when I got home late yesterday, I can't remember exact time, but definitely late arvo/early evening. At the time I put it down to an update or little bit of downtime that everyone would be seeing and went off to do other things, but then today I noticed it still happening and saw people still posting like normal (from the logged out state) xD
@prologic It was happening all day. See pic. 
@adi Thanks bud. Still having issues on my site, nothing to do with the solar setup or anything funnily enough, I think it's my Pagekite setup. DNS always checks out now, it seems I have to restart the Pagekite service a lot for it to function properly, and then after a while it starts having issues again. Kinda sucks, if my ISP didn't block port forwarding I may not have had this issue.
@eldersnake And now txtxt.net timeline IS loading, but only after I posted on Goryon? Haha wtf.
okay that worked. On Goryon, regular twtxt.net still playing up on me :S
Getting "error loading feed" on twtxt.net but not on Goryon. Also wont let me post on twtxt.net. @prologic is anyone else reporting issues ?
yeah ill have to add a http tunnel when I get home. I have my Nginx config set to redirect to https from http requests but of course if i don't have a http tunnel it would never get there. silly me 🤦♀️
and it will need the "www" as well as https. Seems I'll need a redirect.. To explain, because my ISP blocks port 80 and 443, I'm using Pagekite to tunnel it out, but im currently only running a tunnel to https.
the server itself is on a Raspberry Pi 3+. Probably the worst internet setup for a public server ever, but its been fine in my testing. Its even loading fine for me on my phone and I'm out and about at the moment, so I dont know why its not loading for others unless its a DNS propergation thing.
the reason for the distance from the house is the LTE connection is hooked up to dual MiMo yagis to get a strong signal.
eh yeah photos will come but I need to tidy the installation. I've had the solar setup itself for a while, a 160w solar panel on a regular deep cycle car battery powering an LTE Optus Broadband connection, which feeds into a GL-AR300 mini router connected to a 110m Ethernet run of cable back to my house. Its as Jerry rigged as it comes, but I live quite rural and its been a secondary connection as I only have a satellite broadband connection otherwise 😔 until Starlink lands anyway
bugger ! and yet works on everything I test it on outside of the home network 🤣 typical. Did you use the www sub domain ? I know it doesn't load on the root "naked" domain yet.
Assuming the DNS is playing ball now, my little personal site https://www.andrewjvpowell.com/ is now self hosted and solar powered. As @mckinley can attest, running on the original nearlyfreespeech.net non-production plan could use as little as $0.01 per day so there's not really any advantage to this, its just... because I can 🙃
@adi Hmm never heard of that one before (Vis). First glance looks like an almost 'suckless' Vim! I shall try it out. I'm addicted to Vi-style text editing, pretty much ingrained in my muscle memory.
Although it serves as a preface to make a self-hosted XMPP instance, actually a very good article on the problems of the typical centralised messaging services: https://homebrewserver.club/have-you-considered-the-alternative.html
that would awesome ! I don't know much abour the Fdroid process but I do know they require the whole source code to be available to inspect
Always good to have finds like that. I appreciate any devs that not only have an F-Droid version, but also provide means to get a pro version without going to the Play Store or requiring GSF (Google Services Framework). I recently picked up a second hand Google Pixel 3 and put CalyxOS on it, so I've been playing around with the whole de-Googled thing.
Things like this make me shake my head https://cryptobrowser.site/en/ - if you visit the site make sure you have ad block, block trackers etc. Pretty sure it's based on Chromium, but anyway a browser made specifically to "mine bitcoin while you browse". Sounds like extra resource hog to me. Also they actively encourage you to login to Google or Facebook to save your mining progress. The whole thing sounds like a privacy nightmare and sadly no doubt some people will fall for it.
What the heck is happening to this country?
@peekgirls @twtxt @prologic you know you've made it as a social platform when the porn sites start signing up 🤣
And 32kb of RAM might seem like absolutely nothing, but y'know I kind of miss when developers had to be memory constrained, as odd as that might sound to say. Nowadays devs can put any amount of layers and bloat into software because "memory is cheap" and they just don't care.
The instant thought to this is "this is why you would want to roll your own mail server", however then again, whatever server provider you're with can provide your IP upon request. Even if you roll one at home, you've got your ISP. So I guess the best security is simply to... not use the internet?
Thanks for the suggestions! More than a few possibilities it seems.
I'm sure I'm not alone when I say Google's Captcha thing is the scourge of the internet and anyone using (implementing) it should be subject to capital punishment (slight exaggeration). I hate it every time I come across it and most of the time it keeps saying to 'please try again'. Grr!
Was it you @prologic that had some good ideas for self hosted email or am i thinking of someone else ? i know it can (apparently) be a bit of a headache to set up properly.
@adi I mean, your last paragraph sounds like a lot of fun. Server crash... not so much!
Not quite a "now" page (may end up doing that) but for now just a monthly "Recently" https://www.andrewjvpowell.com/articles/recently-september-twenty-one/
@mckinley brilliant article, and bonus points for the Terry Davis reference.
not yet unfortunately, I've only just begun learning C. i assume that will make a good stepping stone though 😅
And with my personal site mentioned at the beginning of this thread, one day I've been tempted to put it on a self-hosted solar powered mini-server, akin to (https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/). In which case there could be little bits of downtime anyway.
@adi Yeah it has email and even SMS warning notices when the credit gets under a certain amount, and I think you can even customize the amounts that "trips" the warnings. It's not a bad system. Just sometimes, admittedly, I've been slack to fund the account, even if it's just a day here and there. To answer @mckinley 's question though, I easily go through at least $5 per month, but then again technically I have at least 3 sites on the one account. If they were sites that had to absolutely be online all the time I'd worry about it more.
Also if my site (https://andrewjvpowell.com/) is ever down, it's no problem. It's hosted on nearlyfreespeech.net, which is pay as you go basically, so if it's down it's just cos I need to add some credits :P
@adi I'm not actually sure, I don't think it ever said which one it was, but as per @prologic 's advice I'll update it to one of my active emails anyway. If it was a bug that certainly explains why no email I tried was working.
@prologic Yeah, because Goryon was still logged in (oddly enough, it would have usually signed out automatically by now) I was able to use it to change my password haha. Stroke of good fortune there.
thanks for the email too @adi . I had to dig it out of Spam or I would have seen it days ago.
sorry guys, I'm very much alive. Honestly I forgot my password and also which email I signed up with... tried all the ones I normally use, nada. Anyway apparently my Goryon was still logged in on my phone so that saved the day. Lol.
@prologic very true, and easy for me to forget. I'm Tasmanian and we've had it pretty good here, being an island i suppose.
@prologic yeah i hear ya, and thanks 😊 i guess social media platforms such as this one are fine as long as, ideally, there's a good amount of actual human interaction, both on the platform and in real life. We are social creatures after all, even if to different degrees.
I'm not gone, I just haven't been on really any form of social media lately. Not intentionally in the case of twtxt... just I guess I've been a bit tuned out of anything online except for the essentials. Kind of an online 'detox' lol.
Disingenuous headline. What I saw in his statement looked like an apology to me, as well as an honest self-reflection. What more do people want. The witch-hunt needs to stop, and in general I am sick to death of news headlines being twisted to have a slanted take on a subject before the reader even reads the content.
A Google product shutting down... wow what a shocker LOL
@prologic yep 😂
@adi I'm just saying that absolutely nobody is perfect, in a general sense. And mobs pushing to put others down or "cancel" them based on something they once online said eons ago is a bad path, though there's always exceptions. Regarding Stallman though, i dont necessarily disagree with him not being suited to leadership roles simply because he doesnt exactly make a good spokesman or public facing figure, but thats the main reason. Most of this smells of software corporates wanting to get rid of a very outspoken opponent and some SJWs jumping on for the ride. Just my opinion.
cancel culture is absolutely a thing IMO. The standards pushed online by the puritans will never hold up as humans are flawed and will always make mistakes, so this cancel anyone for so much as having an ill opinion or thinking differently trend is extremely dangerous IMO. And no doubt bad actors will use it to their advantage for ulterior motives.
A calm, reasoned take on the Stallman situation (some language warning as the creator doesn't mind dropping an F-bomb now and then): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLHxY-QsQkQ
I would be surprised if RMS was transphobic and such, given he's all about the gender neutral pronouns etc, but maybe I missed something.
RMS and I would probably be so far apart politically speaking, and probably various other issues, but I really respect the man, and would never want him 'cancelled'. He's hard to deal with, often seemingly extreme in his views, but he's important IMO. He provides a necessary balance in a world where a lot of people are all too willing to give up basic freedoms and privacy.
Count me in the Vera Farmiga fan club :p And yes I think I know of the movie you mean. That the one where the teen girl touches LITERALLY everything in the spooky house? Couldn't stop shaking my head at that lol!
talk about a murderer dancing on a grave haha
@slashdot @prologic it makes me more angry than most big business decisions have lately. Libraries have existed for time immemorial with their lending model and it's a major part of learning and free access to information. Amazon are the worst.
Okay I mangled the code formatting in the twt, but hopefully you get the idea
Good thing about keeping things simple is there’s so many possible ways to do things yourself. In a case where even mkws would be slightly overkill (or at least I don’t need pp) I basically just do this:
søren peter mørch echo "Making $i..."
cat templates/header-begin.html ${i%.html}.meta templates/header-end.html $i templates/footer.html > public/$i
doneThen my working directory looks like index.html index.meta about-us.html about-us.meta etc etc.
@adi I hear that. That and not watching an unexpected amount of dependencies get pulled in after installing some supposedly simple tool with npm.
@prologic @movq @adi Void Linux is actually my main OS, good little distro though the repo mirrors can be a bit out of sync sometimes
@adi I agree with @mckinley in regards to mkws being fine the way it is. For mine it also helps differentiate it from all the other SSGs out there.
@prologic Haha yeah I hear ya. In my case it's simply twts I don't want to forget about that have helpful hints, I guess in this case really about coding matters. That's probably the main thing one could draw from it!
The purist in me still wants to properly learn good old C before thinking about Go.
Yup, almost feels like they're insulting our intelligence.
@lobste_rs Interesting. Anytime Google and the word privacy are mentioned in the same sentence I can't help but be skeptical though.
@prologic i would like to host my own pod at some point. Not sure how the migration would go but with the simplicity of twtxt.txt I imagine if wouldn't be hard.
it's all good mate. I wasn't even worried, I think because A. you've mentioned it's self hosted before and B. overall yeah we're decentralised. It's nice not having that anxiety one might get from a big silo when they have downtime, wondering if they've finally kicked the bucket and all your data is gone.
@adi I actually think mkws would handle that many articles quite well, as long as no inefficient loops are used like I did with my twtxt.txt parsing originally.
@adi Markdown with some sort of custom front matter. Not quite YAML but in that style.
@adi True, on the name. As for what's preventing me, just time and being prepared to switch a few things up. The existing site has a few things going on with the current CMS like auto-generating thumbnails, image resizing, a search function plus about 217 articles to convert over.
@adi Speaking of that site, it currently runs on the flat file PHP Kirby CMS but one day I hope to convert it over to something like mkws.sh, which should be interesting. The current CMS makes liberal use of front matter etc.
@adi It can do if you make the writing structure a little more rigid and deliberately make the first paragraph as a kind of intro to the article, etc. It's pretty much what happens on my site The Linux Rain.
@adi Yeah not a bad idea. Admittedly sometimes I make my meta descriptions a little bit personalised and not really anything to do with the first paragraph, but your way is probably more proper.
@adi yeah I prefer not using front matter too, even to the point where I used the external meta files as you know. Which isn't perfect but I preferred that than adding an extra thing to separate and process in the one file.
I assume you were meaning to tag @adi ?
But yes, his mkws.sh is great 🤘 It's minimal but powerful because of pp and all the things you can do using the shell and UNIX-type programs.
interesting... spaces and everything. I can see this would be easy to parse.
@adi nice thanks man, I'll definitely bookmark those.
@jlj @adi yep I can relate to the satisfaction. For my own purposes as least, I'll never use WordPress again.
Another anti web bloat article I enjoyed: Website Obesity
If anyone has any ideas of good lightweight website 'date-picker' options I'm all ears. Most are just overly JS bloated and such, but at the same time native browser options aren't great either. So much for standards!
@adi I don't think I ever used the word 'force'. I like the idea of omitting the Like features etc because it, we'll say, encourages proper conversation and back and forwards communication.
@prologic Especially important because instead of how we see on the likes of FB where people just passively aggressively 'react' to comments/posts with the Laugh emoticon, people have to actually reply with a reasoned argument. In theory anyway.
Another Luke Smith video I just enjoyed: A Demonstration of Modern Web Bloat
The difference in the bloated examples versus the minimal (but still lovely) example he made was a thing of beauty.
I haven't looked up any studies or anything but I wouldn't be surprised if those who avoided Facebook, Twitter etc were actively happier on a daily basis.
I think when you reduce entire scores of people to nothing but dots and lines on a graph, it's bound to go badly. In a business setting at least.
@adi @prologic Still had it open in my tabs: https://github.com/grandfoobah/systemE
Interesting read if you don't mind a decent scroll with a lot of presentation images: Choose Boring Technology
@prologic It is very difficult it seems. There are those who will argue "just talk to them through text and calls" like the old days, which on the surface at least seems a fair enough argument, but I don't know it's always that easy. I feel like anyone that does that might, depending on the people they are family/friends with, be seen as a bit outcast or something. I hate the big tech platforms as much as anyone, but it's hard to be kept "in the loop" if I don't at least keep some tabs on it.
@prologic In the case of social media it's really just the factor of my close family and friends being on the likes of Facebook, which is really the only mainstream social media I'm on. It probably sounds like a cop out, but I don't think I'm the only one. As for junk food, ironically I have that more under control, mostly because it upset my stomach 😅 There is occasional indulgence of course though.
P.S I'm still a consumer of both to some degrees, I'm not perfect, but I think it's worth thinking about.
More I think of it, I believe the typical popular social media landscape as we know it is an analog to junk food.
As we know junk food:
I think the above can be directly applied to the big social media platforms too.
@prologic Yep I'm not even very familiar with Go and had the same thoughts as you. Might as well have compared C with PHP.
@adi Ahh okay, never seen that before. Mine is basically this. I admit I haven't at all looked up RSS/Atom specifications or anything so not sure how correct the actual feed is, should probably check that some time!
@adi I'm pretty sure the mkws archive I downloaded just had the sitemap.uppxml file, which I based my rss.uppxml on, but copied in the relevant atom tag bits from another blog site. Then I loop through my folder pages, source the meta data, etc, similar as how I customized the mkws script.
@prologic totally agree with you but unfortunately I think critical thinking escapes too many. In some ways I'm pretty sure these social media platforms encourage lack of critical thinking. A lot easier to keep and control a big dumb addicted herd.
@ionores looks interesting! I use a pre-configured Mutt at the moment, be interesting to compare them.
Yeah I'm admittedly a little wasted tonight so not sure I 100% understood the article 🤣 Might have to re-read in the morning.
Interesting article. The author seems to prefer the populace social media model with all the problems it brings. On the one hand I know what he's saying, but on the other I think he's being a bit defeatist.
It's pretty bloody ridiculous. Unfortunately, it's a good example of the real problem - not the internet itself, but corporations and those in power mucking it up for everyone else.
@prologic "What you see here is as good (or as bad, ir may never become huge or popular, let’s face it!, it lacks the dopamine effects) as it gets" And fine with me! (how do you quote on here?). Something I've begun to realise while being on here is that the only 'reaction' one gets is actual interaction, you know, with words and stuff like people would normally do in conversations, and it's kinda refreshing.
Very good video on the scary nature of social media, especially the silos: Social Media as Social Control
There's also surfraw. Written by Julian Assange believe it or not. But it's a handy little CLI tool for the sort of thing you guys are talking about.
Looks good to me. Not sure if they will load for everyone, because of the Amazon part, although it did for me and Brave browser's blocking shield is reasonably aggressive. But yeah, looks good and the books look like good resources.
@adi Here's an article I did for mkws: mkws - Static Site Generation With The Shell
(Google warning for those concerned - I haven't stripped out the ad code from the site yet, so make sure those blockers are up)
@bml oh nice! Yeah the awesome battery life is appealing too.
@prologic Haha 😅 In all seriousness though, the topic reminds me of one of these: AlphaSmart 3000 Review. I wouldn't mind getting one of these some time. Looks good for a bit of distraction free writing, and portable!
@prologic @xjix I'm surprised no one has tried to run JavaScript on a typewriter 😂 (jokes)
@prologic Yeah exactly kind of what I'm thinking, a typical twtxt.txt file will end up being pretty long and a HTML page with an ever decreasing scrollbar size might not be a good thing lol xD Yeah latest N is probably the simplest solution...
@adi What's your opinion on pagination? I was able to implement a rudimentary pagination on my twts page by using split on the twtxt.txt and a nested call to pp, but I dunno, I don't love it. Do people generally not mind loading a longer HTML page if its still mostly just text?
@adi In terms of wrapping them in HTML it's no more effort really, plus it's just a lot more efficient than calling smu a billion times (slight exaggeration) line by line.
@bml I know it won't win any game awards, but I am impressed the guy managed to make it in pretty much just C and a handful of FOSS tools. Ultra ultra portable!
@adi Aha! Interesting, thank you. Programs like awk continue to surprise me (in a good way).
I thought I'd seen a lot of suckless style stuff, now I find this: DOOM, suckless style 😛
@will Isn't that almost a badge of honour nowadays? 😛
@prologic Lol I thought you were talking about a politician
@adi Just realised a basic gsub on the date string stripping the 'T' and 'Z' does a respectable enough output.
@adi Legend! Works great, thanks man. awk still isn't my strong area, so that helps. It's definitely that bit quicker to generate as you would expect too, being more efficient. You wouldn't also have some clues how to format the date? AFAIK you can't run the date command inside awk?
@adi probably yeah, the main reason I even do the line by line is so I can more effortlessly wrap each line in my HTML container divs.
This does mean it's only updated when I push another site update of course, so it's not a live feed. I could Cron that too, but eh, I don't mind synchronizing once or twice a day for now.
@darch custom I guess. I'm running sed on the raw twtxt.txt file to convert the tags to Markdown friendly links, saving it to a temporary file and then looping through it line by line and putting the lines through smu (Markdown). This is run inside the mkws SSG by @adi . It's probably not the most efficient code but it works!
@prologic Yep, I tapped the post button twice, which apparently submits even though the button is in the 'Loading/Spinning' state still submits a second time! So yeah, not a bug as such, maybe something that could be fixed in Goryon's UI to not allow an accidental second tap or so. My touchscreen can be fairly sensitive, especially as battery gets low.
It's interesting that the double up is actually in the twtxt.txt file itself, and looking at this particular example, the double up comment was timestamped two seconds after the original.
@adi Oh it totally is. And as I said in the article, I once did essentially just that. Which I totally regretted. And managing all the bits and pieces with Webpack/Rollup etc, while it might be useful for really big projects, just felt like bloat and overkill.
@prologic @xuu Strange, I made that comment from Goryon if that helps at all.
@bml just on OpenBSD, how's the hardware support? in terms of drivers etc. I can never quite tell looking at the site. I used to play around with FreeBSD a bit which I enjoyed, I think it's the only BSD I've tried though.
@bml haha I hear ya. I'm not against it in general but the way it gets overused in many places just hurts my soul lol.
@bml love the simplicity TBH. If it's all you need, that's all that matters.
Hmm, just to let you know, the tw.tgz file doesn't seem to download, I get a 406 error.
Haha awesome. I love how Plan9 seems to be cropping up in more and more places lately, a twtxt client was bound to happen at some point.
I'm all for a prologic built Aussie search engine! Sadly you just know the buffoons who'll fork out money will give it to some company that will try to take advantage of peoples data and be Aussie's Google-lite.
Yeah look I'll grant them the work they did early on, they earned their stripes to get them on their way. But then eventually they've made their whole "Do No Evil" mantra look like a total farce, because for mine they do plenty of 'evil'.
Yeah you built one as a starting point in a weekend sitting on your own budget. Given money in the millions, I imagine it's not too hard of an ask at all. Google's dominance comes down to a bunch of other factors anyway rather than who is better, not least of which the fact it's included as default search engine on so many devices and browsers.
@slashdot memo to thr world: you don't have to get AI to do everything..
it's nice not having data held hostage 👍
in the meantime I just run a Cron scheduled script to periodically wget the twtxt.txt hosted here and copy it to my local machine as well as push the downloaded copy to my personal website.
interesting indeed. The import syntax and concat'ing of variables reminds me of JavaScript funnily enough.
@prologic Good stuff. Yeah sys-admin-ing a typical mail setup isn't exactly always fun...
Sh*t like this is what makes one want to use their own hosted mail...
Nice!
@prologic No worries! And that makes sense regarding the angle brackets, force of habit for me just using them wily nily in WYSIWYG editors. But anyway, it helped expose a bug 😎
@prologic Odd! For extra info, the reason I edited is I originally had my "insert web framework" enclosed in arrows (eg. less than and greater than arrows) but putting them in directly made the whole bit of text not even show (I'm guessing they weren't automatically converted to HTML safe > etc).
@prologic Heh exactly! And interesting, I edited my comment and it put it after yours.
KISS has been my mantra for some years now, and I still have to pull myself up sometimes for being caught up trying to over complicate some solution or falling for the hype around insert web framework etc etc.
twtxt/Yarn.social is definitely the best Indieweb-ish thing I've come across. Even Webmentions looked a little complicated to self implement, although I suspect part of that is the documentation is all over the place (and maybe part of it is me, who knows)
@prologic I'm totally quietly thinking of it as Yarns 🙊😅
yeah I love not having to be on some massive API reference docs page just to generate a website too, as a user.
@jlj very interesting. And through that I just discovered the solar version of Low Tech Magazine. I think I'm in love!!
It amazes me sometimes how these things end up vertical enough to end up embedded like this. Always sucks!
@prologic You can according to this (run your own Gab instance) https://code.gab.com/gab/social/gab-social. I just think no one... really has. I assume because of a combination of complexity and maybe just the general audience would rather pay a Pro subscription to be on the main instance instead of going through the work of spinning up their own. But yes as it stands the user experience is one of frustration a lot of the time. If a comment thread is big enough, it somehow even lags my phone terribly while trying to type.
@prologic As for this site, besides the odd caching issue, it runs like a dream. I know the demand and everything is apples and oranges, obviously, but I think twtxt is structured in such a way from the outset it will always scale better for reasons you just stated.
As for Gab's design, that didn't worry me too much, if we're talking aesthetics, but what worries me is their underlying codebase. They're struggling to keep up with the server demand and performance as it is, and I'm pretty sure it's based on Ruby under the hood? I thought that would introduce some scaling problems alone, but I'm no expert on it. In any case, it doesn't run terribly well a lot of the time.
Yeah I have mixed thoughts on Gab since that post. It was my first forey into a new free speech platform, that was also meant to be somewhat decentralised, although I don't know how many people actually run separate Gab instances. My idea was good; get more diverse people on there to make it less of an echo chamber. Problem is, there's still so many hardcore Christian evangelists there it might scare people away.
@adi Looks good, and I was able to tell what it was so it's effective enough. I'm not sure what else you could really do with the website, it's minimalism and cleanliness is very relevant to the software itself. Maybe somewhere it could do with a bit more talking mkws itself up in terms of its advantages, a few 'testimonials' etc.
@adi Now that's an interesting idea... I don't know how you solve the security issue exactly, but it makes a lot of sense otherwise. And yes, progressive enhancement FTW.
@antonio How are you finding it? I ended up switching from Firefox to Brave after using Firefox for years, mostly because ironically Firefox was finding ways to constantly chew up all my RAM. The other reason was just related to Mozilla, but that's a separate issue and not the fault of the browser. I suspect I'm in the minority with the RAM issues, because most people report the opposite.
@prologic True enough, and while @will and I were talking about 'Likes' before, it got me thinking. As innocent as they seem, I guess they contribute because it's not uncommon for people to get hooked and post things just for the endorphin hit of receiving "likes". No doubt the social media companies take full advantage of this.
default.css is nice actually, some of the minimal class-less CSS inserts are not perhaps as minimal as they could be. Haven't had a chance to look over the others ones properly yet, but one thing I do really respect is the minimal and functional approach. I've played around with various web frameworks and tools, and like you I imagine, really just got sick of all the bloat and unnecessary complexity.
@adi You're welcome! I don't have much, but I'm all for giving a little of what one can for free software I use and appreciate. 😀 🥂
Lol. As a side note I really do think the requirements of passwords has gotten to the point where they're long and ridiculous enough that they're basically impossible for any human to reliably remember.
Anyone else have to refresh the conversation pages to show the new replies after navigating to them? I'm assuming it's an aggressive cache thing.
@will @prologic It's a massive problem for sure. I still have close friends and family on FB, none of them would ever move or really understand, I don't think. And it's a kind of chained problem. I'm only still on there because of them... and they there because of others, and so on. Once upon a time I will say FB legit helped me meet up with people from school etc that I wouldn't have found again otherwise, but that was its only saving grace. It's gotten too big and powerful for its own good now.
Lol. I kind of do, but I wonder if I'm just too used to them. I don't imagine they could be implemented in the twtxt protocol too easily anyway, although I could be wrong.
Nice! I can tell by the source view that site was made with mkws also :P
@adi I'm gonna do a writing about mkws sometime soon, be good to try spread the word.
Monetization can be the difficult one, of course depends how you go about it. I remember the PHP-based Kirby CMS which I used for a number of years, obviously all open source code, but charge a license fee to use it on a public server. Back when I used it it was nowhere near the price it is now, so I guess it skyrocketed in popularity at some point. Only other ways I know of is of course ads and/or donations, but it's not a reliable model for fairly niche projects of course.
@adi Lol, good point! It can be a small world when that's the case.
Actually, I discovered mkws first and had just begun tinkering with it. Then soon after, somehow, I stumbled upon twtxt (the format), then of course ended up here. I believe I found twtxt from perusing the indieweb.org wiki. Funny thing is originally (before I found twtxt.net) I was going to email you with compliments/comments on mkws, then I saw you by chance on here. Ha!
@slashdot @prologic Interesting times we live in that's for sure. The part I hone in on though is these silo social media platforms trying to curate their feeds so much, and that always frustrates me. One of the reasons I'm loving decentralised alternatives like twtxt all the more lately.
@adi Good, simple and to the point while looking clean and modern for those that care about that sort of thing. I reckon the How-to page is worth having back on there though, I personally found it quite useful.
@prologic Holy moly, I never knew that! That'll come in handy, it has actually happened a few times over the years (no ip, ifconfig etc).
@prologic Haha that last line gave me a chuckle! :p I'm sure there's a few of those out there. On that point, does Spyda handle some of those horrible overly-JavaScript driven sites? I know Google spiders can navigate JS powered content, although those sorts of sites should probably be penalised in rankings anyway.. okay I'll stop before I go on a rant LOL.
heh you got it all going on! Well I'm always happy to test something out when you put something together 🙂
@adi makes sense! With the blog idea I guess the main difference will be handling dates out of the box, Markdown etc?
ah yep, I hear you. Honestly think it does work great the way it is. I think the (few) different independent pieces working together is nice, very Unix philosophy etc. I feel like anyone already using mkws would be more than comfortable manually handling any small changes brought about by updates.
@adi I believe so. Maybe I'm being a bit dense as I just woke up (lol), but what would be the alternative you might think of?
@adi Yeah I was using a Google cached version of your HOWTO page. I did originally consider it, but as I use a little helper script (example: make-post.sh) that just creates a new directory with a given name, and brings up a Vim window for me with the new post's Markdown file and a meta file, I just find that more convenient for my use case. I just whack a TITLE=<whatever> etc in the meta file and it'll get sourced for that page when processed
@prologic Ahh gotcha :) Well that helped me fix the immediate issue anyway, as I'm just doing rudimentary display on my site I was able to use sed to replace the unicode 2028 into <br>. Cheers!
@adi Yeah it definitely feels a bit weird to mix them. But oh well, works for them I guess. I like a lot of suckless ways of doing things, but I have my limits lol. I think the shell scripting for templating combined with the pp binary as a processor makes a lot of sense.
Anyone got any tips for handling the newlines generated on this site in the twtxt.txt file when outputting in the shell, via cat and the likes? With cat they just look like spaces. In something like the Mousepad editor, it shows the new lines (or carriage returns?) represented with a graphical symbol.
@lazarus I hear ya. And I'm just generally appreciating less is more, lately. Life is too busy with things flying into our brains as it is, let alone with overly busy and distracting websites.
@adi It's obscure and hard to find, but it's what suckless.org actually uses now (they used to use werc). It's called, I think, build-page.c and I found it through this. And the repo is here. Of course it contains the whole suckless site(s), but the build-page.c source is there. I guess really it's just them self-dogfooding, but I found it interesting.
@adi I think I pretty much went online and searched "most simple static site generator" or something along those lines lol. mkws was one of the results amongst a few typical results, like 11ty etc. One was also a suckless type one where the HTML source code was embedded in C source code, which was... interesting.
Here's the bin/mkws code: https://www.andrewjvpowell.com/pastebin/1612574353/
Fair warning that I'm no shell expert and basically learn as I go.
@prologic have to admit I like Yarn.social 👀 not only the double meaning, but I think it's the kind of simple buzzword/name that would catch on well amongst the regular folk.
@darch @prologic I'd love to see twtxt take off more. I guess it will always be a niche because a lot of people don't know or care how their content is handled (unfortunate) but for those willing to even DIY a little, twtxt is simple enough for pretty much anyone to use (I mean, it's PLAIN text 😎). And twt.social services like this one makes it accessible to anyone.
@adi yeah I'll post it when I'm home and near my main machine. Re: the markdown, I'm just using smu similar to what I saw in the docs.
I don't mind writing HTML without quoting attributes, or just using single quotation marks, but admittedly I do forget sometimes. The funny thing is I've forgotten a few times to change from the double quotation marks, and it still worked fine...? pp didn't seem to care, but I assume there's a case where it must.
@adi Basically my install is modified to output the actual site to a dedicated separate output folder as well as sourcing a file called meta if it exists in the given page folder for titles, descriptions etc. Most of my pages use Markdown. This would have all probably been a pain to add in another more complicated and opinionated SSG.
@adi Yep I do: here. Still not finished and just has some placeholder content from years ago with a few new things like a twts feed, but I got the site set up structurally how I want. I have little helper shell scripts to rebuild the site and push it to the server etc. I'll post the modified mkws script when I get a chance, though my code is probably horrible xD
@jlj @adi Heh yeah you won't regret it I don't reckon! If you like and are comfortable in the shell, and the usual coreutils etc, mkws feels extremely comfortable once you delve into it. I like having a folder-per-page with a nested index.html as my site structures personally, which mkws doesn't do out of the box, but it was very easy to modify the main script to accommodate this.
@gr0k @jlj @thewismit @prologic heh, I think I'm a little guilty of not RTFM, cos I completely missed the bit in the docs, especially about the registry and such. I actually thought to self host the twtxt.txt file and still be able to interact on a pod like this one you needed to self host a pod as well. Doh! Cheers mate.
Shout out to @adi and his static site generator, mkws! I've been playing around with it for a week or two now building my personal little site. I never thought of the shell as a templating language, but dang does it work well. I've been very surprised. I wanted a SSG that was less 'opinionated' than others and easily extendable, and this seems to be fitting the bill.
@gr0k I know right? Hadn't even heard of the twtxt format until a few days ago... also wanted to say I really like the minimalism/style of your site! Are you running a twt.social instance? I notice your twtxt.txt file is hosted there. I'd love to do something similar on my site but not sure my host would handle a client written in Go.
@prologic @dooven Oh that's a shame! Hope he's doing okay. Good thing I guess the API here and the twtxt format itself is so simple, any other volunteer app that had an inactive dev would probably have broken in some way by now.
Gotta say, if you're on mobile it's well worth trying out that app @prologic mentioned, "Goryon". Beautifully simple and fluid mobile interface that works lovely with twts!
@prologic @adi So you just casually bang out a search engine on the weekend? I wish I had that motivation and ability LOL. Any alternative search engines that value privacy first and foremost can only be a good thing. Looks like it pulled an RSS feed into the crawled results, not sure if that was intended
@prologic I have to agree, I've just been playing around accessing the API with cURL on the commandline. I'm no pro but learn this stuff as I go, but it looks like even I could jerry rig it together into something I could use outside of just this site. I'm still tossing up whether to post here first and synchronise with my own website twtxt.txt, or vice versa. The editor and reading capabilities are much nicer here though...
@prologic Thank you kind sir! Awesome to see you're another Aussie too ;)
@prologic @thewismit @antonio I would also be interested in this, I just started using twtxt and had planned on just using the CLI client and scripting my static site generator to post my twts whenever I publish it. Now I'm on here because of the discoverability and increased interactions possibilities. If I could sync it all up it would be awesome.
Hello world! Looking forward to getting to know twtxt :)
