What does HackerNews think of twtxt?

Decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers.

Language: Python

#45 in Python
> there really oughta be a text-only implementation of mastodon or one of the other fediverse ecosystems

Something like this that I know of, in a very simplified form.

> twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers.

> So you want to get some thoughts out on the internet in a convenient and slick way while also following the gibberish of others? Instead of signing up at a closed and/or regulated microblogging platform, getting your status updates out with twtxt is as easy as putting them in a publicly accessible text file. The URL pointing to this file is your identity, your account. twtxt then tracks these text files, like a feedreader, and builds your unique timeline out of them, depending on which files you track. The format is simple, human readable, and integrates well with UNIX command line utilities.

https://github.com/buckket/twtxt

I have used this format a little bit when I first found out about it. But haven’t felt like adding any more entries to my twtxt file beyond the ones that I added to it in the first couple of days of having set it up.

I will note that indieweb folks sometimes get a little dogmatic about POSSE being better than PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate to your Own Site). Because POSSE necessarily entails write-permissions, it's titchier to set up than PESOS-ing your public content elsewhere back to your own site. I had a lot of stuff PESOSed from Lemmy (https://lemmy.ml/post/47757) to my own site (https://maya.land/responses/2021/01/14/recyclable-plastic-is...) because I could just scrape the content out of the Lemmy RSS feed and reformat. Similarly I pull over Hypothes.is annotations (https://via.hypothes.is/https://theprepared.org/features-fee...) to a personal wiki where I clean them up into posts for my site (https://maya.land/responses/2021/07/29/geofoam-giant-styrofo...). Sure, if I wanted to update in two places it'd get titchy, but because I'm mainly using these other sites as front-ends to get a canonical personal copy I then mess with, it works pretty well. Hell, I even take Mastodon (https://occult.institute/@maya) and shove it into a twtxt (https://github.com/buckket/twtxt) file on my site (https://maya.land/assets/twtxt.txt). Once you start thinking about stuff with these approaches you can always find a convenient way to duct tape things together.
They are not encrypted but signed with an elaborate algorithm (I worked on ActivityPub server implementation).

Twtxt is minimalist but functional: https://github.com/buckket/twtxt

I still think back periodically to https://github.com/buckket/twtxt. Fascinating project.
Twitter should be a dumb pipe.

Something like twtxt[1], except trivially easy to host, and searchable, and (the hard part) with all of Twitter's users.

[1] https://github.com/buckket/twtxt

I was just going through the Show HNs of the past week to find it! It's called twtxt, and you can find it at https://github.com/buckket/twtxt