Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | prologic's comments login

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


Respectfully, 70 folks is not larger than I thought.

Man I remember when I had 70 friends on Myspace, that was an incredible amount of interaction in the day

Yeah sure, but as I said the community is actually much larger. It is also very hard to measure because Twtxt/Yarn is what I call, "truly decentralised". However you are right, the search engine/crawler puts the active feeds at around ~1000 or so. So orders of magnitude smaller than any "big tech" social ecosystem, but that's kind of the appeal really.

Alright. I'll comment. -- I find it interesting to learn just how much the Go compiler can "optimize your code away". That's both good and bad.

The point on benchmarking the right thing is 100% spot on, same goes for testing too. The optimization problem however is a bit too contrived IMO. When would you possible write code (aside from very trivial things) where the compiler would optimize all your code away, thus making your benchmarking invalid? I want to see a real-world example of where someone has been caught out by this?


Yarn.social (https://yarn.social) and Salty.im (https://salty.im) are both projects of mine making $0/month (community driven and will stay that way). Yarn.social is the oldest now at around ~2.5yrs


Author of the Salty IM Spec here and currently working on a reference client and broker (`saltyd1) implementations called Salty Chat (`salty-chat` CLI and TUI) and a PWA (Progressive Web App)

Thanks for posting this! Happy to answer any questions! The project is in rapid development and has only been alive for ~2 weeks or so.

So far most things are working nicely, docs could be better (of course) and we finally have the Mobile/Desktop/Web (PWA) App in a working state (UX issues aside).


Anyone have any contacts in Apple or know how to file a bug report with Apple that won't just get lost in the ether?!


This is a question I had been asking for several years until I came across Twtxt (the spec/format originally created by Felix, @buckket, read about it at https://twtxt.readthedocs.org) -- When I came across it I saw a bit more potential so I created (what is effectively) a multi-user client also called Twtxt over at https://twtxt.net (launched in Aug 2020). Since then we've also created a Mobile App (Goryon) available in the App Store (iOS) and Play Store (Android), we also offer free (at this time) hosting of pods (individual instances) at https://twt.social/ -- Today we have a dozen pods/instances and some ~300 users. My own pod (twtxt.net) sees around ~4M hits/month :O


Is there an issue that I call the backend (codename) the smae thing? @buckket I _assume_ yu're okay with this, although we haven't spoken much...


> Of course for many things, microblogging is too short

the software behind twtxt.net is quite flexible and configurable. An operator can choose to increase the MaxTwtlength limit by configuration.


That is true, and I actually think the default length may be slightly short even for microblogging in some cases (although I would define a limit in bytes (and perhaps also character cells) instead of characters; if you need multibyte characters then you can probably write what you need in less characters anyways). This is true in other software dealing with twtxt format too, not only twtxt.net.

For full blogs, long notices, full discussions, etc, I think NNTP is much better, so I would continue to use that. But for microblogging, NNTP seems rather excessive to me, so twtxt can be used for microblogging can be good; the format of twtxt is simple and is reasonable and look like good for making a timeline of short messages written by one person (that is what is microblogging anyways, isn't it?).


Between instances of twtxt.net I actually plan to do this. I'm working on more "federation" features that allow users to be spread out over multiple twtxt.net instances.

Of course this doesn't for folks in the twtxt community that just host a twtxt.txt file, but that's okay.


Well, what I was suggesting was a way that you can do this even if you are not using the twtxt.net software; after writing to your twtxt.txt file you could use curl to notify a twtxt.net instance or any other server that implements this same protocol for notification. (The reason being so that registries that collect everyone's messages together need not keep checking for new messages. Of course, this would be fully optional, as not everyone is going to use the notification protocol.)


:O That's a pretty deceptive way to get people to use your thing eh? NOt sure I want to do that ;)


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: