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Anyone using twtxt? It is for posting entirely as plain text. (discuss.online)
submitted 2 months ago by kiol@discuss.online to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/40941829

Details at https://twtxt.dev/ and elsewhere. This has been in development since 2016. All you do is create a txt file in www or html and include info like

# nick        = username
# url         = https://example.com/posts.txt
# avatar      = https://example.com/avatar.png
# description = Describe this

to then begin posting using a command like like

echo -e "$(date -u +'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ')\tHello to all of you out there! >> posts.txt

There are various registries and places you can submit your user via curl to become more discoverable by others. Also tons of spin-offs that add support for fancier markdown and such, but haven't tried those yet.

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[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I've never heard of twtxt. When you say 'posting entirely as plain text', are you posting as plain text to a blog, forum, etc from the cli?

[–] Cyber@feddit.uk 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, not heard of this either

Following the cross-post to the site: https://twtxt.dev/ it seems this has been going for ~10 years!

It's basically plain text tweets

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Bookmarked. I'll add it to the things you can do from the cli, like get the weather, which is pretty cool.

[–] jcolag@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 2 months ago

It's...a web-accessible log file, basically. Timestamp-and-status, line after line, and "clients" read it periodically to report updates. My now-defunct feed has a couple of comments (# ...) at the top for the URL and my "user ID," but I don't remember if they were requirements, conveniences, or just a cargo cult thing.

[–] shertson@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If I remember right, you host a text file on your server. You write short Twitter style texts and can @ mention others and reply to their posts.

It's been a while since I played with it, so I might be wrong.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Neat. The cli is so powerful. I probably haven't even explored 1% of what it can do.

[–] kiol@discuss.online 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Here is an example for someone rendering the twtxt file, including the user icons in a manner that clearly resembles normal microblogging: https://twtxt.net/ or you can see my twtxt file directly as https://txt.livingcartoon.org/latest.txt

[–] somegeek@programming.dev 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Does this work with a central server of some sort or is it decentralized and the only thing we have are text files and clients, and the clients handle everything else?

[–] kiol@discuss.online 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You simply host the txt file. It doesn't get more decentralized, to the point that centralization is the tricky part here.

[–] somegeek@programming.dev 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

And then you follow/subscribe other peoples feeds? And your client fetches them? but theres no such thing as a "global feed"?

[–] kiol@discuss.online 1 points 2 months ago

It is simply a line of text, so you could always relay it into whatever system. Did you see the example where people have made it into a multi-user version on same server? https://twtxt.net/ There are also relays you can submit to to centralize.