Anyone using twtxt? It is for posting entirely as plain text.

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨kiol@discuss.online⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world@lemmy.world⁩

cross-posted from: discuss.online/post/40941829

Details at 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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Comments

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Yaky@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Read about it when playing with Gemini (the protocol, not Google garbage), but just like Twitter, did not find a good use for it. Saw maybe one page promoting it.

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- kiol@discuss.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  What do you think of Gemini? I’m currently confused by it, haha
  
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  - Yaky@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Love the simplicity and pragmatism of both protocol and gemtext markup (not so sure on TLS requirements though). I even use gemtext to write pages for my web site / gemini capsule.
    
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TORFdot0@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
How is this more useful than just posting to an rss feed? Not trying to be snarky, just curious about the design

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irmadlad@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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?

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- Cyber@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Yeah, not heard of this either
  
  Following the cross-post to the site: twtxt.dev it seems this has been going for ~10 years!
  
  It’s basically plain text tweets
  
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  - irmadlad@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Bookmarked. I’ll add it to the things you can do from the cli, like get the weather, which is pretty cool.
    
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- jcolag@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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.
  
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- shertson@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - irmadlad@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Neat. The cli is so powerful. I probably haven’t even explored 1% of what it can do.
    
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- kiol@discuss.online ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Here is an example for someone rendering the twtxt file, including the user icons in a manner that clearly resembles normal microblogging: twtxt.net or you can see my twtxt file directly as txt.livingcartoon.org/latest.txt
  
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  - irmadlad@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Cool.
    
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  - somegeek@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    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?
    
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