#dev 2023-04-16

2023-04-16 UTC
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prologic This is more a social-technical problems I'd love to discuss with you guys. I'm growing more and more frustrated by the hostility that a few from the so-called (dead) Twtxt community continue to rally against with pointless circular arguments around the work we've done (Yarn.social) to extend specs to a point where microBlogging in a more traditional social-like experience is made possible, whilst still being true to
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prologic decentralised and indie-web architecture and in the control of users and authors. See: https://twtxt.net/conv/gjst6xa for my frustration and IRC chat transcripts of #twtxt (unmodified).
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prologic My frustrations are mostly centred around the lack of "actionable feedback" by a few players (really non-players) with a consistent pressure and argument against over the years without actually providing any useful actable feedback or contributing to the solutions to "issues" they keep persisting with.
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prologic One of the worst aspects of course is if you don't use or participate, when why do you have anything to complain about?
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prologic I'm at a point where I'm seriously considering ceasing use of Twtxt (the original spec) entirely, and instead adopting something like JSON Feed, which according to the spec is less hostile and even encourages extensions. I hope that is also true of folks like Manton and Sm who built the spec :)
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prologic Do any of you have any advice?
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[snarfed] I think this is a common experience on standards bodies and working groups, definitely some people here have advice and tactics
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[snarfed] Eg Tantek's (?) taxonomy of trolls
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prologic Thanks! I'll have a read of that
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prologic Meanwhile I'm thinking about this as an RFC: https://twtxt.net/conv/oyi5iua
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prologic As much as I love the idea of JSON Feed, I would completely opt for coming up with something somewhat inspired but completely not, just to avoid this in "socio-technical" mess in the first place 🤦‍♂️
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prologic It feels very counter productive though to have to be forced to come up with something new, just to avoid upsetting a few
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prologic Maybe this is why we have so many goddamn "chat" protocols 🤣
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[tantek] Lots of sympathy prologic. Haven't had a chance to read those links however I’m familiar with some of the phenomena you mention. Maintaining a good, focused, and constructive development community is hard
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prologic hmm
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[tantek] trying Bridgy Publish of a tweet like to see what happens
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IWDiscordRelay <c​apjamesg#4492> To those subscribed to my blog, are you getting my posts in your feed reader?
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[tantek] prologic, I read the IRC chat log at https://files.mills.io/download/Twtxt%20IRC%20Logs%202023-04-14.md and it does seem reminiscent of arguments about keeping RSS 2.0 static (no new features) vs extending it and requiring (whether literally or "just" for market competition) extension
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[tantek] perhaps this is an endemic problem of feed formats
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[tantek] I'm sure [manton] has some good perspectives here too
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[tantek] I have my own strong opinions about plain-text-readable or plain-text-like "formats" but mostly keep those to my own implementation & wiki (tantek.com/w/Markdown) because I'm one of the few folks here who thinks Markdown is a lie (mostly violates its own prime directive)
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[KevinMarks] I can sign up for the Markdown sceptics group. I think there is an inherent problem with the "plain-text-like" formats, where its easy to come up with a compact ideolect that handles a few obvious cases, but there is no clear path to extending them consistently, and you end up with the YAML trap, where it is more complex than the kind of content neutral meta syntax of html or json
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[tantek] that "YAML trap" is worthy of mentioning/expanding in /YAML [KevinMarks], especially if you have a post or other links that already describe the phenomenon
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[tantek] I would add, more complex *and* more brittle than ...
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[tantek] well that Bridgy Publish of a tweet like as expected didn't work, and I noticed that all the Twitter buttons have been removed from the brid.gy home page per Ryan's so long post.
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[tantek] at least it is failing gracefully for those of us still sending webmentions to Bridgy Publish
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[tantek] what's the corollary to manual until it hurts?
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[tantek] automatic until the API breaks?
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prologic In this specific case in the use-case of microBlogging on such trap exists IMO
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prologic The real problem comes down to understanding the context of the "content" itself
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prologic So yes, we generally (in Yarn) use Markdown to write posts, because of the utility of linking images and emphasising parts of content
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prologic so we built parsers to basically parse teh twtxt line and markdown content
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[tantek] once again I am reminded of poor site performance on train wifi. especially those that have gone from relatively simple / plain text to framework/js bloat reddit--
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Loqi reddit has -1 karma over the last year
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prologic I can't ever see a line-orientated format turning into YAML :)
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[tantek] wait, isn't YAML a line-oriented formate?
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[tantek] (or is that the joke?)
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prologic [tantek] poor wifi train signal in what context?
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prologic lol I guess it is :)
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prologic but not my point
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prologic anyway I found your taxonomy of trolls quite illuminating, thank you for your effort and writing this up
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prologic it at least helps me understand I'm not alone in this, even if I still don't have the tools to cope/defend the work (hard work over many a couple of years now) of the community
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[tantek] prologic, the irony is that I can both understand your frustration (wanting to evolve a format that is seemingly abandoned/dead), and the fears of the folks being impolite (a format being "taken over" by a single dominant implementation).
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[tantek] creating a standard is hard. evolving a standard is even harder.
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[tantek] especially a "successful" standard
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[tantek] there's also the back/forth of I read in that IRC log of everyone asking everyone *else* to do the work (write docs, submit a PR, etc.)
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[tantek] also really appreciated your point prologic about being more sympathetic to typos and assuming good faith with broken links due to typos
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[tantek] I feel that's something we could capture somewhere
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prologic yeah it gets a bit hard at times when you're being mocked at when you make stupid mistakes becuase of your vision impairment :(
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prologic real low ya know
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[tantek] yeah that's totally not ok.
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prologic I f'n hate using these sh*ty iPhones with tiny ass keyboards :D
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prologic awful UX
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[tantek] lolol I feel that, I miss the days of being able to type by touchfeel on my Blackberry rather than having to *look* at a virtual touch keyboard that I obscure by using my fingers to type
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prologic sadly I never went through that myself, lost my sight when I was 21 so kind of missed out on the Blackberry days :)
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prologic But I hear ya
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[tantek] one or two of the keys on blackberry keyboards had a tiny raised dot (like smaller than a braille dot) on top so you could learn to navigate your thumbs around on the keyboard with high accuracy without looking
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prologic ahh nic
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prologic nice*
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prologic this is quite encouraging to see support like this from the Twtxt/Yarn community: https://twtxt.net/twt/rb4fjwq
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Loqi [preview] [marado] ↳ In-reply-to » Given the continued hostility of jam6 and buckket over Yarn'a use of Twtxt (even after several years! 😱) I am continuing to face hard decisions. @darch@twtxt.net case in point, I used to twtxt images before using yarn or markdo...
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prologic funnily enough there are folks that use both, and maintain self-hosted feeds and feeds on Yarn pods and keep them in sync and use tools like twtxt2html to publish HTML views ot their static (indie) sites
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prologic Ooof, Loqi should be taught how to read the og metadata tags intead ;)
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prologic One of the most frustrating aspects of this (over the years, this isn't the first time this battle has come up), is we (not me, dozens of contributors, client authors and folks came together) and built these extensions to the Twtxt spec based on research and observations of what was used in the Twtxt community in the past (then dead) and issues/ideas that were raised that nobody actioned or make any decisions around. So we
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prologic did,
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prologic formalised what we saw, carefully spec'd it in a way that was least impactful in terms of completing breaking compat with any older clients (one?)
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[tantek] indeed, this is pretty light for a "format specification" https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/twtxtfile.html#format-specification
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prologic it is pretty much a line-oriented format with <timestamp>\t<content>\n + a User-Agent syntax for discovering who's following you and a registry API spec that no-one uses
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[tantek] irony of the "Fork me on GitHub" banner on that page 😂
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prologic wow I just summed it up in one IRC message
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[tantek] is there a test suite?
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prologic yes yes I know 🤣 then get upset when we (Yarn.social) build extensions to it
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prologic 🤦‍♂️
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prologic test suite? baahahaha
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[tantek] lol exactly
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Loqi awesome
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prologic we have a test suite for our lextwt parser
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[tantek] 💀
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prologic the client itself (ref client) has been broken for years in a non-working state
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prologic at least it was for many years
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prologic anyway its easy to make fun, but these are the facts, it was a broken reference client back in July 2020 and remained so (still is AFAIK), the Twtxt community was basically long dead by the time we come along and picked it up
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prologic The rest of the story behind this madness is captured at https://yarn.social/about.html
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prologic My goals and intention was always to embrace and extend, never to extinguish, but this continued relentless hostility over the years is making me rethink our use of Twtxt (the spec)/format
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prologic Which we really should not have to do
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prologic We also use a very similarly inspired text format for https://salty.im too
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[tantek] I feel like there's a name for file formats that are one record per line that predates twtxt
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[tantek] [KevinMarks] might know
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prologic IRC? :D
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prologic Talk?
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prologic mesg?
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prologic :D
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prologic write <user>
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IWDiscordRelay <c​apjamesg#4492> There is jsonl.
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IWDiscordRelay <c​apjamesg#4492> One JSON document per line.
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[tantek] prologic, if you made a *subset* of the twtxt format which only permitted 51 characters of content (thus 80 characters total per line of the format), it would (nearly) be punched card backward compatible 🙂
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prologic oh good lord :D
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prologic it would even fit on a tele writer!
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prologic ewww :)
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[tantek] yesssss
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prologic used one of those :D
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prologic gawd I'm showing my age or experience an't i :D
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prologic really glad the indieweb folks don't get upset by folks using protocols you guys worked so hard to painstakingly write and maintain, or we'd be a little screwed :D
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prologic indieauth, websub, webmentions, microformats are all used by yarnd (our reference software) :D
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GWG [jamietanna]: Did you ever get a chance to comment re Micropub?
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[KevinMarks] YAML isn't quite line oriented as there's a state machine depending on previous lines. Markdown too that's usually where it fails as the indenting means different things depending on previous state
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IWDiscordRelay <c​apjamesg#4492> How so?
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IWDiscordRelay <c​apjamesg#4492> Re: markdown and indents.
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[KevinMarks] Simplest example: A trailing space at the end of a previous line makes the indented text no longer indented
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IWDiscordRelay <c​apjamesg#4492> Wait what?
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IWDiscordRelay <c​apjamesg#4492> Wow.
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IWDiscordRelay <c​apjamesg#4492> Huh!
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[tantek] Looooool wut [KevinMarks]. Is that trailing space on a line thing in Markdown, YAML, or both?
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[KevinMarks] So indenting means either code blocks, or an indented para under a list, or simple indenting, but it depends on whether you use spaces, tabs or non-breaking spaces
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[KevinMarks] It's so. E markdown variant iirc
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[tantek] also invisiblemarkup--
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Loqi invisiblemarkup has -1 karma over the last year
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[KevinMarks] 2 trailing spaces is a <br>
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[tantek] Wow that's supernuts
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[KevinMarks] YAML I have lost track of completely, after it got used for code injection in RubyGems
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prologic [KevinMarks] how we deal with this in our multiline ext to Twtxt is se use the Unicode newline character (\u2028) as a new line separated and translate that for display purposes, or before shoving into a Markdown parser
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prologic So we (Yarn users) are able to have the simplicity of the Twtxt line-oriented format whilst having complex content, like sharing audio, vidoe, images and even code blocks and whatever else you want really
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[tantek] Lol Unicode as markup
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IWDiscordRelay <c​apjamesg#4492> What re: two trailing spaces?
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IWDiscordRelay <c​apjamesg#4492> Wow.
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prologic no not Unicide for markup, Unicode to separate logical lines :)
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prologic Since you can't have actual \n in a Twtxt content line
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prologic (obviously)
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prologic it works wonderfully well and has for years now :D we all use it (yarnd, jenny, tt, twtr and ohter clients)
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prologic I've never really understood (tbh) the infatuation with wanting to read the raw underlying feed by hand (as a human)
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[KevinMarks] This is worth reading if you're using markdown https://babelmark.github.io/faq/
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prologic except for debugging or a quick glance, but then the later is highly questionable value
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[tantek] prologic it's essentially Unicode line break to mimic an HTML <br> tag, hence Unicode as markup
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prologic yes true, but we don't quite use it that way
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prologic we literally translate \u2028 to \n then shove that through the Markdown parser
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prologic Which will do whatever markup was intended by the author
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[tantek] Good clarification 👍
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[manton] Catching up some of the earlier discussion… JSON Feed is a nice format for microblogging. I think it would be hard to justify creation something new. Also: I strongly feel that HTML should be the basic formatting for microblogs. Tweet-like services that can scale up to full blogging are better for the web, because they build on what already works.
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[manton] In Micro.blog, we support Markdown for “input” but everything goes through HTML otherwise. There is no server-to-server exchange using Markdown.
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[manton] prologic: I’m going to be completely blunt here, feel free to take it with a grain of salt. The more you go down this path with a custom twtxt format, the more you’ll run into limits that are already solved by HTML inside JSON Feed. @-mention, links, Webmention, block quotes, whatever.
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[tantek] those are very good social web format design principles [manton]++
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Loqi [manton] has 26 karma in this channel over the last year (43 in all channels)
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[manton] There has been a lot of discussion of using Markdown as basic formatting in Mastodon lately too. I just don’t see the value when we already have HTML.
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[manton] Creating new formats means you need some kind of bridge or conversation to make posts work with the rest of the web.
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[tantek] that said, I appreciate the minimalism of trying to make things "work" with plain text
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[tantek] Markdown lost the plot long ago IMO [manton]. It's too noisy to be considered plain text readable (md prime directive violation), and it's too fragile/limited to supplant HTML. Current md in practice is a worst-of-both-worlds low point
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[manton] I think sometimes people forget that Markdown was never meant to be a completely new format… It is supposed to exist alongside HTML.
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[tantek] I think angle brackets scare people
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[manton] That’s true. And even for people who know HTML, Markdown is a great convenience for writing.
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[tantek] now if someone comes up with plain text conventions that *look good* in plain text and can be reliably written / parsed into something more structured, I'm all ears
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[tantek] right, that "great convenience for writing" is what has driven my own redesign of md
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IWDiscordRelay <c​apjamesg#4492> Markdown is a big convenience.
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[tantek] How is it a convenience compared to plain text that is auto linked?
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[snarfed] entertaining debate happening right now on https://matrix.to/#/#fediverse-devs:matrix.org on what value do HTTP/LD Sigs add to AP, especially given that server admins control users' private keys anyway, and should we just fall back fetching activities from their server and using SSL to verify, thin ping style like webmentions
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[snarfed] "What AP devs needs to "think" in their own minds, is there's two kinds of usernames 1) DNS based ones, and 2) PrivateKey ones. Once they can accept that, everything else will fall into place, but it's a big mental hurdle for them all." 🔥🔥
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[tantek] Lol
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[tantek] That's actually not a bad summary
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[snarfed] and oh man the implicit architecture astronomy vs actual building experience. I mentioned Mastodon's Delete chattiness just now, and someone there who's been _very_ active historically in specs and standards bodies, including AP and beyond, said they'd never heard of it before. 🤦
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[tantek] what is activitypub spam
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Loqi ActivityPub spam is when your ActivityPub inbox is sent messages from other ActivityPub servers from accounts that your server never sent a follow activity for https://indieweb.org/ActivityPub_spam
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[tantek] ^ [snarfed] feel free to expand & cite that 🙂
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IWDiscordRelay <c​apjamesg#4492> Fewer letters. Limited vocabulary.
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[snarfed] Bridgy Fed users, I'm looking at prioritizing some smaller fixes. let me know, either here or on GH, if you particularly care about any of these! https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3A%22quick+hit%22
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[tantek] "where everyone hosts their own website" <- we need to pushback against this kind of framing, because it makes as much sense as "where everyone hosts their own phone"
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[snarfed] Yes! Especially in the age of eg micro.blog
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[tantek] Yes
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[tantek] It's a common dismissal
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[tantek] Maybe it belongs in a "rude faq"
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bkil [jamietanna]: My recommendation for the Website Club: right click on the first track to check with inspector and be amazed! It's a very noble and ethical site (also love their SQlite dumps), but they are badly in need of some volunteer web dev help. http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/processor-insomnia
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bkil [tantek]: I'm browsing Reddit via Privacy Redirect pointing to old.reddit.com with all assets blocked (JavaScript, CSS, fonts, images) and a few lines of UserCSS to reveal the content. This requires a single fetch and it weighs ~30kB compressed and also renders quickly. Well, a bit custom CSS would still be needed to make it a bit more palatable this way, but I'm all for retro.
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bkil [tantek] prologic What do you think about a chorded keyboard for text entry? It could fit a mobile phone perfectly. I also found it a quality of life improvement that I learned to touch type on a physical keyboard. Not on QWERTY of course, as the keys are all mixed up on that one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorded_keyboard
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bkil [manton]: ActivityPub focuses on passing around rich formatting encoded as HTML. Similarly, Friendica, Diaspora, Hubzilla and other better Fediverse servers support user input being entered in any format: plain text, BBCode (yes, these are old systems and it was still cool), markdown or HTML. I actually suggested this for twtxt as well as I dislike invisiblemarkup-- that is hard to type on a keyboard.
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bkil It's a bit unfortunate that we have quite a few differing viewpoints with prologic about how twtxt could have been extended in different ways to focus more on decentralization and small indieweb sites. Some of these are inherently incompatible with Yarn.social (such as hashes, Unicode newlines or tag links).
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bkil I started drafting it in a structured way, then rewritten it in a different way, and went on to extend it further along the way when I was implementing a proof of concept Reader for it. Now I'm starting to reconsider to pivot to more indieweb-like technologies, although in a backend-optional spin of them. https://github.com/bkil/freedom-fighters/blob/master/en/article/twtxt-yarn-social.md
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drmr There's a recent chorded keyboard called the charachorder which I've had my eye on for a while, looks super dope, steno speeds once you're over the learning curve. Been trying to practice with Plover, but slow going
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prologic bkil: we only differ on some of your more obscure ideas 😆 I don't also agree on your statement above about compatibility with indie web. You really need to define what compatibility with indie web is first. Hosting a test file is as simple as things get.
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bkil Well, I'd focus on post permalinks more.
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[snarfed] bkil prologic https://indieweb.org/friendly
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bkil Yes, and also https://indieweb.org/IndieMark
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prologic Really not sure what we're talking about I'm afraid 😢