Show HN: Twtxt – Decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers

Re:Show HN: Twtxt – Decentralised, minimalist microblogging ... by klapinat0r on Friday February 05, 2016 @05:21PM (#11045092)

This could be solved by archiving/rotating old entries, and have the webserver return the n latest.

For instance, you could let nginx do this:

  location /masukomi.txt {
     default_type 'text/plain';
     content_by_lua 'local tail = io.popen("tail -n 20 ".."/chroot/twtxt/masukomi.txt", "r")
     for line in tail:lines() do
       print(c, line)
     end
     ';
  }

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Re:Show HN: Twtxt – Decentralised, minimalist microblogging ... by toyg on Saturday February 06, 2016 @09:19AM (#11047811)

The problem is that if you didn't fetch the file at the right time, you will lose some history after rotation happens. At the very least, it needs a standard way to deal with that (like a mandated date-based URL format?), which has to be specified in the format.

Also, no DM and no @-replies. For those, you need a registry of some sort, but decentralized registries enable name-squatting.

Before you know it, you have reinvented the WWW, except limited to 140 chars.

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Re:Show HN: Twtxt – Decentralised, minimalist microblogging ... by klapinat0r on Saturday February 06, 2016 @06:26PM (#11050545)

> if you didn't fetch the file at the right time, you will lose some history after rotation

Very true, and that's a trade-off, not unlike what Twitter does today. In my pseudo-code I didn't make the -n part of the url (it easily could be, but that'd add changes to the client). So I agree with your criticism, but a "since" lookup would be a fairly easy extension of the client (i.e. part of query, so unsupported frontends still work), as the data file already contains date.

> Before you know it, you have reinvented the WWW

Yes. :)

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Re:Show HN: Twtxt – Decentralised, minimalist microblogging ... by amelius on Saturday February 06, 2016 @09:24AM (#11047830)

No need for all this complication.

Simply use IPFS[1] instead as the underlying protocol.

[1] https://ipfs.io/

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