Since coming to tilde.club I've learned about a minimalist micro-blogging tool and loose network known as twtxt. The minimal nature of it, decentralization, ease of access, and convenience in the terminal all appeal to me. Unsurprisingly, others in club have also started using it, and even building tools for it! This page is to catalog those that I've discovered so far.
Basically, the client allows you to "send" tweets by simply writing to a publicly accessible text file. You "follow" someone by adding a link to their publicly accessible text file in your client, and it goes out and downloads those files from everyone you follow to construct your "timeline". When other people "follow" you, they are simply downloading your twtxt.txt file too!
- ~deepend's twtxt timeline is a page that gathers up public twtxt.txt files from tilde.club members on the server and displays them in a convenient timeline. It also offers an RSS feed!
- twtxt.tilde.club, though it looks similar in concept, is actually a twtxt registry. It shows the latest tweets from twtxt users who have registered with it. A few of us who have been recently active have added our twtxt feeds to it! If you want to do the same, just use the curl command given in the registry documentation for adding a new user. You can also use the API to query the registry in various ways detailed in that documentation, or by crafting the proper link. For example, you can view the list of registered users.
- A little farther afield, there's also a more general registry available at registry.twtxt.org. You'll need to use the API to get anything out of it. I didn't find that the automatic swagger interface worked very well, but you can use the URLs or curl to communicate with it. For example: viewing the list of users.
- Also, unsurprisingly, a community grew up around twtxt out on the internet, and one of the results of that has been an effort to elevate twtxt to a full social media style platform. Offering extensions to the twtxt spec, and a slick web interface, you can abandon your plain-text-from-the-console lifestyle for a browser-driven social experience, if you like! This is known as yarn.social and is the platform underneath twtxt.net which looks like a pretty cool and active place. Best of all, the extensions to twtxt don't break backwards compatibility, so you can follow people from yarn.social as easily as anyone else!
