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.

  • Yaky@slrpnk.netEnglish
    3·
    5 hours 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.

  • TORFdot0@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    13 hours ago

    How is this more useful than just posting to an rss feed? Not trying to be snarky, just curious about the design

  • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    21 hours 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?

      • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        19 hours ago

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

    • John Colagioia@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      3·
      19 hours 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.worldEnglish
      3·
      19 hours 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.

      • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        19 hours ago

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