Broader protocol support for TWTXT
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I found recently a microblogging platform: twtxt [0].

It's main selling point is that it's decentralized and minimalist. The
concept is simple: write your thoughts in a plain text file, one per
line, prefixed with the date, and share it with others [1] :

2020-10-21T21:34:47+02:00        I am trying twtxt!197
1970-01-01T00:00:00+00:00        It's a Unix system!

You « follow » people by fetching their twtxt.txt file periodically,
and display all entries sorted by date. Multiple clients exist, and the
format is simple enough to build a working client in a few minutes.

Once your file is updated, you must share it with other users. There is
a myriad of network protocols that can be used for this purpose: gopher
of course, but also gemini, IMAP,  FTP, SSH, SMB, WebDav, ... Heck,
even HTTP !

However as I've found out after a few days of using it, all clients and
user directories (registry.twtxt.org, twtxt.tilde.institute, twtxt,xyz,
..) only support HTTP links. This doesn't really fit the « built for
hackers », and « minimalist » promise from the description.

I love the simplicity of the specification. All it does is specifying a
format for people to share thoughts around the world, in the most
elegant way possible: plain text. This leaves the door open to so many
ways to share and update this file, and enforcing the use of HTTP on
its users can only deserve it. The gopher amd gemini community are
particularly aware of the beauty of plain text, and twtxt totally fits
this universe, so I think it would clearly be a benefit to just not
exclude them.

This post is a call to developers to add more protocol support to their
twtxt clients. Not everyone is running an HTTP server, or wants to.

Let's make twtxt truly decentralized, and open !
--
~wgs

PS: I would like to say « thank you » to vain [2][3] for being the
first person ever to follow, and metion my name on twtxt, thus proving
that it's possible !

[0]: https://twtxt.readthedocs.io
[1]: gopher://g.nixers.net/0/~z3bra/twtxt.txt
[2]: gopher://uninformativ.de
[3]: https://www.uninformativ.de/twtxt.txt
20201021.2249

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