From: [email protected]
Date: 2017-03-05
Subject: Setting up twtxt

Twtxt[1]  is  a  distributed  alternative  to  Twitter or other mi-
croblogging services. It's a lot  like  micoblogging  with  RSS[2],
just  without the RSS part. In addition to having romantic feelings
for command-line interfaces, I've been  interested  in  distributed
web ideas like Solid[3].

Like  many others, I've been feeling disenchanted with Facebook and
Twitter -- there's just so much noise. Ads are part of  that  noise
component,  but it's also very easy to share content without adding
to the conversation. Maybe it's too easy. Shares, retweets, helpful
suggestions  from  the platform -- all of these things are added to
your feed with the best of intentions, but they have the  side  ef-
fect  of  obscuring  the  content you are really after. With twtxt,
your activity is not subject to someone else's terms, and  you  can
be  sure that your words will only be seen by those willing to do a
relatively extraordinary amount of work to do so. Let's dive in!

Other interesting uses for this include:

 * A Twitter alternative for closed working groups.
 * A microblogging tool that is machine-friendly. Use it for event
logs!
 * Use as a journal in combination with other productivity tools.

I'm  installing  this  on  OSX.  You  might have an easier time in-
stalling on Linux or a relatively normal  BSD  variant.  If  you're
running  Windows,  you  are  likely already familiar with the hoops
that you will need to jump through. Technically, you don't  need  a
client at all. You could write your twtxt.txt file by hand, but you
will need to memorize how to write a RFC 3339 date-time string. You
can  also  view  other  users'  publicly-accessible twtxt.txt files
without a heavy client, but a client will assemble a  chronological
timeline for you.

Install twtxt

On  OSX, I used pip3 to install twtxt, just like it says in the in-
structions.

 `$pip3 install twtxt`

I also had to set the following:

 `
 $export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
 $export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 `

I also added these lines to my .bash_profile.

Then I ran `$twtxt  quickstart`  to  initialize  my  configuration.
Later, I ended up making some updates to my config. On OSX, the de-
fault config lives in '~/Library/Application Support/twtxt/config'.
With  twtxt  installed, I was able to update my twtxt.txt file, and
follow other users. You can find a  directory  of  other  users  at
twtxt-dir[4].  Now you just need to make the file publicly accessi-
ble.

Install s3cmd

I host my twtxt.txt file (and my website) in an AWS  S3  bucket.  I
assume  you already have an S3 bucket set up and a domain name reg-
istered and the  concomitant  DNS  configuration,  um,  configured.
s3cmd[5]  is  a command-line interface that lets you manipulate ob-
jects within your S3 buckets. AWS  also  publishes  their  own  CLI
tool,  but  I  couldn't get it to install on OSX. s3cmd is a little
more focused on S3 and possibly easier to configure.

As part of configuring s3cmd, you will need to get an AWS  applica-
tion key[6]. This basically involves:

 1. Creating a user group that has access to your S3 buckets.
 2. Creating a user that can be added to this group.
 3. Getting the access key and secret for the user you created and
providing them to s3cmd through `$s3cmd --configure`

The configuration process for s3cmd is a little inscrutable, but  I
took the defaults in most cases and I turned out fine in the end.

To upload your twtxt file to S3, your command will look like this:

 `$s3cmd put twtxt.txt s3://(bucketname)`

Now  that you can upload your file to S3, set up post_tweet_hook in
your twtxt config to execute this command. This will allow twtxt to
automatically  upload  your  twtxt.txt file automatically after you
update your twtxt file.

Add your URL to a registry

Optionally, you can add your username and URL to a registry.  There
may  be  more  of  these  as time goes on and more communities form
around twtxt but, for  now,  the  biggest  one  I've  found  is  at
http://twtxt.reednj.com[7]. See also we-are-twtxt[8]. In the spirit
of decentralization, however, part of the fun will be  evangelizing
twtxt  to  your  associates  and following their feeds.  One of the
benefits of centralized services is easy  discoverability.  On  the
other  hand,  maybe  being easily discovered is something you would
prefer to avoid.

A word on OSX and txtnish

txtnish[9] is another popular client for twtxt. It has many of  the
same basic features of the twtxt client, but aims to be more porta-
ble. It's a breeze to install and set up, but it didn't work for me
right  away.  It  turns out that OSX (and the BSDs) use a different
version of awk than what is common in most Linux environments,  BWK
awk  from  System  V.  The txtnish client uses awk to parse the raw
feeds when assembling the timeline. If awk doesn't  behave  as  ex-
pected, things will go awry.

To fix this, we install GNU awk or gawk:

 `$brew install gawk`

Then create an alias to it:

 `alias awk='/usr/local/bin/awk'`

Also add this to your .bash_profile.

As  I  write this, it's still not perfect, but using GNU awk goes a
long way.

[1]: http://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
[2]: https://thoughtstreams.io/joeld/microblogging-with-rss/
[3]: http://solid.mit.edu
[4]: http://twtxt.reednj.com/
[5]: https://github.com/s3tools/s3cmd
[6]: https://aws.amazon.com/developers/access-keys/
[7]: http://twtxt.reednj.com/
[8]: https://github.com/mdom/we-are-twtxt
[9]: https://github.com/mdom/txtnish

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