twtxt

What should a good social media platform look like? I've written about it before: It must primarily be decentralized and open source. Every person should be able to set it up and use it quickly. Of course, we all immediately think of one thing: twtxt.

Twtxt works like this: Every website owner makes the endpoint /twtxt.txt available under their own domain. It's probably quite obvious that this file is a simple text file, formatted in a specific way:

2024-01-19T18:11:32+01:00    Hamburg remains stable, 130,000 people against #fuckAfD, that was great!
2024-01-19T11:22:16+01:00    Bought a low-profile microphone arm. Why didn't I do this earlier?! So much more stable! So nicely organized

As you can see, the (UTF-8) file contains one status per line, divided into the date and the 140-character text, separated by a TAB character. That's it! Done!

If you want to mention other users, you can use the usual @ syntax, for example: @<source.nick source.url>

You can create such a file yourself, have it generated automatically, or fill it with your own CMS. There are hardly any limits to your imagination. I convert my Mastodon Feed using a Kirby route.

Reading

Now creating such a file is pretty pointless if no one can read it. For this, there is a client that you can install. With the Quickstart command, you can create your own "account":

twtxt quickstart

Yes, it's a terminal client!

Once everything is set up, you can start following other users. For example, follow me:

twtxt follow maurice https://maurice-renck.de/twtxt.txt

You can view your personal timeline with the following command:

twtxt timeline

Of course, you can also unfollow others, see who you are following, and post a status if it doesn't work through the CMS. You can find all commands here.

I must admit that I fear using the terminal might be off-putting. Honestly, I only discovered this feature on my site a few days ago, and I find it somehow charmingly nerdy, so I wanted to write about it. Maybe you do too.

And for those who don't want to use the terminal, you can still use Mastodon…