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.

  • John ColagioiaEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    I used it for a few years. It was a nice idea, but my disinterest in following everybody’s feed meant that I was mostly just posting blindly, which then became just automated posting of blog post announcements, and then a breakage in the posting tool (which I built up all my infrastructure around) convinced me to give it up, since I wasn’t a particularly “good citizen.”

    I tried to solve some of those problems with a desktop tool, but the desktop framework was never ready for prime-time and Node.js was probably the wrong choice in general. I know that there was a hosting service, but that also feels like the wrong way around.

    It’s still a pretty good idea, though.