(11-10-2020, 09:26 AM)prologic Wrote: - An equal no. (or more) pods from folks like @etux and maybe you? :D

I might not be the best candidate for this job. :) See, I do sysadmin stuff for a living, so I have to deal with large and complex deployments/software all the time. I don’t want to do that in my free time as well. Especially not on my public server that faces The Internet. Its web server doesn’t run any kind of server-side code, it only serves static files. So, be it StatusNet/GNU Social, Mastodon, or twtxt.net’s pod software (even if it’s much, much simpler than something like Mastodon), it’s unlikely that I’ll run it in the near future.

From my very narrow POV, the appeal of twtxt is that you don’t have to set it up (on your server). I can host the file and be done with it. If I don’t touch it for a year, it doesn’t matter: A text file won’t have bugs and security issues, no maintenance required. I absolutely love this.

So, yeah, I can post a few “status updates” or “micro blog posts” every now and then, but without the burden of maintenance or proprietary centralized services. For actual conversations, I prefer IRC or forums anyway.

As for twtxt.net: Let’s do a little thought experiment. Let’s imagine all Twitter users would migrate to twtxt.net. They would still get most of the standard Twitter features (threads, push notifications, even a mobile app soon?), aside from private messages. I speculate there would not be a lot of change for them, would there? But crazy weirdos like me would still be able to participate as well. I could follow these users and even actively send messages to twtxt.net users. (I mean, you noticed that I was following you, even though I never contacted you out-of-band. I just assume that this auto-detection works for all users, not just the admin.)

I like that vision. It’s not that much different from stuff like Mastodon, except of course that it’s easier to participate. There is a ton of options to host a little text file under a fixed URL. It could result in a much larger degree of decentralization. (I remember having read a lot of “which Mastodon instance should I join?” posts lately. Well, if it were easier to host your own …)

It all collapses once twtxt.net decides to remove compatibility for external stuff. I mean, Twitter once had RSS feeds, too. :) Not implying ill-intent, but it happened so often, I’m getting paranoid.

Well, whatever. Just speculation and phantasy. Twitter has so much power, it’s not going to happen anyway. For me, it’s a neat toy that I’ll keep.