As of the 20th July 2020 twtxt.net is now ready for beta testing and general use. twtxt.net is a twtxt client in the form of a web application and free publically available service (Please read the Privacy Policy).
Really, what is this thing?
Quite a few years ago now (in factin ~2016) bucket created this thing called twtxt out of frustration and worry that Twitter was changing how it worked and there were growing concerns over its privacy model and data collection of its users.
Enter twtxt, a simplified micro-blogging specification and file format whereby each feed is a single file typically called twtxt.txt.
Each post is append to the file (this is preferred for a number of reasons and is more common) with the following format:
<timestamp>\t<text>\n
I missed all the fun becuase I was working at Facebook at the time and was too busy trying to be good at my day job :)
Enter 2020 and my new-found vision for a self-hosted Web
So now that I’m back home in Australia and have been busily working away at Self-hosted Apps, this is just another addition to my every growing list software, components and services I’m developing in my spare time to achieve my goals.
Why is this interesting? What’s the big deal?
So the big deal for me is this:
twtxt and thus the client and service I wrote is decentralized, self-hosted with no tracking whatsoever and no advertising.
The file format and specification itself is really simple and easy to work with and extend. The way you treat content is like you treat resources on the web (like it was always suppose to be, ie: ResTful).
I will likely continue to use mico.blog for long-posts like this and continue to support the Micro.blog community. However if you’re interested in helping me build out twtxt.net and the software behind it, please get in touch. I posted before on Micro.blog about whether it was possible to Self-host and unfortunately it wasn’t at the time and to my knowledge still isnt’.
Don’t get me wrong, Micro.blog is a great service and I pay for it and believe it is worth the value for money. But I feel very strongly opinionated about Data Sovereignty in a world where we constantly struggle with privacy over data, who owns what data and who controls it.
