twtxt v0.1.0 – 3 Pods, 100+ Users, 1500+ Posts, 1M hits! 🎉

twtxt v0.1.0 now officially released! 🎉

WOW! 😲 What a week it has been! We don’t seem to be increasing in user count (at least on the first pod twtxt.net) but that’s okay! We have exciting news! We’ve now launched our fully-managed 1-click pods. What’s a pod you say? Well we launched the first instance of prologic/twtxt a little over a month ago now over at twtxt.net (the first pod).

As of the 15th Aug 2020 we now offer hosted, fully managed 1-click pods. Check it out over at Twt.social. 🎉

We invite anyone to get in touch and become one of the first few to have their own pod, their own little place on the micro-Blogging Web 😎 This is invite-only at this time, but in the near future we will generally open this up for all. 🤗

On to the highlights!

Highlights

• NEW: WebMention! That’s right! We added support for WebMentions generically as well as between users across different pods. ＠ (more on this later)
• NEW: Configurable Timezone settings. You can now display the date/time of twts in your timeline in the timezone of your choice! ⏱
• NEW: Monitoring and Metrics! We. now have a /metrics endpoint for monitoring pods via Prometheus 🔢
• NEW: External feeds are now display inline as if they were any other normal feed. No more ugly “text” view! 📰
• NEW: Permalink(s)! You can now link to specific twts by their permalink (the date/time link)! ♾

Thanks!

• Thanks @aaadonai for continued hard work and effort on the iOS App!
• Thanks @dooven for the new README GIF and External Feeds view!
• Thanks @shahxeb for the contact/support page with captcha support.
• Thanks @fluffy-critter for helping with the IndieWeb and WebMention support!

If I missed anyone, please hit me up on twtxt.net and tag me @prologic 😛(or just reply here on Micro.blog! its cool I like it too!)

On WebMentions

Let’s talk briefly about what we did here with IndieWeb and WebMention integration…

So basically as of v0.1..0 prologic/twtxt the software that powers all Twt.social pods such as twtxt.net now support:

• Inbound WebMentions
• Outbound WebMentions

This has been built in such a way that it is actually generic enough to work in general. So if you see a Twt from the @twtxt feed saying WEBMENTION: … on a post of yours, then you’ll have been mentioned by some web page / user on the general Web. Cool huh! 😎

Internally between pods we also take advantage of the simplicity of WebMentions and when you @ mention a user from a different pod they get notified! Also cool right? 😀

It doesn’t really get much more complicated than this really, but if you discover or find any strange issues, bugs or find ways to improve this please let us know!

What’s next?

So now that we have the basics of pods and interoperability with the IndieWeb ecosystem, we can now focus on polishing what we have and improving the overall user experience.

Some ideas we have in store:

• Make it easier for users across pods to discover each other. We might borrow the ActivityPub URI syntax for this and define syntactic sugar in the form of @user@domain.tld that is translated to @<nick url> (the twtxt URI).
• Web and Desktop notifications. We plan to abstract away the details of the notifications you see today (which are just a special internal feed called twtxt).

Aside from the fact we’re busily hard at work with building a Flutter App, iOS Swift UI App and continuing to build out the API and CLI; we will continue to make further improvements to the experience.

As always we strive to stay true to the twtxt standard spec that was published by @buckket back in ~2016. Some new features we are planning including:

• CNAME support and custom domains. We think it should be possible to point your own domain name at any Pod whee you have an account and essentially get your https://domain.tld/ as your Twtxt home containing your feed, config and avatar. Under the hood we would just rewrite URIs for https://domain.tld/{twtxt.txt,avatar.ong,config.yml} etc to their appropriate internal handlers.
• Git integration. We think it should also be possible to have your twtxt.txt file hosted offline in a sense where you still get to benefit from the experience of what Twt.social pods provided like twtxt.net; but keeping the actual feed file (or multiple) on your own computer. Think of this as a “FREE” form of backup, or you just want the file on your own PC!

We look forward to the next 100 💯 users on the ever growing Twt community, and the next set of pods (today we have 3!). Thanks for all your support everyone so far and keep safe!

Happy Twt’ing!