twtxt vs IRC + mailing list hype

twtxt strikes me more as a really bad IRC than as a really good federated microblog system.

I guess at the current scale our webservers can handle polling some text files, but it’s just aesthetically chafing.

• The text file → the IRC client’s output
• The client → the IRC client’s input
• The registry → the IRC server

It’s just a way more redundant, way more sending and resending and resending and resending version of IRC.

And if you don’t have a registry it’s even worse.

At best it’s a much improved atom or gmisub. But talking to each other one sentence per day doesn’t seem very sustainable. IDK.

Alternatives to polling models

• IRC
• XMPP
• mailing lists, both news letters and discussion lists, I like both

Everyone had a “homepage”, maybe some slashfic and poems on there, that was basically it.

Usenet was also a thing but I’m pretty much “good riddance” that that’s over. And the protocol sucked too. Mailing lists do the same thing but better.