/tec/ navi (communication system)
i've been trying to find a better way to relate to social networking. not in the sense that other people are doing it wrong. i don't personally like how these things make me feel. i want to be able to talk to my friends and hear news that i care about, but i want a lot more control over what content i see and from whom i recieve it. i'd also like to be able to work offline and upload my posts when i run a sync job.
email is pretty much there already, with some small changes that could use a lot of UX polish it could be really good.
i also happen to think that email could make for a nice gossip network.
twtxt client
i've written a basic twtxt client in shell. a cron job that fetches the feeds listed in my tw.txt feed:
and all of the feeds listed in the feeds of my direct follows. this could recur up to a limit called hops, but doing that in this shell scares me. maybe i ought to port my programs to rc to regain a little sanity. using this local cache (refreshed daily) i can make various queries to display whatever timeline interests me. my stored queries aren't super interesting at the time of this writing, but i'm still experimenting.
the fetch-twtxt program supports http(s) and gemini feeds. i think it could be neat to write a cgi program that translates rss feeds or activitypub actors into tw.txt feeds using a registered user's credentials. it could do public posts, but i think auth-only is more in line with what i'm trying to do. really, there could be arbitraryily many gates that work like this.
cq/rs
navi separates reading and replying. this combined feed format is used to collate and summarize streams of information, but replies are always sent directly to a specific channel. navi can indicate the correct context and provide a shortcut to a reply action, but automatic cross-posting is a sin so it is important to avoid spamming the reply on channels that don't care about it.
i like this pattern.
one of the next steps i would like to take is to make a client that displays this collated information in a daily "newspaper" including attachments and everything. i really want to break the loop of posting and looking for replies. there is still excitement and anticipation, but i can't gratify it whenever i want.