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

Internet for me growing up was mostly mail and IRC.

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.