twtxt
twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers.
So you want to get some thoughts out on the internet in a convenient and slick way while also following the gibberish of others? Instead of signing up at a closed and/or regulated microblogging platform, getting your status updates out with twtxt is as easy as putting them in a publicly accessible text file. The URL pointing to this file is your identity, your account. twtxt then tracks these text files, like a feedreader, and builds your unique timeline out of them, depending on which files you track. The format is simple, human readable, and integrates well with UNIX command line utilities.
tl;dr: twtxt is a CLI tool, as well as a format specification for self-hosted flat file based microblogging.
This version of twtxt can also consume Atom/RSS feeds due to a ten-line patch <buckket#88> that the original developer rejected as “bloat”. This enables users to follow existing microblogs, podcasts and news headlines.
Features
- A beautiful command-line interface thanks to click.
- Asynchronous HTTP requests thanks to asyncio/aiohttp and Python 3.
- Integrates well with existing tools (scp, cut, echo, date, etc.) and your shell.
- Don’t like the official client? Tweet using
echo -e "`date -Im`\tHello world!" >> twtxt.txt!
Documentation
Check out the full documentation at: http://twtxt.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
Community
- twtxt gitter chat: https://gitter.im/buckket/twtxt
- twtxt IRC channel: #twtxt on irc.freenode.net
Contributions
- A web-based directory of twtxt users by reednj: http://twtxt.reednj.com/
- A web-based directory of twtxt users by xena: https://twtxtlist.cf
- A web-based twtxt feed hoster for the masses by plomlompom: https://github.com/plomlompom/htwtxt
- A twtxt-to-atom converter in sh by erlehmann: http://news.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/bin/twtxt2atom
- A twitter-to-twtxt converter in node.js by DracoBlue: https://gist.github.com/DracoBlue/488466eaabbb674c636f
- A port to node.js / npm by Melvin Carvalho: https://github.com/webize/twtxt
- A patched version of TweetNest, which serves TweetNest archives in twtxt format, by texttheater: https://github.com/texttheater/tweetnest/tree/feat/twtxt
- A twtxt registry api by DracoBlue: https://registry.twtxt.org
License
twtxt is released under the MIT License. See the bundled LICENSE file for details.