@prologic@twtxt.net Some criticisms and a possible alternative direction:

1. Key rotation. I’m not a security person, but my understanding is that it’s good to be able to give keys an expiry date and replace them with new ones periodically.

2. It makes maintaining a feed more complicated. Now instead of just needing to put a file on a web server (and scan the logs for user agents) I also need to do this. What brought me to twtxt was its radical simplicity.

Instead, maybe we should think about a way to allow old urls to be rotated out? Like, my metadata could somehow say that X used to be my primary URL, but going forward from date D onward my primary url is Y. (Or, if you really want to use public key cryptography, maybe something similar could be used for key rotation there.)

It’s nice that your scheme would add a way to verify the twts you download, but https is supposed to do that anyway. If you don’t trust https to do that (maybe you don’t like relying on root CAs?) then maybe your preferred solution should be reflected by your primary feed url. E.g. if you prefer the security offered by IPFS, then maybe an IPNS url would do the trick. The fact that feed locations are URLs gives some flexibility. (But then rotation is still an issue, if I understand ipns right.)

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org In my opinion it was a mistake that we defined the first url field in the feed to define the URL for hashing. It should have been the last encountered one. Then, assuming append-style feeds, you could override the old URL with a new one from a certain point on:

# url = https://example.com/alias/txtxt.txt
# url = https://example.com/initial/twtxt.txt
<message 1 uses the initial URL>
<message 2 uses the initial URL, too>
# url = https://example.com/new/twtxt.txt
<message 3 uses the new URL>
# url = https://example.com/brand-new/twtxt.txt
<message 4 uses the brand new URL>

In theory, the same could be done for prepend-style feeds. They do exist, I’ve come around them. The parser would just have to calculate the hashes afterwards and not immediately.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org This looks like a nice way to do it.

Another thought: if clients can’t agree on the url (for example, if we switch to this new way, but some old clients still do it the old way), that could be mitigated by computing many hashes for each twt: one for every url in the feed. So, if a feed has three URLs, every twt is associated with three hashes when it comes time to put threads together.

A client stills need to choose one url to use for the hash when composing a reply, but this might add some breathing room if there’s a period when clients are doing different things.

(From what I understand of jenny, this would be difficult to implement there since each pseudo-email can only have one msgid to match to the in-reply-to headers. I don’t know about other clients.)

The tag URI scheme looks interesting. I like that it human read- and writable. And since we already got the timestamp in the twtxt.txt it would be somewhat trivial to parse. But there are still the issue with what the name/id should be… Maybe it doesn’t have to bee that stick?

Instead of using tag: as the prefix/protocol, it would more it clear what we are talking about by using in-reply-to: (https://indieweb.org/in-reply-to) or replyto: similar to mailto:

1. (reply:sorenpeter@darch.dk,2024-09-15T12:06:27Z)
   
2. (in-reply-to:darch.dk/twtxt.txt,2024-09-15T12:06:27Z)
   
3. (replyto:http://darch.dk/twtxt.txt,2024-09-15T12:06:27Z)
   

I know it’s longer that 7-11 characters, but it’s self-explaining when looking at the twtxt.txt in the raw, and the cases above can all be caught with this regex: \([\w-]*reply[\w-]*\:

Is this something that would work?