Txti is shutting down

by RGBCube • 3 years ago

107 101 3 years ago

enriquto• 3 years ago

I hope the main static page (motherfuckingwebsite.com) will live on, it's a great fulcrum on which to raise your particular designs.

yreg3• 3 years ago

What was txti? A static minimal-style site generator?

zufallsheld• 3 years ago

See http://txti.es/about

Txti is fast web pages for everybody. Most of the world still does not have internet, but many websites from countries like the United States are big and complicated. This makes it hard for people with slow internet to use these sites. It is even harder for those people to put their own thoughts on the internet. With txti, anyone can use any device to share their story.

Txti was created by Barry T. Smith because he believes that high speed internet is a responsibility, not a service people buy. He got a lot of help from his friend Adam Newbold.

yreg3• 3 years ago

That's a very unhelpful about page.

What is "fast web pages for everybody"? Is it a proxy server that compresses websites like Opera Mini did?

o_m• 3 years ago

That is not true that most of the world doesn't have internet. Multiple sources say it is about 64% by now. You should be careful about thinking the world is worse off than it is. Thinking former developing countries is worse off than rich countries is most of the time a outdated world view.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...

jstanley• 3 years ago

OK, you're not accepting new content because you don't want to host phishing, but why stop serving the existing pages? Does it really cost that much to run?

ivanstegic5• 3 years ago

I’m sure it’s non zero. Maybe you could offer to pay for hosting?

saagarjha• 3 years ago

It’s a bunch of static text, no? Surely it can run on a pretty small budget?

FrustratedMonky• 3 years ago

any idea what form did the bad actor take?

lmz• 3 years ago

A guess would be people using it for spam / scam landing pages.

Avamander• 3 years ago

Highly likely just phishing and SEO spam.

hakre3• 3 years ago

In concrete not, for the past:

txti @txties 28. März 2020: "Txti is currently down because some folks can’t follow rules and have created phishing or other malicious pages."

<https://twitter.com/txties/status/1243879222206246912>

The "rules" may relate to txti Terms of Service found <http://txti.es/terms>

elbigbad3• 3 years ago

I’m guessing the admin stopped caring as much about the mission of the site, which actually seems quite compelling, or it wasn’t as profitable as they thought, and was looking for a reason to divest themselves of it. Spam is hard to fight, it does suck in that manner, but certainly possible and certainly pulling the plug on an otherwise passion project screams “don’t care anymore.”

BLKNSLVR2• 3 years ago

cough open source? cough self host? cough

mananaysiempre• 3 years ago

a coughing decade of work and history the owner previously volunteered to host is going to be tossed the cough away into the coughing bit bucket with no recourse once again

Nanana909• 3 years ago

Oh no, is this a new variant?!

joshstrange2• 3 years ago

I hope you're coming from a good place but I can't help but find this kind of comment naive and a little rude.

It's never as simple as "here's the code, have at it". Actually packaging things up and documenting it takes times and effort. Also I'd imagine it feels like somewhat a slap in the face. "Hey, I see you've donated your time and money to this project until you felt you couldn't any longer but please donate more time to package it all up for some heretofore unknown entity that might benefit".

It's a lot easier to call for something to be open sourced than it is to actually take up the mantle and carry the project further. Same as when people say "Well have you seen if someone else wants to run it if you don't?" As if that's not a massive time investment of vetting and researching, not to mention your name is still attached to it even if you hand it over. Somewhere down the line a less scrupulous person might wrest control and do who knows what with it.

Lastly, it's been my experience that the majority of people asking for something to be open sourced have never used and/or are not interested in the original thing. They say it almost if by rote.

Again, I want to be clear I'm not trying to come down or attack you personally, I just feel like this statement gets thrown around a lot without a care in the world for the effort involved. I've had it said to me, I put in the time to clean up a project enough to open source, and no one touched it again as far as I can tell. That's more than a little disheartening.

BLKNSLVR2• 3 years ago

I'm definitely coming from both a place of naivety and optimism. No offense intended, in fact it's intended as respect for what appears to be a service that has legitimate use and reason to exist, hence it would be a shame for it to be extinguished entirely.

raybb• 3 years ago

ArchiveTeam subreddit has a small discussion about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Archiveteam/comments/13mjl8c/_/

samsquire• 3 years ago

Depending on your perspective, hosting is/can be expensive in cost or time (server maintenance) or both

I just use GitHub README.md to host my journal. I trust GitHub shall be around in 10 years.

If I start an open source product or service, the homepage shall contain the reference manual and examples and all the documentation. It shall be one asset that can be copied and archived and replicated across servers and mirrored. It won't be a paragraph of text in hundreds of web pages but a single long document.

joshstrange2• 3 years ago

If I start an open source product or service, the homepage shall contain the reference manual and examples and all the documentation. It shall be one asset that can be copied and archived and replicated across servers and mirrored. It won't be a paragraph of text in hundreds of web pages but a single long document.

A noble goal for sure, but much easier said than done. Complete documentation is harder than I anticipate.

nicbou4• 3 years ago

The dark forest claims another victim.

Yancey's Dark Forest theory of the web. The “dark forest” is a place that seems eerily quiet and devoid of life. All the living creatures within it are hiding. Because “night is when the predators come out. To survive, the animals stay silent.”
The predators here are the advertisers, tracking bots, clickbait creators, attention-hungry influencers, reply guys, and trolls. It's unsafe to reveal yourself to them in any authentic way. So we retreat into private spaces. We hide in the cozy web.

https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web

prox• 3 years ago

I believe in this trend. The amount of people that can use powerful tools without any knowledge is increasing. Some might just GPT their way into creating more darkness. Greed is a nefarious beast. Always has been.

quaintdev• 3 years ago

With this and all AI generated content I think people will be left with no choice but to go back to real world.

hakre3• 3 years ago

IMHO much speculation for the little explanation provided. Do you have more information? Was it offered to the community to take over for those who may want or similar?

abhayhegde• 3 years ago

Kudos to be able to express what I've been vehemently feeling recently.

axus• 3 years ago

I'd imagine it's closer to the original Liu Cixin reasons like security. Ideally you could leave your servers up on the Internet auto-updating, doing their work, and ignore all the "predators competing for attention" from Yancey's theory, but it takes attention to stay secure and keep backups.

Maybe it was more "Tragedy of the Commons"?

nicbou4• 3 years ago

Security is just one aspect. Spam prevention is a much bigger issue. The web is becoming increasingly read-only because of it.

Spam is the form of predation that makes the dark forest so silent.

elbigbad3• 3 years ago

I don’t know who Yancy is but they have some complete lack of shame to steal someone else’s idea almost word for word and prepend their name to it. I don’t know what I could muster that absolute “I don’t care at all what people think of me” if I tried, and I have here and there I just don’t have it in me.

axioms_End2• 3 years ago

You mean Liu Cixin, that Yancy mentions in the first sentence of his essay about Dark Forest of Internet, or someone else?

wffurr• 3 years ago

And apply it to The Internet instead of the galaxy, with due credit given.

speed_spread• 3 years ago

Found it in 3 seconds flat. RTFA and Carry On:

https://onezero.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-int...

tomtheelder• 3 years ago

Liu Cixin certainly didn’t create the concept! It’s a long standing conjecture that he wrote a novel about and provided a new name for. Whoever “Yancy” is has done nothing wrong- certainly nothing more than Liu. They even attribute to Liu in the first sentence! No reason for outrage here.

e12e• 3 years ago

He (Yancey) doesn't:

https://onezero.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-int...

In his sci-fi trilogy The Three Body Problem, author Liu Cixin presents the dark forest theory of the universe. (...)

raverbashing• 3 years ago

Yeah the analogy works much better here than as an answer to the Fermi Paradox

yreg3• 3 years ago

I don't get it. How did advertisers, tracking bots, clickbait creators, attention-hungry influencers or reply guys destroy txti?

fatneckbeard• 3 years ago

Here is the problem people are having with this

Maggie Appleton on this blog literally says "Yancey Strickler's companion idea of the Dark Forest theory of the web".

I have a Dark Forest Theory of Hacker News. If I stay out of certain threads i dont get blasted. So i dont post in them. Hacker News is like Liu Cixin's dark forest.

i hope someone would say "as Fatneckbeard pointed out, HN is a lot like Liu Cixin's Dark Forest" not "Fat Neck Beards's Dark Forest theory of Hacker News".

I did not write 1000+ pages of books about this that became a world wide best seller and responsible for the phrase being a house hold word. I just pointed out they are similar. It is not my idea. It is not even my adaptation of an idea to a novel context. Im just pointing out something relatively obvious, because the original book is widely interpreted as an analogy for China's 996 tech startup culture by the Chinese readership which made it a success in the first place, so I'm basically making a pop culture reference. Even if I wrote a blog about it it would not make it my idea.

marcellus232• 3 years ago

Liu Cixin's Dark Forest

Liu Cixin did not come up with the Dark Forest theory. It’s been around for decades and many other thinkers and scifi authors had written about it before he did (nothing against him of course).

Kiro• 3 years ago

I don't think "bad actors" is referring to any of those in this case.

kvetching2• 3 years ago

Txti.es if you are reading this, can you provide a list of the websites that you had? We can still look at them via archive sites like wayback machine. Thanks for everything. This was a beautiful concept and hopefully someone can take the mantle.

kvetching2• 3 years ago

Derp. You can find a list of archived sites here (10k limit): https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://txti.es/\*

For someone that's interested in crawling all the URLs (by avoiding the 10k limit) that were backed up, I found you can add YYYYMMDD in the * of the URL to see the sites archived during a particular year, month, day etc...

https://web.archive.org/web/2022*/txti.es/*

https://web.archive.org/web/2023*/txti.es/*

https://web.archive.org/web/202301*/txti.es/*

https://web.archive.org/web/20230101*/txti.es/*

aa_is_op• 3 years ago

What does "bad actors" mean?

What was it this abused for? Malware C2 instructions?

stinkytaco• 3 years ago

Or misinformation. Or phishing. Really, any type of moderation is one of the biggest ongoing challenges for a small operation like this.

stavros2• 3 years ago

I wonder how one would implement a reputation-based accounts system, something like lobste.rs has. To get an account, you need to be invited by someone who already has one, and if you get banned, all your children and N levels of parents get banned too.

ekanes• 3 years ago

I love this concept, this seems quite needed in the near future as accounts that seem human will proliferate.

r7212• 3 years ago

Bluesky does this according to their FAQ:

Occasionally, when we take action to moderate an account, we may revoke invite codes from that account and other accounts in the same invite tree.

https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/5-19-2023-user-faq

bscphil2• 3 years ago

N levels of parents get banned too

I would simply never invite anyone. There has to be a moderate amount of "forgiveness" for people who can reasonably be thought not to have invited a deliberate spammer.

sowbug• 3 years ago

That's fine. A system like that doesn't depend on intent.

dist-epoch2• 3 years ago

all your children and N levels of parents get banned too.

This never works. Like black SEO, where the competition deliberately does "forbidden SEO" things just to blacklist you.

stavros2• 3 years ago

Why doesn't it work?

mid-kid• 3 years ago

rentry.org might be a suitable replacement for some.

neovialogistics• 3 years ago

Rentry has an excellent UX but they haven't registered with dmca.copyright.gov so I'd be wary of setting things up there in case the site craps itself like Cohost and Hive Social.

kerkeslager• 3 years ago

Does anyone know how I can contact the creators of Txti? I've looked around and can't seem to find any contact information.

As a long-time user I value what they've done and would like to help. Ideally, if it's just a problem of it being too much work for them to secure against bad actors, I'd just take over the website and organize that work myself. No promises, though, I'd need to understand the problem better before committing to solving it. :)

I suspect the authors and I have a lot of values in common.

Alternatively, the authors can contact me at [removed].

EDIT: Found an email!

talkingtab• 3 years ago

I would like to help rebuild txti.es if you are interested. I'm developing an identity system - with reputation - to keep bad people out. No cost, easy to use. Makes it increasingly hard to get a burner identity. Not finished but probably be usable. Micro-billing - so you can charge 0.10 {cents,euros,marks,francs or dracmas} per month/week/etc, is also in the work. email to arthurgarbanzo at gmail.com if interested. I will do the work as I am trying prove the concept.

jp57• 3 years ago

Giving a valuable service away for free on the internet is like putting out a bowl of candy on halloween night with a sign that says "Be nice, please take one," and then walking away. There are a lot of not-nice people out there any nobody should be surprised when all the candy is gone in five minutes.

shpx• 3 years ago

I love the design of this shutdown notice. No logo, it just starts with the text, it even doesn't have excessive padding. Makes me question why the first thing Hacker News (like all websites) has been telling me for years is that it's Hacker News, with a logo and with text. I know what website I'm on.

Txti is shutting down

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