Depends on what we’re talking about exactly. I’ve created twtxt (the format specification as well as the reference client) a few years back. Many other clients and compatible tools followed provided by other contributors. Sadly prologic chose to name his piece of software just "twtxt" as well, despite it deviating quite dramatically from the original idea.

Great to see the ecosystem grow!

You should register a somewhat short & clear domain and run a public instance! Or is it up to someone else to provide that service? BTW: Someone registered twtxt.org, maybe that's a good place to provide such a service there.

Currently, < http://htwtxt.plomlompom.com/ > (HTTP-only so far, will probably look closer into the whole certificate business after the weekend) is my attempt at a public instance: sign-up is open (for now), and I don't plan on eradicating the feeds regularly as I do with < http://test.plomlompom.com:8000 >. But I'm also a bit hesitant to promote this instance aggressively at this early stage of development. I'm happy about anyone testing it by registering, or even by setting up their own instance.

Cool, added a link to it in twtxt’s README.

Funny thinking about it, but no. It's just a combination of "twitter" and "txt".

This is nice as long as nobody changes old status updates. Thought about using If-Modified-Since to at least reduce the load when nothing has changed at all.

But still: It will definitely take some time till a "twtxt timeline" causes more traffic than browsing the current Twitter homepage. :3

Yes, should be possible. But then again you would have to specify an ordering, i.e. are newer status updates at the top or at the bottom.

Yes, it’s up to each user how he names the URLs he’s following.

This makes it hard to implement global @replies, therefore there’s no recommend way of handling those at the moment. You could just write "@<NICK>:" and hope that the person you had in mind follows you and feels concerned.

I see. So by default all @mentions show up on all followers' timeline, just like regular tweets?

Yes, because there is no difference between an @reply and an ordinary tweet. Not technically at least. It’s just text. But implementing a filter on your side should be trivial if that’s what you want.

Maybe I’ll implement something which makes it easy for users to specify custom filters and/or highlights.

Given the decentralized nature, it'd be nice to parse any @reply , add metadata that indicates the full URL, and thus translate into a local user's nicknames.

Should be easy to add metadata by convention inside the messages, appended to them following some kind of control string, like "META". Clients could interpret anything from that string on by rules yet to be defined.

It’s simpler, but it shares similarities, no doubt.

I guess most of the time being "successful" is not the point.

Yeah, sounds great in the first place, but then again you’d have to consider how one would implement such a list without the need of registering an account or something of that sort.

My friends and I are basically sharing our followings publicly in a separate text file next to the main one, so we can discover new people.