On: How and why to make a /now page on your site

[pablo1]

I've been thinking about something like this for a while, wondering if it could be a decentralized alternative to social media timelines. I really like the idea of having a /now page with a short public status that you could share with friends and which can be less work to update than writing an entire blog post.

That being said, the "standard" you defined could have been bit more specific in my opinion. If I have multiple friends with /now pages, I would like to read them all in one place. For this RSS would work nicely, maybe with a separate feed from your blog. If you don't want RSS, maybe making the /now page a uniform text-based format would have been better?

Just an opinion on this.

[MattJ100 → pablo1]

This is not a new idea, there is some prior work:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol) (one of the earliest implementations of the idea)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microblogging (the general concept)

- https://spec.indieweb.org/ (existing standards for this kind of thing)

Before Mastodon there was Identica/Status.Net, before that generation of tools there were bots that would let you update a page on your website by sending a short message from your chat client. Even Twitter had SMS and XMPP interfaces for this, in the early days.

[rpastuszak → pablo1]

Hehe, I'm actually playing with a similar idea. I'm still trying to figure out how to reduce friction for less tech-savvy users, so have both the ability to plug in your own feed or use the UI on the site.

I wrote about now pages here https://untested.sonnet.io/My+Now+Page

I also made a version of "my life in weeks" https://days.sonnet.io as an excuse for reflection, an excuse to get the bird's eye view of my life, then to encourage others to do something similar. And, some people, even here on HN, have!

[OnACoffeeBreak → rpastuszak]

Your "my life in weeks" page is just lovely. I teared up from the tenderness of it.

That is such a great idea. I have been toying with the idea of writing a memoir, but I haven't started because it seems so daunting of a task. This, on the other hand, is constrained, but still leaves a lot of room for creativity.

[rpastuszak → OnACoffeeBreak]

Thanks! You might like this then https://untested.sonnet.io/Stream+of+Consciousness+Morning+N...

I've been doing this since the late 2019 and it's become a huge part of my life, my relationship with myself and others.

[zimpenfish → pablo1]

Sounds like you're after something like TWTXT[1]

[1] https://indieweb.org/twtxt

[yaky → pablo1]

I believe this can be implemented via XMPP's presence protocol [0].

IIRC this is what WhatsApp did, and sharing your current status was the original purpose of WhatsApp. Messaging and calls were added later.

0: https://xmpp.org/rfcs/rfc6121.html#presence