twtxt VS mailcatcher

GitHub repo

> there really oughta be a text-only implementation of mastodon or one of the other fediverse ecosystems

Something like this that I know of, in a very simplified form.

> 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.

https://github.com/buckket/twtxt

I will note that indieweb folks sometimes get a little dogmatic about POSSE being better than PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate to your Own Site). Because POSSE necessarily entails write-permissions, it's titchier to set up than PESOS-ing your public content elsewhere back to your own site. I had a lot of stuff PESOSed from Lemmy (https://lemmy.ml/post/47757) to my own site (https://maya.land/responses/2021/01/14/recyclable-plastic-is...) because I could just scrape the content out of the Lemmy RSS feed and reformat. Similarly I pull over Hypothes.is annotations (https://via.hypothes.is/https://theprepared.org/features-fee...) to a personal wiki where I clean them up into posts for my site (https://maya.land/responses/2021/07/29/geofoam-giant-styrofo...). Sure, if I wanted to update in two places it'd get titchy, but because I'm mainly using these other sites as front-ends to get a canonical personal copy I then mess with, it works pretty well. Hell, I even take Mastodon (https://occult.institute/@maya) and shove it into a twtxt (https://github.com/buckket/twtxt) file on my site (https://maya.land/assets/twtxt.txt). Once you start thinking about stuff with these approaches you can always find a convenient way to duct tape things together.

If you own the server, it might be easier to set up a little smtp client. Or to be more security conscious, a incoming only smtp client like https://github.com/0xERR0R/mailcatcher/ and collapse that dataflow. But pubsub has a monstrous free tier anyway and I also wanted to keep a copy of the emails on gmail which is easier to search

There are lots of ways to do this. Postfix is nice but a little heavy. The simplest and most functional way I've found is https://github.com/0xERR0R/mailcatcher since all it does is forward the emails. You can even use a throwaway gmail SMTP so it doesn't get send to spam

Easy to set up on a rpi/cheap VPS, as long as you have a hostname. And while you're there, look for a short domain name so it's fast to type (on credit card kiosks). You can get cheap short non-standard TLD's like .li. I got a 3 character domain for $5 a year, as short as bit.ly, but just for me

I use selhosted https://github.com/0xERR0R/mailcatcher with ddns domain on my raspberry pi

Maybe https://github.com/0xERR0R/mailcatcher