@lazarus (#saz2moa) Hello! 👋 Welcome to Twtxt! 🤗

(#saz2moa) @prologic @lazarus Don't mind @prologic, he's a bot! 😛

@lazarus It helps if you start following a few folks btw... Otherwise you'll have to hit the "Discover" view to see thee pod's local timeline of all local users on _that_ pod.

(#saz2moa) @lazarus > If I had removed the hashtag and prologic’s name would my reply still have linked to this conversation or sent you a private msg? Removing the mentions is "okay" but the (#xxx) forms part of a conversation chain. Under the hood this software (_including the mobile app_) all really uses the twtxt.txt spec/format. We describe "extensions" we are documenting over at dev.twtxt.net

@lazarus (#saz2moa) > Thanks. My mistake was trying to use twt.social for the pod name. No problem! Twt.social is _our_ crappy attempt at "branding" and the 1-click fully managed hosted platform for those that either a) don't know how to host/run thee backend and/or b) can't be bothered. To date my pod (twtxt.net) is the largest and most active, but there are ~7 others we host on behalf of others at as well as two others which are completely independently run at twt.u53.net and txt.sour.is

@lazarus (#saz2moa) Although... THere e_could_ be others I'm not aware of 🤔

@lazarus (#saz2moa) Pods are "federated" in the sense of the word - Yes. They do not however utilise ActivityPub (_for good reasons_), they operate in "pull" mode and understand Twtxt. I also offer a free RSS/Atom -> Twtxt aggregation service at feeds.twtxt.net (_which is how I read all my news, lobsters, slashdot, etc, etc_)

(#saz2moa) @lazarus > and if one ran their own server, can they pick and choose which instances to join with, or choose to exist completely isolated and private; msgs only visible to logged in accounts? Curious, what's your use-case? A pod can exist completely on its own, it only interacts with Twtxt feeds. If no users on _that_ pod follows any other users on any other pods, then yeah it'll be pretty isolated.

@lazarus (#saz2moa) A counter-example to this are the pods owned by @xuu and @etux where we (_especially @xuu_) frequently converse across pods on various topics of interest to us 😀

@lazarus (#saz2moa) Ahh I see. Yeah you can _totally_ do that and in fact I encourage it! You are right about the problems of "human socialism at scale", it doesn't scale. Keeping pods small is important in my humble opinion, but a large interconnected network of pods that is diverse is okay. There are no possible ways to create "echo chambers" here, no retweets, no likes, no algorithms. I try to keep things as simple as as "real" as possible, if that makes sense?