Did you ever have something to say that’s too long for a tweet, but too short for a blog post? And what if you don’t have a blog anyway? Then you need txt.fyi, “the dumbest publishing platform on the web.”
Txt.fyi couldn’t be any simpler
Rob Beschizza’s amazing txt.fyi exists for one thing: publishing text to the web, as quickly and simply as possible.
It’s so simple that it’s almost better to define it by what it doesn’t do:
There’s no tracking, ad-tech, webfonts, analytics, javascript, cookies, databases, user accounts, comments, friending, likes, follower counts or other quantifiers of social capital. The only practical way for anyone to find out about a posting is if the author links to it elsewhere.
To use txt.fyi, you just head to the site and start typing into the text box. When you’re done, you hit publish. To share it, you just share the URL of your just-created page.
When would you use txt.fyi? Anytime you want to share some text on the web, that’s when. You can publish recipes, short stories, musings, anything — as long as it’s just text. You can gussy up that text with standard Markdown (and use it to add links, too), but if you’re looking for something fancy, look elsewhere.
The beauty of txt.fyi is this simplicity. Not because it’s “distraction-free,” or any other crap like that, but because you don’t need to worry about anything other than your words. There’s no Twitter widget, no Facebook tracking code, no Like or share buttons. The generated pages aren’t even indexed by Google or other search engines (unless they’re doing it surreptitiously, anyway).
Text, and nothing but text
“I wanted to make something that didn’t just strip away slow tracking, webfonts, adtech and analytics,” Beschizza told Brutalist Websites after launch, “but also all the baroque and falsified quantifiers of social capital littering the web. So this website does almost nothing beyond its purpose: making it easy and simple to publish text online.”
You should totally check it out. Even if you don’t need it now, bookmark it for the next time your tweet length gets untrimmably out of hand. And as an example of a txt.fyi page, I’ve posted this article.
