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.
Charlie Sorrel writes reviews and how-tos. Follow Charlie on Twitter at @mistercharlie, and at micro.blog on @mistercharlie
One response to “Txt.fyi is the dumbest publishing platform on the web”
Reminds me of one of the more prescient predictions of the last decade, which is repeated as follows.
We are formless. We are the very discipline and morality that Americans invoke so often. How can anyone hope to eliminate us? As long as this nation exists, so will we. Don’t you know that our plans have your interests–not ours–in mind? The mapping of the human genome was completed early this century. As a result, the evolutionary log of the human race lay open to us. We started with genetic engineering, and in the end we succeeded in digitizing life itself. But there are things not covered by genetic information. Human memories, ideas. Culture. History. Genes don’t contain any record of human history. Is it something that should not be passed on? Should that information be left at the mercy of nature? We’ve always kept records of our lives. Through words, pictures, symbols… from tablets to books to tablets again… But not all the information was inherited by later generations. A small percentage of the whole was selected and processed, then passed on. Not unlike genes, really.
But in the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading, always accessible. Rumors about petty issues, misinterpretations, slander… All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate. It will only slow down social progress, reduce the rate of evolution. You seem to think that our plan is one of censorship. What we propose to do is not to control content, but to create context. The digital society furthers human flaws and selectively rewards development of convenient half-truths. Just look at the strange juxtapositions of morality around you. Billions spent on new weapons in order to humanely murder other humans. Rights of criminals are given more respect than the privacy of their victims. Although there are people suffering in poverty, huge donations are made to protect endangered species. Everyone grows up being told the same thing. Be nice to other people… but beat out the competition! You’re special. Believe in yourself and you will succeed. But it’s obvious from the start that only a few can succeed…
You exercise your right to “freedom” and this is the result. All rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests to chum and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems. Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds leaking whatever “truth” suits them into the growing cesspool of society. The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. Nobody is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in “truth”.
And this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.
We’re trying to stop that from happening. It’s our responsibility as rulers. Just as in genetics, unnecessary information and memory must be filtered out to stimulate the evolution of the species. Who else could wade through the sea of garbage you people produce, retrieve valuable truths and even interpret their meaning for later generations?
That’s what it means to create context.