Wet for Gwit : your CLIent for offline-first content browsing
2025-03-25
I have the pleasure and pride to publish Wet, a command-line client for the Gwit protocol : offline-first, git-based content distribution !
I took the opportunity of the OFFLine-FIRst SOftware CHallenge 2025 to achieve three important features :
- Wet is packaged and published on Pypi, for ease of installation. The package name is wet-gwit.
- Wet will try to open binary files through `xdg-open`.
- Most importantly, Wet has now an import/export feature. This allows you to bulk update your sites to/from a USB key. Wet works over sneakernet !
To browse this page with Wet :
# Install Wet python3 -m pip install wet-gwit # Browse wet get gwit://0x16c8a566bb88303c2513cf6328996d46e0440e85/blog/2025/publishing-wet.gmi#??https://framagit.org/matograine/gwitsite.git
Use case and why does it make sense in OFFLFIRSOCH
OFFLFIRSOCH is about offline-first computing. Wet allows you to browse and share sites while staying offline.
Say I have a friend who, for any reason, has no internet connection at home, no telescreen[1]. When she comes to visit me, she has her USB key with her, and simply run `wet get --export /path/to/USB` to get all the sites I keep up-to-date on my own computer. At home, she just has to `wet get --import /path/to/USB` to save them on her own machine. And if she does not want my whole collection, she may filter the sites she is interested in through `wet get --export path/to/USB solderpunk matograine ...`. Nice, isn't it ?
About Gwit
Gwit is a simple protocol based on git + pgp, aimed at textual content publication. It is thought for lightweight websites, books, documentation, etc. Summarized in a sentence : when you visit a gwit-enabled site page, you clone the whole site whith its history, and you verify that the content has not been tampered. Period. This has major benefits :
- A single network transaction lets you get the whole site
- Noone knows which page you visit and how often
- Once you have visited a site, you will be able to access its content even if the author deletes it / forgets it (or if anyone forces the author to delete it, as dictatorships do), or if you get offline
- You can re-host the very same content, or share it through USB, but you can't tamper it
- You have your own local wayback machine
The repo presenting Gwit protocol
The oldest gwit site (on gwit)
The oldest gwit site (on gemini)
If your site exists on a git repo, chances are you can host it on Gwit with minor changes on your repo.
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[1] Telescreens are two-way video devices that appear in George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Omnipresent and almost never turned off, they are an unavoidable source of propaganda and tools of surveillance (source : wikipedia). Commonly named _smartphones_ nowadays.
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