Take something like X/Twitter. Users there upload some concepts through text, which can be of high importance to users following them. But say you are annoyed that every thought you convey is being stored in history, every post can be analyzed chronologically, unless you do the job of removing them automatically after some minutes or hours. Not to you mention that to use this platform you need to go through several authentication checkpoints to make sure you are somebody.

Lets go back to the early 2000s. I'm sure you remember MSN Messenger. Messenger had this feature where every user could set their own status, which could be any combination of text + emojis. When you opened Messenger you were welcomed to an overview of the people you followed. A vertical list of users, each with a status. The status conveyed something.

A single status tells something about a person or about something happening around them. Now imagine a dashboard full of these, that updated automatically every 5 minutes. That you can just leave open in a tab and check once in a while, to get an idea of what's going on.

So I made this:

A simple status update backend and a dashboard to use it:

In this gif you can see how I authenticate with gregg and change its status, then do the same with interjected which is another one I control.

(Lots of Not Found) statuses because I added dummy ones for testing.

I'm calling this thing Curls. You claim a curl and get a key to control its status. You get the key only once, if you lose it there's no way to recover it.

You can change the status with classic linux tools like... curl

There are no CORS restrictions, it can be changed from within any application.

When you go to https://curls.merkoba.com/nextcaller you get a pure text response, which  is the status of the curl called nextcaller

You might have deduced already that this is not only useful for fun, but also for software development too, since you can point software to a dynamic piece of text that only you control.

There are no accounts, to get a curl you simply solve a captcha.

Also I want to point out in the gif above. Notice how each color has its own set of curls. For example you can follow certain curls in green then follow other ones in white for whatever reason or categorization you come up with. In other words, the colors are not simply for theming.

To add curls you simply write or paste them in the textarea on the left. It's a simple HTML textarea.

Curls and the Dashboard are released under AGPLv3.

https://github.com/madprops/curls

What do you think, do you see some value in this?