Yarn.social

Yarn.social is a decentralised self-hosted social media that has a privacy-first focus.

There are no ads, no tracking and no personal information is ever collected or stored.

Read more About Yarn.social or try the Demo Pod today!

Try it Now!

👉 Getting Started

Yarn.social is completely decentralized and operates on a “pull”-based model unlike ActivityPub based platforms like Mastodon. In order to get onboard and start following your friends, family or colleagues, you need a feed and a client.

You can either Join an existing Pod that runs Yarn.social’s multi-user decentralised and distributed software called yarnd, or you can Run-a-pod yourself on your own server or even a Raspberry Pi! And finally you can Manually host your own feed and use any “compatible” client of your choosing, or write a new one that implements the specifications. Enjoy 🤗

🤗 Join an existing Pod

Join Today!

You are welcome to join one of the existing pods listed here:

📱 Mobile App

There is a native Mobile App for Yarn.social pods!

NOTE: The mobile app is being rebuilt and rebranded. Test versions can be found here

🧶 Run a Pod

Deploy to Vultr!

📣 NEW: (17th April 2022) Yarn is now available in the Vultr App Marketplace! See https://www.vultr.com/marketplace/apps/yarn for more details.

If you have Docker installed and available to run containers you can run a yarnd instance by simply running:

$ docker run -p 8000:8000 prologic/yarnd

Pre-compiled binaries can be found on the yarn Releases page, and are compiled by James Mills and the *-checksums.txt.sig can be verified with the GPG public key C1F16643ADFF61B4A39EA3FEAC4C014F1440EBD6.

Otherwise if you wish to compile from source and build yarnd yourself (Be sure to have Go installed):

$ git clone https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/yarn
$ cd yarn
$ make deps
$ make

Now run your instance by running:

yarnd

For options see yarnd --help.

Please refer to the Configuring your Pod guide for a production pod setup.

For other setups and community documentation on setting up a Yarn.social pod, please see Our Pod Owner’s WIki, you are also welcome to contribute to the Wiki!

💪 Manually

Since Yarn.social is built upon the Twtxt spec with a few small (optional) extensions, all you need to do to join the network and participate in the growing number of users and conversations is have:

• Host a twtxt.txt file somewhere
• Add some important Metadata such as # Nick =, # Description = and # Avatar = at a minimum.
• Use a twtxt Yarn-compatible client that at least implements the Twt Subject Ext and Twt Hash Ext such as:
  • jenny: A console twtxt client with mutt integration (tutorial)
  • jdtron/twet: A command-line client.
  • twtr: A twtxt client written in Go, for all your twting needs.

For the best experience your client should also support some of the Twtxt Extensions developed by Yarn.social’s development team and community. For example being able to participate in “threads” by implementing the Twt Subject and Twt Hash extensions and the Metadata extensions to advertise information about your feed such as a description and avatar.

🌐 Hosting

Coming soon™

👨‍🔧 Services

The following supporting services help to support the Yarn.social platform and are provided for the benefit of all users:

• search.twtxt.net This is an instance of the Yarns search engine and crawls and indexes Yarn.social pods and Twtxt feeds.
• feeds.twtxt.net This is an instance of rss2twtxt and is used as the primary “feed source” for all Yarn.social pods (by default) and supports RSS/Atom and Twitter™. This allows users to “subscribe” to and “follow” websites, blogs or Twitter™ accounts.

💾 Sources

The project is managed by a self-hosted Gitea instance at https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial

• yarn 🧶 The yarnd self-hosted Yarn.social Pod server itself as well as the yarnc command-line client for posting and interacting with the yarnd API.
• search 🔍 The Yarn.social search engine that crawls the network of pods and twtxt feeds, scrapes and indexes every twt.
• feeds 📜 an RSS/Atom and Twitter feed aggregator that consumes RSS/Atom and Twitter™ feeds and produces twtxt feeds for consumption by Yarn.social pods as well as twtxt clients in general.
• app 🐦 A Flutter iOS and Android App for the Yarn.social yarnd API to provide a native mobile experience for users (in the process of being rebuilt).

👨‍💻👩‍💻 Contributing

If you would like to help the project and contribute ideas, bug-fixes, improvements, etc, we’re always looking for new contributors and we still have loads of things to do!

Please reach out to @prologic or join our Gitea instance at https://git.mills.io/ and start filing issues and pull requests to the main project https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/yarn

💬 Collaboration

We have an IRC channel #yarn.social on the Libera.Chat IRC network. You are welcome to come chat to us and hang out.

🕵️‍♂️ Privacy and Abuse Policy

Yarn.social is a decentralised social media platform that supports micro-blogging (Twts) and full blogging. Pods (or individual instances) are owned and operators by “Pod Owners” or “Pod Operators”. Pods can either be configured as single-user or multi-user (the default).

As such all Yarn.social pods share the following defaults Abuse and Privacy policies:

• Default Abuse Policy (Community Guidelines)
• Privacy Policy

Note: The privacy policy applies to ALL Yarn.social pods as the software yarnd DOES NOT collect any personally identifiable information from users (PII), or any metadata or analytics of any kind nor does it send, sell or transfer any data from pods to any 3rd-parties.

👨‍⚖️ Licenses

Most of the software components here are licensed under the terms of the AGPL-3.0 License with the exception of the hosting platform.