Own your words.
Yarn.social is a decentralised ecosystem for social micro-blogging: open specifications, many clients, servers and services — and your posts in a plain text file you own, hosted wherever you like.
Claim your feed — free Just start reading
One tap, no account, nothing to run — or read first, which needs nothing at all.
The big idea
Not a social network — an ecosystem
There is no Yarn.social server to sign up to, no company behind the curtain, and no algorithm deciding what you see. There is just twtxt: a decentralised way of sharing short posts as plain text files over HTTP, plus a family of open extensions, clients and services that make it feel social.
📄
A feed is just a file
Your feed is a twtxt.txt file on any web server. One line per post — a
timestamp, a tab, and what you have to say. You can read it, back it up,
move it, or delete it. It is yours, forever.
🧩
Open specs, no gatekeepers
The twtxt specification and its extensions — threads, mentions, avatars, multiline posts and more — are small, open documents anyone can implement. Use all of them, some of them, or none.
Get started
Join at your own pace
Take the first rung and stop, or climb the whole ladder — every rung is decentralised, and you can move your feed between them at any time without losing your posts or your followers.
Get a feed Easiest
Claim a nick and you have a feed: free, no
account, nothing to run. It lives at twtpub.com/u/yournick, your handle is
yournick@twtpub.com, and anyone on any client or pod can follow you.
Read
Open twtxt.app and follow a few people — by feed URL
or nick@domain. It’s an offline-first web app: your timeline is cached on
your device and readable on a plane. Install it to your home screen if you
like.
Post from somewhere you already own
Rather host it yourself? Point twtxt.app at a twtxt.txt in your own GitHub
or Gitea repo (no server required!), or at an account on a community pod like
twtxt.net.
Host
Run twtd — a tiny personal feed server with media, avatars and follower discovery:
$ docker run -p 8000:8000 -v twtd-data:/data \
prologic/twtd -n yournick -u https://your.domain
Or run yarnd to host a whole community.
Build
It’s plain text over HTTP — you can write a client in an afternoon. Start with the specs and developer docs, and come say hi; extensions are designed in the open.
The ecosystem
Woven from many threads
Everything below is free, open source and self-hostable. Mix and match.
🐦 twtxt.app Easiest start
An offline-first web client for twtxt and Yarn.social. Read without an account, post via the backend of your choice, pair your devices with a QR code.
☁️ Hosted feeds
Don’t want to run anything? twtpub.com hands out free twtxt feeds — claim a nick and you’re posting. It’s a plain feed like any other, so you can move it elsewhere whenever you like.
🪶 twtd
A tiny single-user feed server:
one Docker command, one access token, and you own your corner of the web —
complete with followers, media and nick@domain mentions.
🧶 yarnd
The community pod server. Multi-user,
web UI, API and the yarnc CLI. twtxt.net is the
original pod, and many independent pods federate alongside it.
🌉 bridge
An ActivityPub ↔ twtxt gateway: follow twtxt feeds from Mastodon and friends, and bring the Fediverse into your timeline.
🔍 search.twtxt.net
A search engine and crawler for the whole network — discover feeds, follow conversations, explore who’s out there.
📰 feeds.twtxt.net
An RSS/Atom-to-twtxt bridge — follow websites, blogs and news sources right in your timeline.
📗 twtxt.dev
The developer docs and specifications: the twtxt file format and every extension, written to be implemented.
🛠 Community clients
jenny, twet, twtr, Yarn Desktop Client and more — terminal, desktop, or roll your own.
See for yourself
This website is a feed
Follow it in any client at https://yarn.social/twtxt.txt, or as
@<Yarn https://yarn.social/twtxt.txt> — or just paste the URL into
twtxt.app.
Peek inside twtxt.txt — this is the entire format
# nick = Yarn
# url = https://yarn.social/twtxt.txt
# avatar = https://yarn.social/logo.png
# description = Yarn.social is a decentralised self-hosted social media based on the Twtxt format.
2022-10-30T23:20:41+10:00 Hello World
2026-07-12T12:39:43+10:00 🥳 yarnd v0.16.0 "Silver Sojourner" is out — the first full release in nearly 4 years! https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/yarn/releases/tag/0.16.0
Which means this is a complete, valid post, with no client involved at all:
$ echo -e "$(date -Is)\tHello World" >> twtxt.txt
Principles
What we will never do
✅ No ads — nothing is sponsored, promoted or boosted.
✅ No tracking — no analytics, no metadata collection, ever.
✅ No PII — pods store no personally identifiable information.
✅ No lock-in — your feed is a text file; take it anywhere.
✅ No algorithm — your timeline is just the feeds you follow, in order.
✅ No secrets — every component is open source (AGPLv3).
Pull on a thread 🧵
Claim a feed and say hello, chat with us in #Yarn.social on Libera.Chat, or dive into the source code.