Yarn.social is a decentralised self-hosted social media based on the Twtxt format (with Extensions) 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!
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 🤗
You are welcome to join one of the existing pods listed here:
| Pod | Location | Operator |
|---|---|---|
| twtxt.net | Australia/Brisbane | @prologic |
| nfld | United Kingdom | @jlj |
| We.Love.Privacy.Club | Australia | @eldersnake |
| zn80.net | Europe/Germany | @carsten |
| neotxt.dk | Europe/Scandinavia | @darch |
| .kyoko | Europe/Luxembourg | @akoizumi |
| yn.vern.cc | America/Eastern | @aryak and @cobra |
Note: Due to increased spam and link submission bots and/or marketing/seo type folks that don’t know any better, some pods have disabled “Open Registration”. If you’d like to join a pod that has registrations disabled, you’d best contact its operator. An Invite System will be built soon™
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
📣 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!
Joining the Yarn.social / Twtxt social ecosystem is as simple as writing a RFC3339 timestamp followed by a tab and your post to a text file and hosting that on a public webserver. For example:
$ echo -e "$(date -Is)\tHello World" >> twtxt.txt
That’s it! (But do read on…)
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:
twtxt.txt file somewhere# Nick =, # Description = and # Avatar = at a minimum.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.
The following clients are modern up-to-date and well maintained clietns that fully support the Twtxt and Twtxt Extensions:
A full complete example of a feed would look like this:
# 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
Which also happens to be the same feed at twtxt.txt which you can follow in your client as entering the feed uri of https://yarn.social/twtxt.txt or @-mentioning the feed with either @<Yarn https://yarn.social/twtxt.txt> (the Twtxt mention format) or [email protected] (the yarnd mention syntax).
Enjoy! 🤗
Coming soon™
The following supporting services help to support the Yarn.social platform and are provided for the benefit of all users:
The project is managed by a self-hosted Gitea instance at https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial
yarnd self-hosted Yarn.social Pod server itself as well as the yarnc command-line client for posting and interacting with the yarnd API.yarnd API to provide a native mobile experience for users (in the process of being rebuilt).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
We have an IRC channel #Yarn.social on the Libera.Chat
IRC network. You are welcome to come chat to us and hang out.
For your convenience you may use the the Web Chat.
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:
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.
Most of the software components here are licensed under the terms of the AGPL-3.0 License with the exception of the hosting platform.