Frequently Asked Questions

Getting started

Q: Do I need an account to use Yarn.social?

A: No! Reading requires nothing at all — open twtxt.app and follow a few feeds by URL or nick@domain. To post, the quickest route is to claim a free hosted feed — one tap, still no account, and it’s an ordinary twtxt feed you can move elsewhere later. If you’d rather host it yourself from the start: sign up on a community pod like twtxt.net, point twtxt.app at a twtxt.txt in your own GitHub/Gitea repo, or run your own twtd.

Q: Is there a mobile app?

A: twtxt.app is the mobile app — it’s an offline-first web app you can install to your home screen on iOS and Android (and desktop). There’s no app store, no updates to approve, and your timeline works offline. (The original Flutter app, Goryon, has been retired.)

Q: What’s the difference between twtd and yarnd?

A: twtd is a tiny single-user feed server — it hosts your feed, media and avatar, discovers your followers, and pairs with twtxt.app for posting. One Docker command and you’re done. yarnd is the full multi-user pod server — a complete web UI, user accounts, an API and moderation tools for hosting a whole community.

Q: Can people on Mastodon follow me?

A: Yes — via the ActivityPub bridge, which exposes twtxt feeds as ActivityPub actors and brings replies from the Fediverse back into your timeline.

General

Q: Is Yarn.social a “social media” alternative?

A: Yes and no.

Yarn.social is really an ecosystem: a collection of specifications, clients, servers and services that people use to interact with one another “socially”, in an open and transparent manner. There is no central service, no company and no single point of failure — so it’s less an alternative platform and more a different way of doing things entirely.

Q: Does Yarn.social use Twtxt?

A: Yes. And it also extends the original Twtxt specification with Extensions, developed openly with the twtxt community.

Q: Are any of these extensions required or mandatory?

A: Absolutely not!

You are free to use twtxt however you wish. You are also free to use all, some or none of the Extensions. The choice is yours! However, most (if not all) of the extensions were a formalization of what was already being actively used by the Twtxt community. See below for more details.

Q: Which are the most important Extensions?

A: Of course any ranking is debatable, but since all extensions have the goal of improving interaction, and some of them were born out of what a lot of feeds settled on already, these extensions might help you:

  1. Twt Hash Extension in combination with the Twt Subject Extension for forming conversation trees;
  2. Multiline Extension for writing longer twts with paragraphs;
  3. Metadata Extension for additional feed metadata (e.g., nick, avatar, description); and
  4. Archive Feeds Extension for archiving and rotating long feeds.

If you have a question that wasn’t answered above, which you believe should be listed here, please get in touch via #Yarn.social on Libera.Chat or raise an issue on git.mills.io.