Welcome to Yarn.social
Hey there 👋 Welcome to Yarn.social 🤗
Yarn.social is a non-social social media 🤣 At least that's what some in the community call it.
Seriously though Yarn.social is a privacy first micro-blogging social media ecosystem. Why do we call it an ecosystem? Well because unlike many traditional "big-tech" social media platforms, Yarn.social is not a "single place" you can go. It is fully decentralised and joining Yarn.social can be as simple as joining an existing Pod to running your own to building your own client and hosting your own feed however you wish!
Also unlike other social media solutions such as Mastodon that uses the ActivityPub protocol (often referred to as the "Fediverse") Yarn.social is also not a protocol, but a set of specifications for how to build clients and publish feeds that clients can consume. Yarn.social is thereby strictly decentralised in the strictest sense where most ActivityPub-based social media software really forms a "distributed network" of nodes.
Probably the most important thing to remember of all is that Yarn.social is first and foremost privacy first and 100% decentralised and has no interest in any advertising business models and so therefore will never have any ads.
If you are curious about the history of Yarn.social and how it was formed please have a read of About Yarn.social
For the technical minded folks that are curious and want to know every little detail of how things work (and we don't blame you!) Yarn.social is actually just a "brand" name we've given to a project that originally started out as a simple Twtxt Web Client/App. It was then later rebranded (pretty quickly) into Twt.social (now gone) and finally what you see here now today.
As stated before, Yarn.social is an ecosystem
- Clients such as the ones found on https://yarn.social#clients
- A set of specifications for how to build clients and publish feeds and interact with others
- A collection of supporting tools and services that support the greater ecosystem.
And of course Yarn.social has its own client and backend called yarnd which provides:
- A (by default) multi-user Web Application that primarily uses Server-side-rendering (SSR) technology with minimal Javascript (only to enhance the experience).
- Is based on the and uses the Twtxt spec/format itself.
- Has a JSON API for interacting with a Pod programatically
- And a Mobile App!
For the extra curious and developer in you, here's the tech stack that powers all Yarn.social pods (instances of yarnd):
- Written in Go
- No framework(s).
- Is a Server-side Render Web App (SSR)
- Using Go's html/template(s)
- Very minimal use of Javascript (only to enhance the User eXperience slightly with graceful degradation)