Learn about yarn.social, a small open-source decentralized micro-blogging ecosystem built on twtxt, including its clients, servers, and free cost model.
yarn.social is a decentralized, open-source social micro-blogging ecosystem built on top of twtxt, a simple specification where a person's posts are stored as lines in a plain text file hosted on any web server they control.
The project was created around July 2020 by James Mills, a former Facebook engineer who built an extended, federated implementation of twtxt with threaded conversations, mentions, and user discovery, originally as twtxt.net before rebranding to yarn.social.
There is no central company behind yarn.social. It is maintained as a community, open-source project with no algorithm, no central server, and no single point of control, making it a niche alternative to mainstream corporate social networks rather than a mass-market product.
Posts are stored as plain text twtxt.txt files that users host themselves, meaning content ownership sits with the individual rather than a platform operator.
The ecosystem offers multiple interchangeable clients, including web apps, terminal clients, and desktop applications, along with independently run servers called pods that anyone can host.
An ActivityPub gateway connects yarn.social to the wider Fediverse, and additional tools support search, discovery, and bridging RSS or Atom feeds so users can follow traditional blogs alongside social posts.
yarn.social is entirely free to use, with no ads, no tracking, and no paywalls anywhere in the ecosystem.
Because every component is open source under the AGPLv3 license, individuals and organizations can self-host their own pod or client at no licensing cost, with the only expense being their own server infrastructure.
There are no commercial pricing tiers, since the project is community-maintained rather than operated by a company selling a product.
Yes, yarn.social is completely free with no ads, tracking, or paywalls.
It was created around 2020 by James Mills, also known by the handle prologic, building on the earlier twtxt specification.
Yes, every component, including clients and server software known as pods, is open source under the AGPLv3 license.
Yes, an ActivityPub gateway bridges yarn.social pods with the wider Fediverse, including Mastodon.
twtxt is the simple text-file specification that yarn.social is built on, where a user's posts are stored as lines in a plain text file they host.
Yes, anyone can run their own pod since the server software is open source and self-hostable.
It is a small, niche community focused on developers and decentralization enthusiasts; precise user numbers are not publicly documented.