Help for txt.sour.is

Why do I need an account?

You need to have an account so this Yarn.social pod can uniquely identity you in a meaningful way and create a personalized timeline based on users and feeds you follow as well as allow you to post Twts against your own user or create feeds to post as different topics of interested or personas.

Without creating an account you are limited to reading the pod’s local user timeline of feeds (basically all the posts of the users on that pod) but you are unable to participate. You may also be able to view the profiles of any user on that pod provided the pod operator has chosen to and configured “open profiles”. You are also able to follow a user without an account by subscribing to their Atom feed. You can also similarly subscribe to the pod’s local timeline of users feeds.

How to create an account?

To create an account on txt.sour.is simply navigate to /register assuming the operator of this instance has left user registration open. There you need to fill in a valid Username and Password and optional Email Address (which is only used for password recovery).

How do follow someone?

Following someone in the twtxt community is actually rather hard to do because of it being decentralised. This means no one company or entity controls who posts what, where, why or how on their twtxt feeds.

Nevertheless following someone on the same instance (txt.sour.is) you are on is easy! Simply /login and navigate to the /discover page to find public posts of users on the same instance. This is a good way to discover new users.

How do I format my posts?

The software that powers this pod txt.sour.is (a Yarn.social pod) supports what’s called Markdown. (It actually supports the full syntax of Markdown really but it is not recommended as twtxt posts are limited to single lines and length)

This means you can format your posts in very simple but powerful ways:

  • Anything that looks like a link is automatically rendered as a click-able link
  • Use **bold** or __italics__ to place emphasis on your parts of your post
  • Use fixed width to render text in fixed-width or another style of emphasis
  • Use [Title](url) to give your links a nice pretty title
  • Use ![](url) to link to external images which will be rendered inline with your post

Of course twtxt is fully Unicode and Emoji capable so any Emoji you can type on your keyboard (such as the special keyboard on your iPhone) will also work nicely.

Pro Tip: Just use the “Formatting Toolbar”.