TouchGrass is for keeping up with people you know and care about. Here is what you can use today, and where connections to other services still have limits. Updated September 21, 2026.
Profiles, short posts, articles, photos, albums, comments and messages are available. You can follow people, make friends, share with circles and talk in rooms. Search respects the audience of the content it returns. Profiles can hold links, interests and recommendations without requiring a daily post to stay useful.
Posts can be public, for friends or for selected circles. Shared circles and rooms have their own recipients. Letting someone open a circle post through a persona link and allowing search engines to index it are separate choices. Neither choice automatically makes that post eligible for public federation.
TouchGrass supports public follows, posts, replies and post updates through ActivityPub. Delivery runs through a queue and can be retried; an update on TouchGrass may take time to appear elsewhere. The receiving app decides how to display articles, albums and other formats.
Friends, circle, shared-circle and room posts can reach the remote recipients in that audience when the author enables federation for it. Restricted post requests require a signed request from an allowed actor. This is recipient-based access control, not end-to-end encryption: the receiving service handles the copy it receives.
The ATProto connection supports public posts, replies and updates. Longform writing also has an Atmosphere publication path. These are public publishing routes; they do not carry a TouchGrass friends or circles audience. Formatting and presentation depend on the receiving app.
TouchGrass does not publish restricted posts to the public Bluesky network. ATProto Spaces is an upstream alpha for permissioned data, is explicitly unsuitable for production use and is not connected to TouchGrass. Bluesky's option to hide posts from algorithmic recommendations does not make them private. Direct messages are a separate feature, not a restricted-post bridge.
Account export and supported import formats are available, including resumable import recovery. Imports do not replay old posts to other networks by default. Protocol vaults and transfer workflows exist, but a move is not a promise that every post, contact, permission or plugin record will work identically at the destination. The target service and protocol determine what transfers.
Each account has a native Pod for files and RDF data, with containers, conditional writes and N3 or SPARQL data patches. Writable WAC rules support individual WebIDs and groups. Local HTTP tests passed for sign-in token exchange, DPoP authentication, data edits, refresh rotation and replay rejection using oauth4webapi 3.8.8 with Inrupt solid-client 3.0.0. Interactive consent still needs a manual check. Pod writes do not replace your TouchGrass posts or their audiences.
External Solid identities can be verified through issuer keys and the issuer trusted by their WebID, then receive access through WAC rules. This path has automated tests, but has not yet been checked end to end with an independent provider. Inrupt's authentication SDK 5.0.0 still uses older DPoP proofs that this server rejects; its data client works with current OAuth authentication. Full Solid conformance and universal app support are not claimed. WAC is supported, ACP is not; remote JSON-LD contexts are rejected and each resource is limited to 2 MiB.
TouchGrass exposes ActivityPub and Pod metadata, links external Pods through Solid-OIDC, and supports ActivityPods import/export and credential-dependent export copies. Its authenticated read proxy signs remote GET requests as your TouchGrass actor. It does not host the ActivityPods app framework. App registration and installation permissions, live notification services, a writable app proxy and a SPARQL query endpoint remain unimplemented. Connecting a Pod does not turn it into a second live database for TouchGrass.
Life and Playground plugins add tools such as Recipe Box, Walk, Trail, Workouts, Chore Wheel, Cards with Friends and Brainbusters. Availability depends on the instance and the plugins you enable. The Personal API gives authorized integrations scoped access to supported account and plugin data; it does not grant access outside those permissions.
The Solid checks used the standard Inrupt data client against the HTTP endpoint with temporary local test credentials. They covered storage and access rules, not an interactive sign-in to a third-party app. Bluesky's current upstream work is described in the ATProto Spaces alpha announcement and the content visibility declaration linked below.
