Touchgrass-en

Touchgrass-en ·Oct 6, 2026

Digital minimalism can leave room for your friends

Wanting less social media does not mean wanting less of your friends. You may still care about their photographs, their news and the book they think you'd enjoy. The part you want to reduce is the time spent checking for something else after you've caught up.

Digital minimalism is useful when it helps you decide what a tool is for and how much of your day it deserves. Keeping in touch is a clear purpose. A social app should be able to serve that purpose without turning every available minute into another opportunity to open it.

TouchGrass is designed around that expectation. Your feed follow

Touchgrass-en ·Sep 29, 2026

A different reason to choose an Instagram or Facebook alternative

Looking for an Instagram or Facebook alternative often starts with something quite specific: you still want to see your friends' photographs and hear their news, but you want social media to occupy a smaller part of your day. A change of logo would do little for that wish.

TouchGrass is built around people you know and care about. You can share photographs, write, make recommendations and choose between public, friends and circles audiences. Profiles give those things a place beyond their brief appearance in a feed.

The decisions around that experience matter as much as the features. TouchGr

Touchgrass-en ·Sep 22, 2026

A social network can start with one real friend

One friend is enough for a social network to do something useful. You can share photographs from a day together, pass on a book recommendation or keep a conversation going between visits. None of those things becomes more meaningful because a hundred strangers are also watching.

A new account can feel empty if the measure of success is how quickly its feed becomes busy. We think the better question is whether there is someone you would like to hear from and something worth sharing with them. A small beginning gives you a chance to find that out.

On TouchGrass, you can start with a profile, c

Touchgrass-en ·Sep 15, 2026

ActivityPods and a social life that can span apps

Trying a new social app should let you build on the posts and relationships you already have. Starting with an empty profile and finding everyone again makes experimenting expensive. It asks people to reconstruct a social life just to find out whether a different tool suits them.

ActivityPods brings personal data storage and social networking together. It is a framework for building ActivityPub-compatible apps around data held in a person's Pod. That gives developers a way to work with shared social data while offering different experiences around it.

The useful idea is that an app can becom

Touchgrass-en ·Sep 8, 2026

Solid Pods and choosing where your data lives

The app you enjoy using today may not be the one you want in five years. If it is also the only useful way to reach your stored information, changing apps becomes a much larger decision. Choosing where your data lives can give you another kind of control.

A Solid Pod is a personal online data store. Apps request permission to use data there, which separates the place holding the information from the particular app presenting it. You can think about the two choices independently: where to keep your material, and which tool you want to use with it.

That changes what an app ought to compete on.

Touchgrass-en ·Sep 1, 2026

An account export should be useful after you leave

An account export earns its name when you can use what you receive. A download button is only the beginning. If you want a photograph from a trip or a piece you wrote years ago, you should be able to find it and understand what you have.

TouchGrass's account export lets you request a copy of your data, with choices about what to include. Writing, profile information and media have different uses once they leave the app. The point of the export is to give you something you can keep and work with on your own terms.

Imagine leaving a service and returning to that copy a year later. You may want

Touchgrass-en ·Aug 25, 2026

You should be free to leave TouchGrass too

Independence from Big Tech should include making it practical to leave TouchGrass itself. A smaller service can still become difficult to leave. Size alone says little about whether people have a useful choice.

An account gathers things that matter: writing, photographs, recommendations and relationships. As that history grows, the effort of moving can become a reason to stay. We think a social network has a responsibility to reduce that dependence, including when its users are perfectly happy today.

TouchGrass provides account exports and connections through the open social web. Those are p

Touchgrass-en ·Aug 18, 2026

Keeping up with friends on Mastodon and Bluesky

One friend uses Mastodon, another uses Bluesky, and you would like to keep up with both. That is an ordinary social wish. Connecting the services should be work for the software, so friendship doesn't require everyone to agree on an app first.

Mastodon is part of the Fediverse and uses ActivityPub to exchange posts and replies with other services. Bluesky uses ATProto, the protocol behind the Atmosphere. They are different technical systems, each giving developers a way to build social experiences beyond one website.

TouchGrass works with both. You can follow a Mastodon address through its A

Touchgrass-en ·Aug 11, 2026

Bluesky, ATProto and the freedom to choose an app

Your identity and history should be able to outlast your enthusiasm for a particular app. Over time, an account holds writing, connections and a name people recognise. Choosing a different interface should not mean starting that life again.

ATProto, the open protocol used by Bluesky, separates account identity and data hosting from the apps that use them. The Atmosphere is the wider ecosystem built around it. That distinction matters: Bluesky is one familiar way to take part in something that can support other apps and services.

On TouchGrass, you can link a Bluesky account to bring in posts

Touchgrass-en ·Aug 4, 2026

How ActivityPub connects TouchGrass and Mastodon

A social network should earn your time by being useful. If choosing another service means losing touch with your friends, that choice comes with a cost the service can benefit from. We think people should be able to choose differently and keep talking.

ActivityPub makes that possible between TouchGrass and Mastodon. It is an open standard for exchanging posts, follows and replies. Like email between different providers, it lets independently run services communicate. Those connected social services form part of the fediverse.

You can follow a friend using their Mastodon address, read their p