Making Your Timeline Yours
Your UDP Social timeline starts empty. That’s by design — nothing shows up until you choose what to put there. Here’s how to fill it with people and content you actually want to see.
Step 1: Invite the people you’re here for
The easiest way to connect with someone is to invite them directly. Head to the Contacts page (the
group-of-people icon in the toolbar, or /contact) and click “Send an invitation.” Enter their email
address, and they’ll get a message with everything they need to set up their own node — subdomain,
username, temporary password. Once they’re in, you’re connected.
This is the path for family and close friends. It feels like normal social media because it is —
you’re just skipping the part where a platform decides who else gets to be in the room.
Step 2: Connect to another UDP node
If someone you want to follow already has a UDP node, you don’t need to invite them — you need to
pair your nodes. Click “Node pairing” on the Contacts page. This links your node to theirs so
members of each can follow each other. It’s a slightly more intentional step, but it’s the right
model: you’re not just following a person, you’re connecting two communities.
Step 3: Follow anyone on the fediverse
The “Add new contact” field at the top of the Contacts sidebar does more than it looks like. Type a
fediverse handle — @someone@mastodon.social, for example — hit Connect, and you’ll follow that
person’s public posts directly in your timeline. They don’t need a UDP account. They don’t need to
know you exist. If they’re on any fediverse platform (Mastodon, Friendica, Pixelfed, dozens of
others), they’re reachable.
This is genuinely powerful once you realize the scope of it.
Bonus: RSS feeds
Here’s the part that might change how you use the internet: that same “Add new contact” field
accepts RSS feed URLs. Paste in a feed address, hit Connect, and the blog or comic or newsletter
starts showing up in your timeline like any other post.
A few feeds worth trying if you want to see how it works: XKCD (https://xkcd.com/rss.xml), Saturday
Morning Breakfast Cereal, Dinosaur Comics, Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic. Fair warning — if a feed has
a long backlog, your timeline will get lively for a little while as it catches up.
The appeal isn’t just convenience. It’s that your timeline becomes a single place for people and
content you’ve chosen — no algorithm deciding what’s relevant, no ad-supported publication trying to
keep you clicking. Just the things you actually wanted to read.
Organizing with Circles
Once you’ve added a few contacts, circles let you decide when you see them — not just whether you
see them. A circle is a named group of contacts whose posts you can browse separately from your main
timeline.
To create one: on your timeline, find the Circles section in the left sidebar and click the pencil
(edit) icon. That takes you to your circles manager. Hit the plus icon, type a name when the field
appears, and you’re done. Then add contacts to it from their profile or from the circle editor.
The practical payoff: put your RSS comics feeds — XKCD, Dinosaur Comics, SMBC are my own favorites — into a circle called
“Comics” or whatever suits you. They vanish from your main timeline and wait patiently in their own
tab until you’re ready for them. No noise, no missing them, no algorithm deciding you’ve seen
enough webcomics today.
Circles work for people too, not just feeds. A “Family” circle, a “Work” circle, a “People I find
interesting but post a lot” circle — the organizational logic is yours.
(A more detailed guide to circles and how to use them for privacy and reach is coming separately.)