External accounts

Sifa's strength is your activity on the Atmosphere: what you post on Bluesky, what you publish on Leaflet, the repos you maintain on Tangled. Most professionals also publish elsewhere though. A personal blog, a GitHub account, an ORCID profile for academic work, a Mastodon presence.

External accounts let you add those to your Sifa profile. Sifa stores the link, sometimes discovers an RSS feed automatically, and renders the externally published work alongside your Atmosphere activity.

What you can link

Sifa supports these platforms today:

"Link only" means Sifa shows the URL on your profile but doesn't poll it for activity.

How to add one

In Sifa, open your profile and go to External accounts. Add an account with:

• Platform: pick from the list above.
• URL: the canonical address of the account or feed.
• Label (optional): a custom display name. Sifa uses the platform's default if you leave it blank.
• Feed URL (optional): if Sifa can't auto-discover the RSS or Atom feed, paste it here. Most of the time you can leave it blank.

Save. Sifa writes an id.sifa.profile.externalAccount record to your provider. The record is owned by you, lives on your provider, and is readable by any other app that reads id.sifa.* lexicons.

How feed discovery works

When you add a website, substack, fediverse, or rss account without specifying feedUrl, Sifa fetches the URL and looks for a feed. The discovery follows the standard auto-discovery rules:

1. <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml"> or application/rss+xml in the page head.
2. Well-known feed paths (/feed, /feed.xml, /atom.xml, /rss.xml).
3. Platform-specific rules. Substack always lives at <subdomain>.substack.com/feed, Mastodon at <server>/users/<handle>.atom.

Once Sifa finds a feed, it polls daily and surfaces new items in your Activity feed. The feed URL is stored alongside the account so subsequent polls go directly to it without re-discovery.

ORCID: academic publications

Add an ORCID account and Sifa pulls your publications from the ORCID API on a daily sync. Each publication becomes an id.sifa.profile.publication record on your provider, so your publications are now portable Atmosphere records, not a list locked inside ORCID.

Sifa accepts both the full URL (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-0097) and the bare ID (0000-0002-1825-0097). The input is normalised before validation.

GitHub: initial repo scan

Add a GitHub account and Sifa runs an initial scan of your public repositories and contributions. The scan is one-shot. Subsequent updates flow through the GitHub firehose / public events stream where available, or through periodic re-scans.

Verification

For some platforms (the ones the protocol can verify, like GitHub and ORCID) Sifa tries to confirm that the account you added is actually yours by checking for a back-link or a specific identifier. Verified accounts show a small checkmark on your profile. Un-verified accounts work the same way for content. The verification badge is informational.

Removing or editing an external account

In Sifa's profile editor, you can edit the URL, change the label, or delete the account. Deleting it removes the id.sifa.profile.externalAccount record from your provider and removes the surfaced items from your activity feed.

Records on the external service itself (your blog posts, your GitHub repos) are untouched. Sifa only manages the link record on your provider.

Want to go deeper

• Activity feed: where external-feed items show up alongside your Atmosphere activity.
• Atom feeds: Sifa publishes its own Atom feed of your activity, so other readers can subscribe the same way.
• Your data on a provider: what an external-account record looks like on your provider.