---
title: External accounts
description: Link your blog, GitHub, ORCID, and other profiles to Sifa so the work you publish elsewhere shows up on your professional page. Auto-discovers RSS feeds.
---
Sifa's strength is your activity on the Atmosphere: what you post on [Bluesky](https://bsky.app), what you publish on [Leaflet](https://leaflet.pub), the repos you maintain on [Tangled](https://tangled.org). Most professionals also publish elsewhere though. A personal blog, a GitHub account, an [ORCID](https://orcid.org) 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:
| Platform | What Sifa does with it |
| ----------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| `rss` | Generic RSS / Atom feed. Items appear in your activity feed. |
| `website` | Your personal site. Sifa tries to auto-discover a feed from the page. |
| `substack` | [Substack](https://substack.com) newsletter. Auto-discovers the public RSS feed. |
| `fediverse` | [Mastodon](https://joinmastodon.org) / Pleroma / GoToSocial account. Auto-discovers the user feed. |
| `github` | GitHub account. Sifa runs an initial scan of your public repos. |
| `orcid` | ORCID academic profile. Sifa syncs your publications nightly. |
| `keyoxide` | [Keyoxide](https://keyoxide.org) identity verification profile. |
| `youtube` | YouTube channel. Link only. |
| `twitter` | Twitter / X handle. Link only. |
| `instagram` | Instagram profile. Link only. |
| `linkedin` | LinkedIn profile. Link only (importing your data instead is usually better, see [Import from LinkedIn](/docs/import-linkedin)). |
| `other` | Any other URL. Link only. |
"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. `` 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 `.substack.com/feed`, Mastodon at `/users/.atom`.
Once Sifa finds a feed, it polls daily and surfaces new items in your [Activity feed](/docs/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](/docs/activity-feed): where external-feed items show up alongside your Atmosphere activity.
- [Atom feeds](/docs/atom-feeds): Sifa publishes its own Atom feed of your activity, so other readers can subscribe the same way.
- [Your data on a provider](/docs/your-data-on-a-provider): what an external-account record looks like on your provider.