Accounta-Buddies

A pod is a small, invite-only crew: a shared weekly board, challenges, a private chat channel and an activity feed you can cheer each other on in. Anyone can start one and invite people into it.

You never have to decide up front how big a pod should be. Invites simply start switched on, and you turn them off once the pod feels right. A pod can hold up to a dozen buddies, which is a practical limit rather than a target.

Nothing about you is visible in a pod until you say so. You choose that separately for every pod you are in.

Starting or joining a pod

1. Open Coaching in the sidebar, then Accounta-Buddies and pick Start a pod.
2. Name it, give it a tagline, and design its crest: a shape, a colour and an emblem. That crest is how your pod shows up everywhere.
3. Choose the name you want to go by in that pod, then set what the pod can see about you.
4. Open Settings → Invites, create an invite link and send it however you like. Links last two weeks, can be single-use or cover several people, and you can withdraw one at any time.
5. When the pod is the right size, switch invites off on that same page.

Opening and closing the door

A pod owner can turn invites on or off at any time, in one tap. Turning them off closes the pod properly, not only can no new links be made, but every link already sent stops working immediately. That matters, because a link you shared in a group chat months ago should not still be a way in once you have decided the pod is complete.

Turning invites back on revives any links that have not expired or been used up. If you would rather a particular link never worked again, withdraw it individually instead.

Your privacy dial

For every kind of information (weigh-ins, progress, protein, workouts, streaks, injections, side effects, photos and more) you pick one of three settings, per pod:

• Never: invisible in that pod. You will not even be offered the option to share it there.
• When I say: kept off your pod profile and off the board. It only appears when you deliberately share one thing.
• Always: shown live on your pod profile and on the board, and notable changes post themselves to the feed.

Most things start on When I say. Your food diary, side effects, body measurements and progress photos all start on Never. Your companion, your streaks and your challenge scores start on Always, because none of them say anything about your body.

A different you in every pod

Your pod profile exists only inside that pod. You pick a separate screen name, face and bio for each one, so you can be open with a close pod and reserved in another, and the two need not look alike. There are no profiles anywhere else in Tirzing, and nobody can see a pod's members, or that a pod exists at all, unless they are in it.

The weekly check-in and the pod streak

Once a week you write one line: what you are going for. Everyone in the pod sees it, and at the end of the week you mark it hit or missed. Calling a miss honestly counts exactly the same as a win.

The pod streak counts consecutive weeks in which every member checked in. It is the group's streak, not yours, which is exactly why people write their line on a Sunday night. It is weekly rather than daily on purpose: one person's bad Tuesday should not torch everybody's month, and the week in progress never breaks it.

Challenges

Any member can start a challenge: a protein floor on five days out of seven, four workouts before the week is out, strength sessions, steps, water, or just showing up and logging something.

No challenge is ever scored on weight lost, and none ever will be. Ranking an accountability group on pounds punishes whoever is having the hardest month, rewards the least sustainable thing you could do, and shuts out anyone in maintenance. Challenges rank on turning up.

Anybody can start any challenge, and anybody can join in. If Tirzing already tracks that thing for you, say protein when you have the food diary, your score fills itself in from your logs: the card just says so, with a link to log. Nobody sits out their own pod's challenge over a plan feature.

If you do not have the feature, you log your days on the challenge card instead: enter the amount for a day, and it works out how many days you cleared the target on its own. You never count your own days. A self-reported day is marked as such on your card, and you can remove any day you logged.

The activity feed and cheers

Wins land in the pod feed, either because you shared them or because you set that kind of thing to Always. Look for the Share with a pod button around the app: it lists only the pods allowed to receive that kind of thing, and you can send to several at once.

Every item can be reacted to, replied to, or both. The + button adds an emoji reaction, and only reactions somebody has actually left are shown, so a busy post looks different from a quiet one. Reply opens a message box, and GIF next to it fires off a GIF on its own, from the same library as chat. You can also attach a GIF to a written reply.

You can retract anything you shared and remove any reply you wrote, and only you can: nobody else can quietly delete something you chose to say.

Your dashboard carries a Buddy activity card too: the newest handful of items from every pod you are in, merged into one list, newest first. It turns up only once a pod has something in it, so it never sits on your dashboard empty. When you are in more than one pod each row is labelled with the pod it came from. Tapping a row opens that item in its pod, which is where cheering and replying happen. Like any dashboard card you can drag it somewhere else, flip it between full and half width, or switch it off under Customize.

Sharing something set to "When I say"

The Share an update box on the pod board lists everything you are currently allowed to share, with your real figure on each one: your latest weigh-in, protein today, workouts this week, your streak, your last non-scale victory and so on. Tap Share on any of them.

Anything set to Never is not listed at all, and anything set to Always is greyed out because it posts itself anyway. There is also a plain text box for saying something that is not a number.

The campfire and pod chat

Your pod's companions gather in a strip along the top of the board. It shows a creature and a name, nothing about anybody's body, which is why it is on by default. You can opt out per pod like anything else.

Every pod also gets its own private chat channel with reactions, images, GIFs and mentions, and it is invisible to anyone outside the pod. In pod chat you appear under your pod name, and renaming yourself from inside pod chat changes your name in that pod only.

The Pod chat button on the board opens the docked chat panel on a desktop, so the board stays visible behind it, and the full-screen chat on a phone, where a docked panel is the wrong shape for a real conversation.

Nudges

When a buddy has not been around for a few days, a Nudge button appears next to them. One tap, no message to write, which is exactly why people send them. Somebody can only be nudged once a day no matter how many people tap it: being piled on the moment you have a rough week is the opposite of encouraging.