Graph discovery

Every other read answers one question about one object. x discover chains them: it starts at a tweet or a user and follows that object's links outward, hop by hop, streaming every node it reaches. It is a breadth-first walk of the X graph.

x discover 1234567890        # what is this tweet linked to?
x discover nasa              # what is this account linked to?

A seed is any tweet or user reference: a tweet id or status URL, or a handle or profile URL. Pass more than one to start the walk from several places at once.

What gets followed

The default follows a post's content and stays entirely on Tier 0, so it works with no token: the author, the tweet it quotes or retweets, its reply parent, the accounts it mentions, and (for a user) their pinned tweet.

Choose what to follow with --follow. It takes a preset:

x discover <ref> --follow content      # author, quote, retweet, reply, mention, pinned (default)
x discover <ref> --follow thread       # author, reply, replies, quote
x discover <ref> --follow engagement   # liker, retweeter, quotedby
x discover <user> --follow network     # following, followers
x discover <user> --follow timeline    # timeline, pinned, author
x discover <ref> --follow all          # everything

or a comma-separated list of individual edges:

x discover <ref> --follow author,quote,mention
x discover <ref> --follow replies,liker

The full edge vocabulary:

Edge	From → to	Tier	What it follows
author	tweet → user	0	who wrote the tweet
quote	tweet → tweet	0	the tweet it quotes
retweet	tweet → tweet	0	the original it retweets
reply	tweet → tweet	0	the tweet it replies to
mention	tweet → user	0	accounts it @-mentions
pinned	user → tweet	0	the account's pinned tweet
timeline	user → tweet	0	the account's recent tweets
replies	tweet → tweet	guest/session	the replies under it
liker	tweet → user	guest/session	accounts that liked it
retweeter	tweet → user	guest/session	accounts that retweeted it
quotedby	tweet → tweet	guest/session	tweets that quote it
following	user → user	guest/session	accounts it follows
followers	user → user	guest/session	accounts that follow it
likes	user → tweet	guest/session	tweets it liked

The Tier-0 edges work with nothing. The rest read the GraphQL surface, so they need --guest or your own session (x auth import). When you ask for an edge you have no tier for, x discover drops it with a one-line note on stderr and keeps going on what it can reach, rather than failing the whole walk. The one exception is when every edge you asked for needs a tier: then there is nothing to do and it exits 4 with the tier to add.

How far and how wide

x discover <ref> --depth 2            # follow two hops from the seed (default 1)
x discover <ref> --fanout 50          # up to 50 neighbors per edge (default 25)
x discover <ref> --fanout 0           # no per-edge cap
x discover <ref> -n 1000              # stop after 1000 nodes total (default 500)

--depth is how many hops to follow. --fanout caps how many neighbors each edge contributes per node, so one hop never pages a whole follower graph unless you raise it. -n/--limit is the total node budget, the hard stop on a deep or wide walk.

Reading the output

x discover streams one row per node, tagged with how it was reached:

depth  via      kind   id   who     summary                   url
0               tweet  20   @jack   just setting up my twttr  https://x.com/jack/status/20
1      author   user   12   @jack   jack                      https://x.com/jack

Because it streams through the same formatter as every read, it shapes and pipes the same way. The JSON forms carry the full node, with the nested tweet or user:

x discover <ref> -o json | jq -r '.via + " -> " + (.tweet.id // .user.username)'
x discover <user> --follow network --guest -o jsonl | jq -r '.user.username' | sort -u
x discover <ref> --fields depth,via,who,url -o table

Persisting a walk

Add --store to write every node and edge into the local store as the walk streams, so you keep the graph as well as see it:

x discover nasa --follow network --depth 2 --guest --store
x db query "select kind, count(*) from edges group by 1 order by 2 desc"

When you want the dataset rather than the live answer, reach for x crawl, which is the same walk pointed at the store instead of stdout. See the local store for inspecting and exporting what you collect.