Getting started on TikTok

There is no password on PodSwap, for anyone, ever. You sign in with a magic link sent to your email, a login code for when you are moving between devices, or through Google, Apple, Facebook or LinkedIn. None of those gives PodSwap a credential — an identity is received, not a password.

One login runs every account you connect, on either platform, and you switch between them without signing out.

The wizard above is Instagram's, step for step, told which platform it is on. Only two steps are TikTok's: the handle lookup, which has its own rate limiter, and the verification handover at the end, which sends you into the TikTok comment exchange rather than Instagram's.

That is deliberate rather than lazy. TikTok used to have a three-screen wizard of its own — handle, confirm, paste a code into your bio — and a member who came through it arrived with no niches chosen, no video picked and no comments to give, which is to say unmatchable. Each of the eight steps feeds something downstream, and skipping them did not make onboarding shorter so much as make it not work.

The bio code is gone. If you verified under the old scheme there may still be one in your bio; it does nothing now and can be removed.

A newly connected account can give engagements immediately — that is how anyone tries the product — but cannot bank points until it is 14 days old and has 5 videos posted. Earning is what a throwaway-account farm is after, so earning is what is gated; giving is not.

From the first day the pacing rails apply: at most 40 engagements a day, comments capped at 15, and a gap of 45 to 210 seconds between actions. When a limit stops you, the app says which one and when it resets.

The useful thing to do in that fortnight is the comment exchange in earn mode: you start engaging straight away, your own video's queue grows as you go, and you have a set of comments to give from step seven. You also have a vote on which held exchange opens next, which you can move or withdraw at any time.

The comment room opens when 7 creators are ready at once — where ready means holding a seat in that room and having been active on PodSwap recently, not sitting on a waiting page. Everyone checked in when it opens is granted 4 comments at no cost in points.

Rooms are shut for most of the day on any platform, and on the newer one the wait is longer: a TikTok room needs the same headcount an Instagram one does, drawn from a smaller pool of connected accounts. That is why PowerSwap is deliberately not gated on rooms. It rotates the exchanges that have shipped, pays 6 actions per point instead of 7, and checks you into any room that opens while a session is running.

You delete your account and its data yourself, from inside the product, without emailing anyone. The one thing that blocks it is an open dispute, because somebody else is waiting on the outcome.