AT friends #4 & #5: @gabboman.at.app.wafrn.net and @djara.dev of Wafrn

@gabboman.at.app.wafrn.net (center) and @djara.dev (left) are part of the team making Wafrn , a federated social media inspired by Tumblr that connects with both the Fediverse and Bluesky.

@latenthomer.com: What would Wafrn be without Activity Pub, without AT Proto, or without either of those. Could it even exist without Activity Pub?

@gabboman: Wafrn was its own software, it was a low-quality Tumblr clone. It was a desert, it was empty. I think I had at that point less than 500 users of which active were a few a day.

@djara.dev: I think less. The Fediverse integration came really early.

@gabboman: When Elon Musk said he was going to buy twitter I joined the Fediverse. I joined a Spanish server that had a lot of drama, I left, I forgot about it and then a few months later I joined another server, the one that the person who made Linux for the M-series macs made, Marcan42, that was a very cool one and I thought maybe it's worth it to look into this.

And I also saw a post from the tumblr CEO saying, "I am going to connect Tumblr to the Fediverse."

It's been three years.

So then you did it.

@gabboman: I did it in a few months. Actually, I was waiting for it a few months, Juan was also waiting waiting too, and we thought okay [we'll do it] but, how?

And It was a little bit mind-bending to get started with the protocol because the way the I've done the Activity Pub and Bluesky integration are very different.

Activity Pub I basically did it fully native. The actual breakthrough came when I realized you can actually force a mastodon server to make a query to your server, and you can log that, and then you can query the mastodon server, and I started mimicking mastodon.

@djara.dev: To put it shortly, we didn't know how to do it or where to start so we just started anywhere and continued from there.

@gabboman: But for ATProto, I am going to be honest I didn't trust too much the Bluesky corporation, some people will say that the great moderation misses of the last month was proof of it, I will say that they–jokingly we called our software Waffle, and now I cannot call it that because it's a reference to an incident .

But I thought okay this is a complex protocol, I am not ready, I was really busy at work I cannot do again what I did with Activity Pub, what's a different way? And I talked with @snarfed.org , the person from Bridgy Fed, and I said okay what if I actually kinda do it, like, I have a PDS, and I have Wafrn and Wafrn talks to the PDS.

So you're using @snarfed.org, his bridge?

@gabboman: No, no, no. He helped me with the idea of the architecture, and he called it Sidecar architecture. There may have been other Fedi software that may have been trying to do that, but the idea was what if we have an existing PDS, and then sending posts to Bluesky was super simple, I just send posts the PDS and then–magic!

To get the posts, I basically listen to the firehose and we filter and I have to do a lot of stuff to make that efficient because I get a lot of posts and then I have to quickly decide, okay, this post–the person who made this post, is this someone who anyone in Wafrn is following? No? Does this post have a hashtag that anyone is Wafrn is following? No? Is this post a reply to a post that we want, or a reply to a post of someone we are following?

Wow, that's a lot of branching logic.

The first thing I heard about Wafrn from @snarfed was, he said it was popular with furries. And I'm not familiar with furry culture but then when I just lurked without an account I would not have guessed that, it just looked like Tumblr. So is what Ryan said accurate?

@djara.dev: Take this with a grain of salt, but most of the user base of Wafrn is marginalized communities and those communities are using Wafrn as a safe space. Furries are one of those communities but not the only one.

@gabboman: We have a very diverse community, which I think is good. The community is very varied compared to other social networks, and that [also] comes from the Fedi, the Fediverse is popular with Furries. I am only half-joking when I say this: we don't have enough furries.

Wafrn, you've got according to this , you've got 4606 users, and 845 monthly active users. I grew up in a small town of 2,000, so I wonder what does Wafrn feel like to be there and be active there, do you feel you are interacting with everyone or just your followers? Does it feel like you know everyone?

@gabboman: I don't think I use Wafrn as an end user, I mostly use the explore local webpage , because I know that the people that join Wafrn usually follow cool people and they reward cool things and stuff, and I'm also there [for] moderation.

@djara.dev: To give you a little bit of context in our main application we have three feeds. We have the normal feed, the people you are following, then we have the local feed, and then we have what we call the bubble feed, also called "Wafrn & friends", a timeline with posts from friendly servers picked by us.

So your standard feed, people you are following, that's like your standard average microblogging experience. But the local feed is something very cool too because I see and read and interact with the Wafrn people on my local server without having to follow them explicitly, being in the local feed feels very much like home, like a small family because oh it's this person, active on Wafrn they are posting about this cool thing they are building and I can, like, oh let's add a little reaction emoji there, oh, that's very nice!

Having this couple of feeds that you can interact with different experiences makes Wafrn a little bit richer than the standard experience I feel.

And that's all my questions, anything else you wanted to say or highlight?

@djara.dev: I just wanted to highlight that in the last year or so of Wafrn, it's not just Gabbo and me, we are a team of five, six– there was this guy from eastern Europe, @sztupy and he did an amazing job helping us with the database, also fire and alexia and other people form the team have been helping greatly, greatly with UX, with design. A feature that just went viral on Bluesky was done by a guy campos , jbc did the bluesky part. We did a lexicon for bites that neither Gabbo nor me were involved with.

There was a a time when it was just the two of us, and there was a time when it was just only Gabbo. But it's been a long time since that.

Gabbo and me are friends from college. There was one day we went to the beach and he showed me his app and I said, "Oh my god that's so ugly I need to fix that." So that's the thing that got us here, and now we are like six, five a very vibrant community and I'm super grateful that all these amazing people are helping Wafrn become what is right now. We couldn't have done it without them.

Lightning Round

You have a magic wand, you can bring back one deprecated social app or feature that doesn't exist anymore from the history of the internet, what do you bring back?

@gabboman: 2015 Tumblr.

@djara.dev: Tuenti . Tuenti was a spanish social network that was kind of a mix between facebook but had some concept of twitter, of tumblr. It died a premature death.

Name a historical figure who would have been great on Wafrn.

@djara.dev: Terry Pratchett, the writer.

@gabboman: Alexander Hamilton just because of the musical.

It's 9:30 in the morning you get a call from an unknown number, do you pick up?

@gabboman: No.

@djara.net: No. If my Google recognition says it is spam, definitely no. If not, maybe I will consider.

Name one thing that's easier about running a mastodon instance than people think and one thing that's harder than people think.

@djara: Mastodon from a dev-ops perspective is way simpler than ATProto. There is only one server that talks to another server, that's it. But that does not scale very good.

@gabboman: The thing that is actually harder than people think is, oh no I actually have a server with more services, and funnily enough everyone who wants to host Wafrn has a server that already has stuff on it.

If you have a clean server for it, it's extremely super easy.

How many monitors at your set up, right now.

@gabboman: One, the laptop, I have my M1 monitor and that's what I use usually.

@djara.dev: I have also an M1 MacBook and then I have a monitor here, but the Mac has just duplicated the screen so just one.

Your docs mention "The closest thing we use to "AI" is my toaster in the kitchen." Who's toaster?

@djara.dev: It's Gabbo's toaster.

What kind of toaster is it, is it conventional–you put the toast down–or is it like an oven?

@gabboman: Let me see if I can...one second.

@djara.dev: Yeah yeah, go get it.

That's the toaster! That is the toaster from the docs, oh thank you Gabbo! It's just a regular toaster, that answers my question. And then, what was the first post on the network?

@gabboman: Yeah it was a small post basically saying hello, welcome, this is a little bit how it works. It had a video link to an album by jazzwave .