Wafrn FAQ / User Guide

Welcome to the Wafrn user guide and FAQ! This is where we well, put frequent questions that get asked by users, and where they are answered.

This FAQ page primarily goes over the webapp. In the future we may add a page for Mobile-App specific questions and instructions

I am new what do I do?

First of all, do you also want to post to bluesky? You may want to visit your 'edit profile' page and enable it.

Second, a first post with the tag introduction will help your account get some reach!

Post formatting

On Wafrn we can format post with a mix of Markdown and HTML.

The allowed tags are (at the time of writing) as follows: b, i, u, a, s, del, span, br, p, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, pre, strong, em, ul, li, marquee, font, blockquote, code, hr, ol, q, small, sub, sup, table, tr, td, th, cite.

Additionally, most of CommonMark is supported. So for basic things like paragraphs, quotes, bold, italic, lists etc you do not need to write raw HTML.

There is ONE wafrn-specific markup: ![media-{number}]. By inputting it in this format, replacing {number} with a digit, you can have inline media. If you have 4 pictures and want the 3rd one somewhere in the middle of your post, simply write ![media-3] where you want it.

For custom emotes, you can check what emotes are available using the button above the composer. You can insert them from there. We also have Discord-like autofill so that you can start typing :neocat_... and have it autofill.

Not all of these tags work on the Mobile app by @javascript yet.

Description of the images or videos?

Yes! We take accessibility seriously. If you have doubts you can check this guide, but basically imagine you are explaining a visually impaired friend what is in the image, even if it's as short as "a meme of some shapes in which you realize it's loss".

Post Privacy Options

Wafrn supports different post privacy options (or privacy "levels"). This allows you to restrict who can or cannot see a given post.

It's retroactive, so if a user that previously didn't meet the criteria now does, they will get access. This includes i.e a fresh follower getting access to your old followers-only posts.

The following post privacy options are available as of writing:

• Public - Your post is available to everyone, whether they follow you or not, off and on wafrn (including Bluesky, if enabled)
• Unlisted - The post is available to everyone, but won't show up on the explore timelines, tags, or in other discovery features.
• This Instance Only - This post is available to everyone as long as they are browsing on the same site, i.e app.wafrn.net but not outside users.
• Followers-Only - This post is only visible to your followers. This is particularly useful when manually approving follow requests.
• Direct Message - This post can only be seen by those who are mentioned / Pinged in it. If you add someone later by pinging them, they are added to the thread and can see any new messages from that point on. This is not End-To-End-Encrypted. We could read anything you say here if we wanted to.

Bluesky only supports public visibility. Anything that isn't public won't go to Bluesky. This only applies if you have opted-in to Bluesky.

If you reply to, or quote, a post then Wafrn will automatically use the same privacy option by default. You cannot make your reply less private than who you're replying to or quoting.

I.e if you quote a followers-only post, your post will be set to followers-only too. If you quote an unlisted post, it must be unlisted or 'more' private.

Bluesky Integration

Wafrn has native Bluesky Integration.

Other Fediverse software has to rely on Bridgy to interact with Bluesky. Wafrn's native suppot means that we have major advantages over Bridgy:

• Users from Bluesky don't need to opt-in to a bridge.
• You get all replies ffrom Bluesky users, even if they never opted-in to a bridge.
• You can search all Bluesky users directly.
• All bluesky-native post interactions work (replying, liking, boosting etc)
• You do not have to trust Bridgy to keep your bridged account safe. Your wafrn server does that for you.
  (if you trust your wafrn server already, you won't have to also trust bridgy.)
• You do not have to go back and forth with the Bridgy bot to configure anything. Your profile and settings apply to both Fediverse and Bluesky interactions.

To reiterate, Bluesky only supports public content. so if you use any Post Privacy Level other than "public" your post(s) won't go to Bluesky.

the app.wafrn.net server has Bluesky integration available, but other servers might not. If you are on a different server, please ask your administrator if Bluesky integration is configured correctly.

Tags and Search

Wafrn offers a very basic search feature. Whilst it's still heavily WIP, here is what is/isn't possible with it so far:

YOU CAN:

• Search for posts by their URL (Wafrn, Fedi and Bsky)
• Search for users by their username
• Search for tags
• Filter your search by a specific user

YOU CANNOT:

• Do Full-Text search
• Search by criteria like having media, polls or other attachments
• Search for a specific timeframe (i.e since: or from: ... to:)
• Search by content-warning

All we'll say is that right now, even Tumblr beats us in search. But we're hoping to surpass them eventually.

Theming with CSS

On Wafrn, users can also apply custom CSS to their profile. This CSS will also be used as the default across the entire site for the user that set it.

We generally do not restrict what you can do in the CSS, go wild. If you know CSS you can do whatever the hell you want like what @sneexy did for the "Rizzler" theme, but this guide may be useful to get started.

The mobile app currently, and for the forseeable future, does not support custom themes through CSS. The codebases are simply too different, and we will need to think of a more robust system in the future to make theming cross-platform to some extent.

Media on Wafrn

There are some open questions about media, so...

• What's the max upload size?
  The maximum upload size depends on the server and its capacity, however for app.wafrn.net it's 250mb.
• How many pieces of media can be uploaded?
  However many you want, but it will warn you that as of right now Mastodon users can only see the first 4. This limit also applies to Bluesky.
• What filetypes do we support?
  h264 MP4 Videos, webp, most audio formats and PDF. Other Video and Image formats will get converted to webp or h264 MP4 automatically. Videos will get downscaled if they aren't h264 to save on processing resources.
• Will we ever be able to upload multiple pieces of media at once?
  Yes, eventually.
• Will we be able to paste media?
  Yes, also eventually.
• Can we add our own custom emoji?
  No, these are added by administrators to prevent abuse. If you do want some custom emoji added, you can send it to @gabboman or @alexia either in a 'Direct Message' post or ask in the Discord.

Common misc. feature requests

All the things below, and I cannot stress this enough, might become a thing eventually.

• Post drafts? Yes
• Scheduled posts? Yes
• Rewoot privacy options? Yes...probably
• Per-user tag search? DONE! Just need to have "featured" tags on the profile :)
• (More) Customizable Word/Tag mutes? Definitely on the wishlist.
• oAuth2? Someone just rewrote our entire login service at 23:47, maybe lol
• Pinned posts? Yes, almost certainly, at some point
• Flash/SWF support? Maybe? I mean we have doom

This list is non-exhaustive, sort of a semi joke, and actual feature requests should go on Codeberg.

That said, everything that has "Yes" and nothing else is actually confirmed to come eventually.

on the "tumblr-isms" in Wafrn

Whilst we're quite similar to tumblr, we do differentiate ourselves in some ways for one reason or another; Some common questions relating to that are listed here.

• Why are reblogs rewoots different?
  Essentially, we do not see the need to replicate them one-to-one, but it also causes us lots of technical troubles trying to interact with platforms that aren't Wafrn. Rewoots with tags are effectively replies with just tags in them, which replicate the UI almost completely. We as such just didn't see the need to try and hack something together hoping it works in tandem with Bluesky and Fedi.
• Why can we not interact (e.g rewoot, like, react) multiple times?
  Again, this is for compatibility's sake. Neither Bluesky nor most other Fediverse software likes it when you simply repeat an action. As such we follow norms and require the user to un-do their action first.

How does Wafrn respect its users, anyway?

The slogan is somewhat of a placeholder, but we believe that the software and community we are building are to respect the user in their choices, their being and their consent. The name is a joke based on a 2018 Tumblr policy banning "female representing nipples", so our whole shtick is that We Allow Female Representing Nipples.

We also do not sell data, nor do we make it available for training on Ai to anyone.

That said, whilst we make an effort to just not be pricks to our users (unlike i.e Tumblr moderation), and to respect consent every step of the way (i.e making things like Bluesky 100% opt-in), there are some things we cannot adequately protect users from. Namely:

• When using Bluesky integration, we cannot prevent people from scraping Bluesky for your posts for any purpose. There is only public posts and data on Bluesky.
• We cannot prevent people from scraping your public Wafrn posts and using them for whatever they want, including training AI or archiving them.
• We cannot prevent someone from screenshotting DMs with you, or followers-only or otherwise private posts.
• We cannot prevent other servers from storing your posts even when you've deleted them. We can't know when they try to do that, either. This is the reason we support posting only to the current server.

This also means that, for public posts, we cannot adequately prevent them from being scraped by AI companies. We don't give them access to that nor do we get reimbursed for it, they just take without consent and without giving anything back.

With the server being in france and @gabboman in spain, we also have to adhere to their laws to some extent. We will of course resist where we can, but we do not have the technical means nor tons of money to fight shit in court.

↑ I swear if they want us to do anything queerphobic or vaguely adjacent I will explode
- @alexia

The closest thing we use to "AI" is my toaster in the kitchen. Seriously, we do not use it ourselves for anything nor do we accept contributions that involve AI generated artwork, code or text.

Another way in which we feel we demonstrate respect towards the user is by building on the open [ActivityPub Protocol] and its various extensions by the community.

Whilst the protocol is far from perfect and we would really need more robust tools and standards in and around ActivityPub for data portability, it respects the user much more than closed platforms like Threads or X would.

We also make all our code public under the AGPLv3 License. We do not use a Contributor License Agreement, so copyright belongs to those which originally wrote the code, not Wafrn or @gabboman.