Wafrn FAQ / User Guide

Post formatting

On Wafrn we can format posts 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 you want the 3rd one somewhere in the middle of the post, simply write ![media-3] where you want it.

For custom emotes, you can check what emotes are available at Settings → Edit Profile → Available emotes [app.wafrn.net link], and insert them into posts like on Discord or Slack; I.e you can insert them by inputting the emote name starting with a : and it will offer autofill for the full emote.

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

Post Privacy Options

Wafrn supports different privacy options (or "levels") per-post. 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 (i.e a followers-only post being accessed by a fresh/new follower).

The following post privacy options are available as of writing:

• Public - Your post is available to everyone, whether they follow you or not, on and off wafrn (including Bluesky, if enabled)
• Unlisted - The post is available to everyone, but won't show on the explore timelines 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 users 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.

Bluesky only supports Public visibility posts. 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, 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, but cannot be made public.

Bluesky Integration

Wafrn has native Bluesky integration.

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

• Users from Bluesky don't need to opt-in to the bridge
• You get all replies from Bluesky users, even if they are not opted-in
• You can search for 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 in direct messages with the Bridgy bot to configure anything. Your profile and settings apply to both Fediverse and Bluesky interactions.

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 is 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 Bluesky URLs)
• Search for users by their username
• Search for tags (as indexed by wafrn)

You CANNOT:

• Scope your search to specific users (e.g from:me or from:@username@example.com)
• 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 I'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 apply custom CSS to their profile. This CSS will also be used as the default for the person that has it set on their profile across the website.

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...

1. What's the max upload size?
   the maximim upload size depends on the server and its capacity, however for app.wafrn.net it is 250mb.
2. 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.
3. What filetypes do we support?
   h264 MP4 videos, webp, most audio formats, 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.
4. Will we ever be able to upload multiple media at once?
   Yes, eventually.
5. Will we be able to paste media?
   Yes, also eventually.
6. 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 mentions-only post or ask in the Discord.

Common misc. feature requests

Can we (eventually) get...

I cannot stress this enough these will come eventually. Not soon, just When They're Ready™

• Post drafts? Yes
• Scheduled posts? Yes
• Rewoot privacy options? Yes...probably
• Tags per-user? Yes
• Following tags? Yes
• (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 GitHub.

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 differntiate ourselves in some ways for one reason or another; Some common questions relating to that are listed here.

• Why are reblogs rewoots different?
  Essentially, because we are not the only ones making fediverse software. It was a lot easier to adjust existing structures to a tumblr-inspired, but not straight up cloned workflow for the sake of not breaking compatibility with other Fediverse sites/servers.
• Can this ↑ be fixed?
  Maybe in the future, but as of right now, not really. We've made some adjustments to quotes so that they hopefully fit the usecase of reblogging on Tumblr a bit better, adding your content *after* the full content of another user.
• Why can we not interact (e.g rewoot, like, react) multiple times?
  Again, compatibility. Other sites REALLY do not like it when you do the same action multiple times. Mastodon for instance has bugged out in the past when there was multiple rewoots of the same post.

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 (on the main app.wafrn.net server).

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

• When using the Bluesky integration, we cannot prevent people from scraping Bluesky for your posts for any purpose. There is only public posts on Bluesky.
• We cannot really prevent people from scraping your public Wafrn posts and using them for whatever they want 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 do that, either. This is the reason we support posting only on 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 in france and the residence of @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 something queerphobic or even 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. Whilst it 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 more than closed platforms like Threads or X would.

We also make all our code public under the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3, or AGPLv3 for short. We do not use a CLA, so copyright belongs to those which originally wrote the code, not Wafrn or @gabboman.