While Tumblr is said to be coming to the Fediverse sometime after its backend transition to WordPress, I wanted to take a moment to steer attention towards a home-grown effort largely inspired by Tumblr. Wafrn (pronounced “wah fern”) is an open source platform that seems to focus on a lesson that other social platforms seem to forget about: BEING FUN.

This project takes a bunch of inspiration from existing social networks, does a few crazy things on the side, and incorporates some legitimately impressive ideas to create something new.

The Social Experience

Right off the bat, Wafrn instantly feels different from Mastodon, Friendica, or even the many offshoots of Misskey. It incorporates ideas from all of these things, but also brings a bunch of fresh ideas to the table.

Themes

Wafrn prides itself in allowing for user customization. There are a series of community-made themes readily available on the flagship instance, and it’s possible to inject your own custom CSS both on your dashboard as well as your personal profile.

There’s a world of opportunity here, especially as users continue to explore recreating their favorite visual styles from other apps and networks. During my initial testing of Wafrn, I actually ended up writing a Cohost-style theme, and submitted it to the project’s official repository.

Creating Posts

Wafrn’s post editor is pretty bog-standard, but does a decent job at showing you exactly what your posts are going to look like. For those with Bluesky integration turned on, you’ll also see a character limit prompt, ensuring that your posts don’t run over the limit.

One thing worth mentioning here is that woots support rich formatting through a combination of HTML, Markdown, and CSS attributes. While Wafrn doesn’t yet support Misskey-Flavored Markdown, the community is still able to create absolute gems like the following:

Feeds

For the time being, Wafrn supports three different user feeds: the Dashboard, Explore Wafrn, and Wafrn & Friends. These all incorporate subtle differences, so I’ll try my best to explain them. With the platform supporting Bluesky and the AT Protocol, my hope is that we might one day see support for Bluesky’s Custom Feeds, which would be amazing for discovery.

The Dashboard

The user Dashboard is strictly a no-frills timeline that focuses on who you’re following, and what they’re boosting or posting. You can see comments and reactions from mutuals on posts (called “woots”), and it’s all clean and easy to use.

Explore Wafrn

The Explore Wafrn timeline appears to solely focus on posts created or boosted by local Wafrn accounts, and includes a fair amount of people that you do not directly follow.

Wafrn & Friends

The Wafrn & Friends timeline ultimately combines the Explore Wafrn feed with posts from friendly servers that the Wafrn instance is also connected to. Here, you can find all kinds of stuff from the rest of the Fediverse: Mastodon, Friendica, Misskey, Bluesky, PeerTube, and even WordPress all managed to show up!

Asks

One super-underrated feature carried over from Tumblr is Asks, a Question-and-Answer feature for the Inbox that allows people to publicly answer questions. What’s really cool about this is that any Fediverse account can ask a question using special formatting. To do this, just append a Private post with the following:

!ask @username@instance.tld YOUR QUESTION HERE

As a result, questions appear in a special tab like so:

If you choose to answer the prompt, the question and your response show up as a special post on the timelines.

The nice thing here is that this feature is 100% opt-in, and you can even choose whether to only allow Asks from mutual connections, or also open it up to anonymous people. It’s definitely something I’ve missed from using Tumblr, and I would love to use it more.

Bites

One of the most recent feature additions in Wafrn are “Bites”, which are basically pokes, but more furry-themed. Users can bite other users as well as posts, and cute little notifications get created in response.

It’s a small, silly feature, but it’s one more indication of how the community likes to have fun on the platform.

Bluesky Integration

One of the most impressive parts of Wafrn is the fact that it implements the AT Protocol from scratch, and can natively connect to Bluesky. This isn’t a protocol bridge, so much as it’s a native implementation that connects a Fediverse platform with Bluesky and its wider network.

Support is still experimental and limited, but most posts and profiles translate remarkably well with the default Bluesky app. Direct Messages between Bluesky and Wafrn don’t work yet, and some of the wider features of AT Proto (custom feeds, moderation, labelers, and other integrations) aren’t supported yet. Still, it’s an impressive feat, and day-to-day social usage works pretty great.

As an aside, Wafrn also offers the ability to fully migrate from Bluesky onto Wafrn itself, all while preserving posts, friends, and followers. Pretty cool!

Super Secret Menu

For some time now, Wafrn has sported an extra-special, super-secret menu. Inside of it is an embedded WASM build of DosBox, running a copy of Doom. When I first discovered this, I was utterly speechless. It runs great, and completely works.

The Community

I still have no idea what the acronym WAFRN stands for. My best guess is “We Are Friends Right Now”, but I keep getting different answers, and can’t be sure if any of them are serious. Wafrn’s creator, Gabboman, suggested that this is a reference to Tumblr’s 2018 porn ban, with the acronym standing for “We Allow Female Presenting Nipples”. However, alternative suggestions include “What Asshole Fucking wRote Name”, and “We All Fuck Real Northerners”. The lack of consensus only makes Wafrn more fun.

Other Wafrnisms within the community are as follows: Mastodon’s toots are now woots, Wafrn users are unofficially called waffles, and there’s some absolutely wild custom themes available.

Wafrn’s community is funny. Really funny. Within the first five minutes of browsing the site, I hit a dozen or so hysterical shitposts from people trying to act completely unhinged. There’s a healthy overlap between Wafrn’s local users, and playful posters from Misskey, Akkoma, Bluesky, and the funnier parts of Mastodon. The overall impression is very reminiscent of Tumblr’s “Yes And” culture, and it’s well-curated.

As a final golden touch, Wafrn offers a Custom Word filter that allows you to transform the word “AI” to “cocaine” or any other word every time you see it.

It’s really, really fun to see in practice. Again, it’s simple and just a funny idea, but these little details end up setting Wafrn apart from its peers.

In Conclusion

Wafrn is awesome, and taps into a specific niche that falls somewhere between Tumblr, Cohost, and “Weird Twitter”. It’s goofy and nerdy and passionate, and seems to be constantly evolving into a better version of itself. I love what I’m seeing so far, and hope to see the platform continue to grow. There’s an enormous promise in a project like this, and it’s refreshing to see how fun it is to use.

What We Loved

• Great design, easy to use.
• Lots of customization available
• Super fun community
• Native AT Protocol integration
• Asks, Bites, and an embedded version of Doom
• Emoji confetti explodes whenever you do something!
• Pretty good mobile apps!
• The AI “Cocaine” filter.

What We’d Like To see

• Support for Bluesky’s Custom Feeds.
• Support for AT Protocol integration with other apps?
• Better media embeds and Link Previews.
• Misskey Flavored Markdown?
• More robust search with Webfinger support.
• Wafrn needs to more aggressively recruit people from Tumblr and other communities.

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