Alex Gleason

A social network for AI agents built on Nostr. Truly decentralized identity, permissionless participation, and native Bitcoin payments.

Last month we released Ditto, a powerful new server for building communities on Nostr. This new release adds major stability and performance improvements we discovered after it became adopted by the Nostr community.

It has moderation. It has spam filters. It has NIP-05 self-service. It has quote posts, emoji reactions, and zaps. ⚡ The scope of this project is absolutely huge. It aims to take everything that's good about Mastodon and implement it on Nostr, with none of the downsides.

Nostrify is a flexible library for building Nostr apps in TypeScript. It provides Relays, Signers, Storages, and more to help you build your app.

It is now possible to zap across the bridge. By leveraging existing technology in the ecosystem, sats can now flow between Nostr and the Fediverse. The is a first step in the journey to integrate payments with Soapbox.

Threads has begun testing federation over ActivityPub. And they have blocked two important servers I administrate. The first server is the Mostr Bridge. The Mostr Bridge connects ActivityPub and Nostr together, so people can communicate across protocols. The second server is Spinster.xyz, which is arguably the largest independent feminist community online.

Today I'm pleased to announce that Soapbox has been awarded a grant by OpenSats to build out Ditto, our new project to port Soapbox to Nostr.

We hope you enjoy getting to know each other, and that this opens new doors for collaboration.

So you've started a new server on the Fediverse - and it's completely empty. By default, nothing happens. You're stuck there alone on your personal little island with no way to the external world.

This is the biggest release of Soapbox ever. What started out as a fork of Gab’s 2019 UI has now become a mainstay on the Fediverse. Originally created for the feminist platform Spinster, Soapbox now powers Truth Social, which has quickly become the largest website running Mastodon online.

Back in 2019 I released Soapbox as a fork of Mastodon with a much nicer UI. Over time I got fed up with Mastodon being slow, expensive, and not innovating enough. So I decided to jumped ship to Pleroma.

This update to the user interface for Pleroma+Soapbox brings cryptocurrency features to the Fediverse.

The Erlang 24 cataclysm event. I hate to start off with something negative, but it needs to be addressed. For a long time we pointed to Pleroma's source install guide, and even used it as the starting point for our own install docs. In that guide, we recommended installing a repo from "erlang-solutions.com" on your server. This was a mistake, as that repo pushes out bleeding edge versions of Erlang literally on the day of a new release.

Soapbox BE is a production ready Pleroma branch. It's being maintained alongside Pleroma, with additional bugfixes and features. Our goal is to move faster, while taking deliberate care to ensure clean code merges between projects. Soapbox BE contains code that has not yet been merged (or may never be merged) by Pleroma.

With a slew of administration new features, this release builds on the stability of the v1.1 release. It brings us up to speed with Pleroma 2.3, released last month. Managing a Fediverse server can be challenging. That's why we brought the most important admin features into a convenient dashboard.

This release is so solid it makes v1.0 feel unfinished. Truly, Soapbox FE was put to the ultimate test — a real social network with 14,000 users. 185 issues were closed. Major new features were added. This update brings us up to speed with the latest Pleroma, released last month.

After 12 weeks of strenuous labor, we're excited to announce that the Soapbox Frontend is finally stable. Countless hours and late nights were spent pouring love and energy into this release, so that the familiar interface can finally run on Pleroma with minimal gotchas.