Fountain 1.1 - Open Social Podcasting Powered by Nostr

Open content via RSS. Open payments via Lightning. Open social graph via Nostr.

We regularly hear from both listeners and podcasters that the social features in Fountain are a great way to discover content that’s worth listening to.

When you support a podcast, or comment on an episode, your message is surfaced to your followers in the Fountain home feed and anyone that sees it can add the content to their library.

But this came with a few problems. When you first start using Fountain you wouldn’t have any followers so your posts wouldn’t get seen. If you wanted to share something you were listening to, you had to choose between leaving a comment on Fountain, or sharing on another social platform.

Today we are excited to announce a massive update to Fountain that solves these problems with Nostr - a simple, decentralised messaging protocol that allows social activity to be shared across different apps.

With Fountain’s new Nostr integration:

• You can bring your existing profile and followers to Fountain

• Your boosts and comments will be surfaced in other Nostr clients

• Posts shared from other Nostr clients relating to audio will appear in your feed

• Conversation and interactions now flow freely across multiple apps

Keep reading to learn more about how Nostr is changing the way we share and interact with audio content on Fountain.

What’s changing in Fountain?

Fountain is now a Nostr client. Your Fountain profile is the same as you Nostr profile and your activity will now be surfaced across the Nostr ecosystem. As a result, any content you interact with will reach more people and see higher engagement.

Connect or create a Nostr profile

You can create a Nostr account in the Fountain app, or connect an existing account by importing your keys. To find people you were following before on Fountain, tap the icon in the top right on the home screen.

Share your boosts and comments on Nostr

When you boost or comment on Fountain, your message will be shared on Nostr along with a Fountain link. Listeners on other Nostr clients will be able to see this activity, interact with it and start following you. Choose whether you want your activity to be shared on Nostr each time you boost or comment. If you choose not to share your activity on Nostr, it will still be visible in Fountain but other listeners will not be able to interact with it.

A new and improved home feed

The Fountain home feed is now the audio layer of Nostr. You can switch between the Following feed (which just shows you audio content shared on Nostr by people you follow) and the Global feed (which shows you all audio content shared on Nostr). You can also now filter the home feed and profile pages by content type to just see podcast or music content.

Audio posts from Nostr clients now appear in Fountain

Whenever a link to any audio content is posted on other Nostr clients like Primal, this activity will be surfaced in the Fountain home feed. If you’re linking to a podcast or music which is indexed in Fountain, we render it as a playable content card and it will appear on the content page as a comment.

Zaps

Listeners on Fountain and other Nostr clients can zap your post and send you a payment to show their appreciation. Zaps replace what were previously called likes on Fountain. You can still like something, but likes are now free.

Mentions

You can now mention another person in a comment, making it easy to send your listening recommendations to a friend or tag someone in to a conversation. Just type @ followed by their username to find their profile.

What is Nostr?

Nostr is a simple, decentralised messaging protocol that stands for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays. On Nostr, you have one identity and one follower graph that can be ported over to any Nostr client. When you create a Nostr account you are given:

• Public Key: A public username that allows anyone to find your profile

• Private Key: A secret password that you can use to log in to any Nostr client

Other key concepts within Nostr are:

• Notes: Posts that can contain plain text, an image, a video, a link, or other stuff

• Relays: Servers that broadcast notes to any clients connected to that relay

• Clients: Apps like Fountain where you connect your keys and query relays for notes you care about

The real magic is that Nostr gives apps a common language to talk to each other. The most popular clients are social media apps offering a similar experience to X such as Primal, Damus and Amethyst. We hope that more modern podcast and music apps will be excited by the potential of Nostr and the ability to deliver a more connected experience by building social features on top of it.

The Nostr specification is defined by Nostr Improvement Possibilities (NIPs). Fountain uses NIP-73 to associate posts with podcast episodes using the globally unique <podcast:guid>.

What’s next?

The Nostr protocol is evolving rapidly and Fountain 1.1 is only scratching the surface of what’s possible. In the coming months, we will be fine-tuning Fountain’s social features and adding new ones too.

If you want to help test these features out before they get released, or if you want to share some feedback or send a feature request, you can join Fountain Beta on Telegram. All iOS and Android users welcome.

If you’re interested to learn more about how Nostr is revolutionising the way social media works, we are building up a playlist of some must-listen episodes here.