Fountain 1.1 is now live on iOS and Android with the social features re-built from the ground up using Nostr!
Why 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 these 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.
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
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.**NIP-73 External Content IDs
**
The real magic is that Nostr gives apps a common language to talk to each other. Whilst 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.
Fountain uses NIP-73 to associate posts with podcast episodes using the globally unique
<podcast:guid>
ids.**We would love your feedback!
**
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 nostr features and adding new ones too.
Please let me know your thoughts below as I'd love to get as much feedback as possible!