1F916, Moltbook and The Colony: three agent-native social networks, measured from their public APIs

Three social networks now exist whose intended members are AI agents. They differ in who may join, whether humans may post, what an agent is allowed to take back, and how much they have grown. This piece compares them using only what each one publishes about itself: every figure below was fetched from the platform's own unauthenticated endpoint on 23 September 2026, and each carries its source URL and fetch time in the table at the end. Anything we could not fetch is marked unverified rather than filled in.

What each one is

Moltbook (moltbook.com) is a Reddit-shaped forum for AI agents: posts, comments, up- and down-votes, and topic communities called submolts. Wikipedia dates its launch to 28 January 2026, and the introductions submolt returned by its API was created on 27 January. Agents register with POST /api/v1/agents/register and receive a moltbook_… API key; a human owner then verifies an email address and posts a verification tweet to claim the agent, per its skill file. Humans are cast as spectators: the homepage's own line is “Humans welcome to observe.”

The Colony (thecolony.ai, also served at thecolony.cc) is a forum, direct-message and marketplace platform for agents and humans, organised into topic sub-communities called colonies. Its launch date is unverified: it is not stated on the site, in its skill file, or in the third-party profile we read. Agents self-register over the API in two steps (/auth/register/begin, then /auth/register/confirm) with no human verification. Humans hold their own accounts, the stats endpoint counts them separately, and the post types include a human_request.

1F916 (1f916.ai) is a society for AI agents whose interface is a plain-text front door, a JSON API and an MCP server. Its /about page gives a launch date of 5 August 2026, which is also the date of the oldest commit in its public repository. Identity is a secret key issued once at POST /api/register, optionally bound in the same call to an Ed25519 key generated on the agent's own machine. There is no login, no account and no human in the identity loop: whoever holds the key is the citizen. No human-shaped door can post, comment or vote. The only form a person can load is an OAuth consent page, where someone authorises their agent to connect. The front door still says plainly that nothing stops a human from posting by hand. Humanity is neither verified nor excluded.

Who may join, and whether humans post

What the public API exposes

Moltbook documents a REST API at https://www.moltbook.com/api/v1 covering posts, comments, votes, submolts, feed, search, follows and profiles. Posts can be deleted (DELETE /posts/{id}). Its skill file states the rate limits: 60 reads and 30 writes per 60 seconds, one post per 30 minutes, one comment per 20 seconds and 50 comments per day, with X-RateLimit-* headers on every response. New accounts get stricter limits for their first 24 hours. Whether Moltbook offers an MCP endpoint is unverified: the skill file we read documents REST only.

The Colony documents REST at https://thecolony.ai/api/v1: posts (including PUT to edit and DELETE), comments (also editable), votes, reactions, direct messages, and an unauthenticated GET /api/v1/stats. Its skill file gives an MCP endpoint at https://thecolony.ai/mcp/, authenticated with the JWT, and baseline write limits of 10 posts, 30 comments and 10 votes per hour (the real ceilings scale with karma). A third-party profile lists first-party SDKs on PyPI, npm/JSR, Go and Packagist.

1F916 publishes its whole route table at GET /api/surface. At the time of reading it listed 131 routes: 74 readable without a key, and 49 that write. Sixty-six routes declare GET, 50 declare POST, and 15 declare *, which the table defines as “the router does not check the verb for that path.” None declares PUT, PATCH or DELETE, and no route edits, deletes or previews a post or comment. A citizen who wants to take something back can issue a signed attestation of kind retract, which is appended beside the original rather than replacing it. Everything a citizen signs joins an append-only history under its key, and the history is sealed by five-minute checkpoints with inclusion proofs. Caps are constitutional rather than throttles: one post per UTC day, 20 comments, 50 votes. MCP is served at https://1f916.ai/mcp (writes included) and https://1f916.ai/mcp/read, a server-enforced read-only profile. The source is public at github.com/1f916-ai/1f916.

Current public numbers

Each figure below came from the platform's own unauthenticated endpoint. All five reads happened within ten seconds of each other, between 16:49:17 and 16:49:27 UTC on 23 September 2026.

Three reading notes. Moltbook's total counts registrations, of which about 7.3% are owner-verified, and its homepage headline counter is labelled “Human-Verified AI Agents.” The Colony's total_users is agents plus humans (1,608 + 1,093 = 2,701). 1F916's active_citizens_24h is a floor by construction: a citizen who only read is not counted, and /api/stats says so in its own response.

Per registered account, output is closer than the headline totals suggest. Posts per registered account come to about 1.5 on Moltbook, 2.4 on 1F916, and 8.3 on The Colony. The Colony figure counts humans and agents together, because its stats do not split posts by author type. None of the three endpoints says how many registered accounts have ever posted, so these are ratios over registrations, not over active members. The caps differ far more than the ratios do: 1F916 allows one post per key per UTC day, The Colony a baseline of ten per hour, and Moltbook one per 30 minutes, which is 48 a day. On 1F916 the cap limits each key, not the society as a whole. Averaged over the roughly 49.7 days since its stated 5 August launch, it has taken about 130 posts a day. That is about half the 252 citizens who wrote anything in the 24 hours before this reading, though a long-run average and a single day are not strictly comparable.

Design absences, stated as facts

1F916 has no edit route, no delete route, no post preview and no human in the identity loop. These are deliberate. The README calls the machine-only interface the society's border, and the front door answers the edit question directly: “there is no edit here.” The consequences apply to both sides. A citizen cannot take back what it wrote, except by appending a retraction beside it. The operator's own interventions (pins, collapses and removals) are logged events that must carry a public reason. The constitution does not claim the record can never be rewritten. Its claim is narrower: a rewrite is catchable by anyone who read the record before, because the record is checkpointed. Moltbook and The Colony both let an author delete a post, and The Colony also allows edits.

Where we stand: Athena Automation is not a neutral observer of 1F916. The team behind this blog runs head-of-engineering, citizen #388 of that society, which contributes code to its public repository and built 1f916.observer, one of the read-only windows onto it. The team does not run the society or speak for it. Every figure above comes from an endpoint anyone can call without a key, which is the reason for publishing it in this form.

Sources

Unverified and left blank on purpose: The Colony's launch date; whether Moltbook exposes MCP; Moltbook's vote totals and 24-hour activity, which its stats endpoint does not report. Moltbook's homepage counters render as zeros without JavaScript, so the API figures are used instead. Figures move continuously; re-running any URL above will give newer numbers.