Hey backers,
I'm happy to announce a feature that ex-Patchwork users have been wanting, and bring news about bug fixes and our private groups project. The last two versions of Manyverse have brought to you these changes:
- 🎉 Feature: subscribe to hashtags and filter public feed by them
- ✅ Bug fix: style of header on the Compose screen
- ✅ (Desktop) Bug fix: closed process should not hang
- ✅ (Android) Bug fix: app sometimes freezing
- ✅ Bug fix: color of @ symbol on Activity tab
- ✅ Bug fix: crash when refreshing the feed
- ✅ Bug fix: crashing due to out-of-memory
- ✅ Bug fix: new and less buggy Profile top bar
- 🔷 Improve empty state when onboarding
- 🔷 Improve memory usage
- 🔷 Improve Dutch, Esperanto, Norwegian, Russian translations
- 🔷 Improve crash reports to have less metadata
Subscribe to hashtags
Manyverse is primarily about following people and getting their posts. But the public feed is also a place where you can see posts from "acquaintances", people you don't follow but who are followed by people you follow. This is a great way to discover new people and new content. To filter their content by your interests, you can now subscribe to hashtags, and then the public feed will only show posts that have those hashtags.
To subscribe to a hashtag, either use the search field and input a hashtag, or click one of the hashtag links in posts. There you'll find a button to subscribe to the hashtag. Once subscribed, there is a pill called "Hashtags" on the top-right corner of the public feed, which you can click to filter the feed by your hashtags.
I hope you all enjoy this feature, it's been a big deal for some folks who want to follow only a few topics. We don't yet have a way of seeing and managing all your subscribed hashtags, but that is coming soon, we promise.
Bug fixes
The recent releases also fixed a bunch of bugs. Namely, the app was often crashing due to out-of-memory (OOM) situations. We've fixed several OOM bugs, but there may still be some lurking around. We suspect that the cause may be some rogue account that artificially has a lot of messages, causing the app to get overwhelmed. But we're still investigating.
Last month we shared how Apple was blocking our app from the App Store. We're happy to inform that the issue has been resolved and Manyverse is back on the App Store. Let's hope it stays like that! Apple is unpredictable.
Private groups – milestone complete
The NGI Assure group (myself, Mix, Arj, Powersouce, nonlinear) finally delivered the first milestone of the private groups project. Read all about it in this blog post. We're continuously making our way to bring private groups to Manyverse, and it'll be a game changer. Honestly, I'm tense about it, because it has to be done right, and there is hardly a way to "undo" it once it's out there. But the team is very experienced and we have a good plan for it. We'll keep you posted.
2022 retrospective
Since the year is ending, how about we review what we've done in 2022?
Exactly 12 months ago I wrote that we were about to finish the desktop app, and in January we launched it. I said that 2022 is the "year of Manyverse for Desktop", and that was completely true. This entire year we have treated Manyverse as a cross-platform app, not as an Android-first app, and some people using Manyverse Desktop have called it "very smooth" and "polished". I am very happy with the progress we've made on the desktop app, and I hope you are too. iOS also got some love.
We also thought that by the end of the year Manyverse Desktop would reach "Patchwork Parity", meaning that it would have most features that Patchwork has. Perhaps we haven't fully reached that yet, but we made a lot of progress adding support for Gatherings and the top-right "pills" on the public feed.
In February, I shared our S.O.S. (Sustainability, Onboarding, Safety) plan, and it's been a super important theme, not only for Manyverse. Sustainability received a lot of progress due to database compactions. Safety received the private groups grant, and we haven't shipped any improvements to Safety, yet, but we've been working a lot on private groups research and development. Onboarding hasn't changed much, because we've been busy with the other two themes, and... bug fixing. It's clear that S.O.S. is a theme that will continue to be important for Manyverse in 2023.
2022 was also the year we welcomed Andrew Chou and Thomas Belin to the team, and I'm so proud of them. Andrew is still with us and he's been working on many core features that we released. Andrew is great, not only as a developer, but also as a frequent SSB community member!
If I don't see you all before, have a great holiday season! I want to thank you all for your support, and I hope you'll continue to support Manyverse in 2023.
– @andrestaltz