0xc835c3dc…f946sent to0xf18407c1…3156·#9,960,924·view on Etherscan
!smokesignal{"m":"# Version 0.9.2 Live\n\n### Topics, Visual/UX Improvements, Mobile Support, and more!\n\nWhen we launched a couple weeks ago with what I'm going to call v0.9.0, the small bit of engagement we got helped us prioritise which features to target. We implemented replies for a quick v0.9.1 update, then started on this update, which took a bit longer.\n\nThis update contains quite a few lovely new features and fixes.\n\n#### Visual/UX Update\n\nThe damn thing just looks a lot prettier! And we have a nice explainer home page now, with a few UX entry points.\n\nAdditionally, some interactions have been smoothed over to be more intuitive; one example is how SmokeSignal now indicates a submitted message or unlock transaction is being mined.\n\n#### Topics\n\nThis was the main driver for this update--the star of the show, at least for me!\n\nThe first version of SmokeSignal simply showed all messages, sorted by time posted. This was fine for an alpha launch, but as soon as people started putting effort into their posts, I noticed that this way of presenting the posts made the conversation feel rambly and unconnected. Replies helped a bit with this, but not much.\n\nTo address this, every post now has a topic, and SmokeSignal is always viewing either a given topic or a given post (with its direct replies). These can be thought of as analogous to subreddits or channels, but note that **topics don't have owners or rules,** and are only differentiated by their names. So when you see a post in `smokesignal/announcements`, there won't be any guarantee that the people posting there are official SmokeSignal devs or representatives!\n\nIn this way, they are more like hashtags: a loose collection of *conversational topic* rather than a specific *community with boundaries and rules*.\n\nAlong the same theme, \"starting\" a topic is just a matter of writing the first post for it (the front page explains how to do this). Topic names have very few limitations--SmokeSignal just replaces spaces with dashes and lower-cases the name (i.e. `my super cool topic XD` becomes `my-super-cool-topic-xd`).\n\nWhen I built the topics column on the front page, I had to sort it by something--I barely hesitated to use the total amount burned. I noticed then that this gives each topic an implicit ranking with some very cool properties: on one hand, this ranking is *completely determined by users*, but is also *completely resilient against being gamed* (after all, you can't fake burning!)\n\nWe are very interested to see which topics rise to the top as traffic increases. In the future we will continue this theme, using burn data to sort and filter content--it's a crucial part of our plans for how to build a social media platform that has no censorship/moderation and yet is resilient against spam.\n\n#### Compose Preview and Fixed Markdown Rendering\n\nWhen we launched, the markdown rendering engine we were using turned out to be... not so great. And without a preview mechanism, the user experience was awful: you'd compose an **immutable post** only to find out that the rendered version looked anywhere from awkward to outright broken!\n\nSo first off, we have previews. Desktop users see the preview as they type, and mobile users can preview the content by tapping \"preview\". If you click the reply button to this post, you can see this for yourself, even if you don't have a web3 wallet yet!\n\nWe're also using a much more mature rendering engine, that additionally gives us finer-grained control over the markdown rendering. So if any more rendering oddities show up, we can squash them pretty quickly.\n\n#### Mobile Support\n\nSmokeSignal now works on mobile!\n\nIt will work in read-only mode for any mobile browser, with a slightly different layout than on Desktop. And if you have Trust Wallet or some other compatible mobile web3 browser, you'll be able to post as well.\n\n#### ...And more! I think!\n\nI'm sure there are other changes that I've made, and have now forgotten about! It was quite a flurry of inspired development. Schalk, can you think of anything else that's new?","v":2,"c":{"topic":"smokesignal/announcements"}}