This week was mostly about trust in the plain sense: keeping private things private, making messages dependable, and giving you more say over who reaches you. Here is what changed.
Messages
- Choose who can message you. Right now you can set the trust level globally for who can reach you. But what if someone you want to hear from hasn't cleared your trust bar? Now you can let them in from the ⋯ menu on their profile, or let in a whole group from that group's settings. Settings lists everyone you've let in, with Remove.
- Your message history follows you to a new device. A new phone or browser used to start blank. On your devices page you can copy your history from a device you already use by typing an 8-digit code, or turn on a backup you can restore with a recovery key if you lose every device. Messages stay end-to-end encrypted either way.
- Messages work in every tab. The "Messages are open in another tab" screen is gone, and new messages show up without a reload.
- Conversations have day dividers, and a chat photo you save gets a real file name instead of "image.bin".
Your inbox
The inbox is calmer. Chats and channel messages left it, since they have their own badges, and a pile of replies on one post is one row instead of dozens. Unread rows are bold, a row you read drops below the unread ones right away, and each row has a menu to mark it read, mute the post or decline. When people uptrust your post, you see how many did, never who. A vote is a secret ballot.
Groups and channels
- A group's home page lists every channel, new ones in bold, with a search once there are more than 15. A channel opens at the first message you haven't read, and Next takes you to the next channel with something new.
- Mark as unread. Right-click a channel, or use a message's ⋯ menu, to mark it unread and come back to it later.
- Topic tags no longer crowd every channel message. To trust someone on a topic, choose Topics from the message's menu.
- Leaving a group asks first, and saving group settings shows that it saved.
Writing and reading posts
- Footnotes. The post editor has a Footnote button. Readers tap or hover the number to read the note without losing their place.
- Expanding a long post in the feed shows the whole post. It used to stop at five lines.
- Tapping Publish again on a slow connection no longer posts the same thing twice.
- In a phone's browser, what you type stays above the keyboard instead of hiding under it.
- Hebrew and Arabic read right to left, with punctuation where it belongs.
Bridges
- The Bridges page no longer goes blank when you switch tabs. If your bridges fail to load, it says so and offers Try again.
- A request sent to one person says who can answer it, so a lone Boost button no longer looks broken. Quoted comments are kept whole instead of cut off mid-word.
- Withdrawing trust or choosing "Not who I meant" asks you to confirm first.
Privacy and security
- Private stays private. We checked everything the site shows to someone outside a private group and closed the spots where a private group's name, topics or post titles could leak. Our analytics get nothing from private groups, events or messages, and Facebook's tracking pixel loads only for signed-out visitors and on sign-up pages.
- Visitors in the EU, EEA and UK see a cookie banner, and nothing optional runs until they accept.
- After several failed logins we ask you to prove you're human, and a new password that shows up in a known data breach is refused. Nobody gets locked out.
- Usernames are public, so you can no longer use an email address as one.
- The privacy policy and terms now name every outside service that touches your data and what each one gets.
On your phone
Version 1.1.11 is in the App Store and Google Play. Update to get these.
- Sign in with Google on iPhone. If you made your account with Google on the web, you can sign in the same way on an iPhone.
- Swipe a message right to reply.
- Each channel has its own notification bell, and the + menu in a channel opens a full editor for longer posts.
- A #hashtag you type becomes a topic link, and tapping one opens that topic.
- You can see where you rank with each point of view, and revoke an AI assistant's access from Settings.
- You can finish signing up by typing the code from your email, without opening the link on that phone.
- Footnotes show as numbers you can tap, and the Lobby greeting tells you how much is unread from people you trust.
If you use an AI assistant with UpTrust
- Perplexity shows as a verified publisher on the approval screen, as Claude and ChatGPT already did.
- Your assistant can read files attached to channel messages.
- Its results no longer show anyone's email address, and text from posts reaches it marked as quotes, so instructions hidden in a post have a much harder time steering it or a group's AI.
- Using Log In or Sign Up in the top bar while connecting an assistant no longer drops the connection.
Smaller fixes
- Related topics on a topic page load again after timing out over the weekend, and topic pages load faster.
- Errors read as plain sentences without status codes, and a page that fails to load offers Try again.
- We fixed what an accessibility audit found: missing labels, low-contrast text, keyboard focus and a skip link on every page. You can also reorder channels with the keyboard.
In testing (experimental)
These are not on for everyone yet and may still change.
- The next app version, 1.1.12, is with testers. It brings the calmer inbox and the new group home to the phone, along with Mark as unread, starring and muting channels, and a "Pick up where you left off" row in the Lobby.