hi there! like we mentioned last week, colin and aidan are working on a feature we’re all really excited about right now; we were hoping it would ship in time for this patch notes but there’s still some stuff to finish up, so we’re going to provide you some more details on it at the end of the post instead of leaving you in the dark.
alongside spending most of our week on that, we’ve shipped a couple small changes:
- fixed a bug where users could very rarely get stuck in a half-signed up state, unable to use the site
- this happened at most about once every 10,000 registrations
- after we got two reports of it in a short span of time, we fixed what we think is the underlying issue so it shouldn’t happen any more, fixed the small number of users whose account was in this broken state, and built new tooling for @kaara to help fix people’s accounts with minimal effort if it ever recurs.
- removed a bunch of old unused notification code, in preparation for doing some more work to improve notifications.
on the business front, we’ve finalized our most recent round of funding! we’ll have a full financial update out next week for the start of October and we’ll go into more detail about everything then.
before we get too deep into the New Feature, we wanted to share a brief update on tipping since we’ve gotten questions about it. the good news is jae is still making progress on it! the bad news is that progress has been slower than we’d hope. the moderate news is that jae recently returned home after a trip to realize that they’d been suffering from allergy symptoms for months, and that the likely causative agent was black mold (yay florida!) that they’re now getting taken care of. hopefully that helps things moving forward.
anyway!
the new feature
a lot of folks over the past year have alluded to a couple of different themes:
- cohost being built around a chronological timeline clashes with encouraging Big Effort Posts; we want people to invest time into making stuff they want to share, but if someone works hard on something that happens to not get seen by one of their followers before it rolls off the front page of their timeline, it might just disappear entirely.
- the “following” page sucks and nobody uses it. (it gets about 1 page view out of every 2,500, behind, for example, the user settings page. it feels like we mention the user settings page a lot in these posts. is that weird? I think it might be weird.)
earlier this year, jae had the idea of creating a new view organized something more like an e-mail client or newsreader, where we list the pages you follow ordered by how recently they’ve posted, and you can click through them and see what specific people have been up to. as we tossed ideas around the office, we liked this idea more and more as a way of helping address those problems, and it made sense to implement as a revamp of the following view, so we’re working on it.
the following page is going to gain a few things:
- a sort order — you’ll be able to choose between “most recently posted”, “most recently followed” (the current sort order), and “alphabetical by handle”.
- pins, so you can ensure that certain people and projects that are important to you stay at the top of the list even as everything else moves around. (obviously, your pins are private to you.)
- in “large” browser windows — i.e., wide enough that you get the navigation menu on the side — a second column where you can click on someone in the list to view their feed inline without leaving the page.
we’re hoping to start rolling this out sometime next week; since it’s hard to test and there’s a lot of room for bugs and performance problems, we’re going to test it ourselves on the site before gradually opening it up to everyone else. don’t worry, though, the timeline isn’t going anywhere — and we also see this new view as a jumping-off point and not a finished design; we’re starting off with the minimum feature set we think is necessary to make it hold together as A Thing, and plan to add to it over time if people see value in it.
that’s all for this week! thanks, as always, for using cohost! 
