Ecency web 4.4.1 is live on ecency.com.
This one took a while. There are quite a lot of changes in the release, including some things we've been working on for a few months, so I'll try to cover the important ones without turning this into a changelog. Some of the changes were released way before but we didn't announce those changes.
Probably the first thing you'll notice is Shorts in Waves. We also added post templates, dictation, translation, a few new Points features and a lot of smaller changes around performance and usability.
Blog hosting related changes are not covered here. That part grew quite a bit and we'll have a separate post about it.
There is a new Shorts tab on ecency.com/waves.
It's basically a vertical video view for video waves. Ecency already aggregates short-form content from multiple sources, so Shorts uses those same sources but filters for videos and gives them a proper full-screen player.
One thing we specifically wanted to fix here was vertical video. Previously it could end up inside a landscape player, which obviously isn't great for something recorded vertically. The player now follows the video's aspect ratio.
Upvoting is also intentionally simpler here. Tap the heart and that's it. We didn't think bringing the full voting slider into this interface made much sense.
You can see votes and tips on the side while watching.
Waves itself got a few other changes at the same time:
Tags can be pinned and become tabs next to For You and Following.
Individual Waves sources can also be pinned. This is useful if you want to browse one source instead of everything mixed together.
Tip counts are shown directly on waves, including whether you already tipped something.
We added a small onboarding checklist for new accounts too. Before this, a new user could land on an almost empty Waves page and there wasn't much explaining what to do next.
Empty personal feeds now point people toward Waves for the same reason.
This has been requested a few times.
You can now write something in the editor and save it as a template from the publish menu. Templates can include the title, tags and post settings.
For example, if you publish a weekly report with mostly the same structure and tags, you don't have to rebuild that setup every week.
There is one small safeguard: if you load a template and try to publish it without really changing anything, we'll warn you first. It's surprisingly easy to load a template, forget about it and accidentally publish the original text again.
There's now a microphone button in the editor.
Click it, record what you want to say and stop the recording. Ecency transcribes it and puts the resulting text into the editor.
Transcription uses Points. The cost is shown before you use it and there's a free daily allowance as well. We also limit recording length, mostly to prevent someone accidentally leaving a recording running and spending far more Points than they intended.
This is one of those features that might sound a little unusual in a blogging editor, but after using it for quick drafts and notes it actually feels quite natural. Another tool helping you to create content faster, now possible even without keyboard.
We've had translation on the reading side and this release expands it.
If a post is in another language, readers can translate it from the post actions.
Writers can now do the opposite from inside the editor. So if you've written something in English and also want to publish a translated version, you can do that without moving the text back and forth between Ecency and another translation tool.
We also added an AI disclosure option to the publish menu.
If you used AI to help with the text or images in a post, you can mark that when publishing. The post will show a small badge.
This isn't mandatory. Nothing is enabled by default and we're not trying to decide what does or doesn't count as "AI content" for people.
The interesting part for us was making the information portable. The disclosure is stored in shared post metadata, so it isn't limited to Ecency. Other Hive applications can read the same field and display it if they want, some already does.
A small clarification that will hopefully save some confusion.
Comments and waves shorter than 25 characters, after removing links, don't receive Ecency Points and don't count toward the daily comment quest.
This rule isn't new.
What was wrong was that we weren't telling you about it.
So someone could write a short reply, see that their quest hadn't moved and reasonably assume something was broken. The composer now warns you before posting when the content is below the minimum.
Ecency Pro is currently $19.99/year.
It adds the verified badge next to your account, includes a hosted blog at yourname.blogs.ecency.com and unlocks Insights for other creators. Without Pro, Insights is limited to your own account. It has also many free AI allowance and custom claimable blogs.
Subscriptions also help us pay for Ecency development and infrastructure.
Another new addition is Gift Points. If you had Points balance, you could already do that by transferring but what if you didn't have enough?!
You can purchase Ecency Points by card and send them directly to another Hive account. Enter the username, choose the amount and optionally leave a note.
We wanted this to be straightforward. If you want to give someone Points, they shouldn't need to go through an exchange or understand how to purchase crypto first.
We also fixed a related usability problem. If you're trying to use something that requires more Points than you currently have, Ecency can now take you directly to the top-up flow instead of just telling you that you don't have enough.
There is a new Support Ecency section in Settings.
One option lets you set a default beneficiary percentage for posts. We'll add it when you publish but you're still free to remove it from an individual post.
For people delegating Hive Power to @ecency, there's another option to leave a percentage of the daily curation share with Ecency.
Both are optional.
Notifications got more work than you might immediately notice.
Some notifications now include the post thumbnail. This applies to things like mentions, bookmarks, favorites and payouts. It makes a surprisingly big difference when scrolling through a long notification list.
Scheduled posts also finally have a dedicated notification. When your scheduled post actually publishes, you'll know about it.
There's a filter for these notifications too.
We also went through the notification filters and push notification settings because over time the two lists had become slightly different. They should now match.
A few changes here.
AI Summary has been renamed to Recap. We think that's a better description of what the feature actually does.
Posts now have a breadcrumb showing where you are, and we've changed the related content area at the bottom into a smaller three-column layout.
We also added proper archive pages for authors, communities and tags.
This one is mostly invisible during normal browsing, but it's important for discovery. Infinite scrolling works well for humans, not so well for search crawlers. Numbered archive pages give crawlers a path through older Hive content instead of leaving thousands of posts buried beyond an infinite scroll.
There were several media fixes as well. Odysee URLs can be embedded now. Some old video placeholders that had stopped working are working again. Vertical videos keep their vertical layout.
Older Hive image URLs are now handled through our image proxy as well.
The Creator Economy page also got an update. It now goes all the way back to the Hive fork, charts show values on hover and there are additional sections covering communities and curation.
This release also contains quite a bit of work that isn't really visible as a "feature."
We removed the animation library that was being included throughout the app and replaced those animations with CSS.
Some of the heavier logic attached to feed cards is now created only when it's actually needed. Content further down a page isn't laid out immediately if you can't see it yet. We also changed thumbnail handling so browsers can discover important feed images sooner.
One particularly wasteful request was the voter list.
When an anonymous visitor opened a post, we were fetching the complete voter list even though in most cases that data was never used. On posts with many votes that could be a lot of unnecessary data. Anonymous reading no longer does that.
We've made some changes to API reads too. Timeouts can adjust depending on how the network is behaving, and in some cases Ecency can hedge a slow request rather than waiting indefinitely for one endpoint.
Another fix is for people who leave Ecency open for a long time. Previously, if we deployed a new version while your tab was still running an older build, the next navigation could sometimes break. The app should recover from that situation now.
Wallet token history can load older pages again.
Saving a chain address no longer causes engine tokens to disappear.
Account history pagination reaches the beginning properly.
Deck column rendering and counts were fixed.
Advanced search had fixes for both query building and error handling.
Chat unread counts should be more reliable. If an account is banned from chat, we now actually explain that it's banned and, where applicable, when the ban ends.
Deleting comments from the dropdown works again.
Importing a post from a URL will fetch it again instead of getting stuck with the previous result.
SPK Network support has been removed.
And there are quite a few other smaller fixes that aren't particularly interesting to describe one by one.
As always, you can see the actual development work on GitHub. Ecency is open source, so you don't have to take a release post's word for what changed. The pull requests and code are there.
If you find something broken in 4.4.1, please tell us. Open a GitHub issue, or just leave a reply here.
4.4.1 is already running on ecency.com, so give it a try.
