A new Ecency release is here! 馃殌
Version 4.4.3 brings a large collection of improvements across Ecency - from faster feeds and better reading performance to major upgrades for curation, chat, audio, and the first steps into something a little more playful.
A lot has changed under the hood too. This release includes dozens of fixes and optimizations aimed at making Ecency faster, more reliable, and more resilient across desktop and mobile.
Here are some of the highlights.
Faster feeds and reading
Speed has been a major focus of this release.
Feeds, community pages, profiles, and individual posts have received significant rendering and caching improvements. More content can now arrive with the initial page response, helping pages become useful sooner instead of waiting for additional client-side loading.
Feed navigation has also been improved to make returning to content feel more natural. Cached rows can be restored during navigation, feed cards now have unique identifiers for restoring reading position, unnecessary image/GIF requests have been reduced, and several sources of perceived slowness have been removed.
The result: less waiting and a smoother experience while browsing Ecency.
Curation Desk gets much more powerful
The Curation Desk continues to evolve into a serious workspace for community curation.
This release adds and improves:
A curator roster administration panel
Quick actions for recommended posts
Better mobile support for reviewing and marking posts
Smarter handling of already-reviewed recommendations
More accurate recommendation counts
Improved review workflow and toolbar
Guest curator applications, which is open at the moment, go Apply: https://ecency.com/curation/applications
Tools for curation teams to review and elect guest curators
Better handling and labeling of excluded content
These changes make it easier for curation teams to organize themselves, discover content, and collaborate on rewarding valuable contributions.
Better group chats and private channels
Ecency Chat also received a substantial update.
Group conversations are now supported on the web, along with improvements such as seeing who reacted to messages, displaying sender names correctly in groups, renaming groups, sorting conversations by activity, and showing previews for post links.
The New Chat experience and responsive layouts have been polished as well, making conversations easier to manage across different screen sizes.
Listen with natural voices
Reading isn't always the most convenient way to enjoy a great Hive post.
The new Listen experience introduces natural-voice audio generation for posts, unlocked using Ecency Points.
Instead of relying on the browser's Web Speech text-to-speech system, Ecency can generate a more natural listening experience. The player includes playback speeds up to 2.5脳 and shows generation progress while your audio is being prepared.
Whether you're walking, driving, exercising, or simply prefer listening, this gives you another way to experience content on Hive.
Welcome to Raidstead
Something different has also been growing inside Ecency.
Raidstead is a new community raid game where alliances become towns, players rally together, build their war chest and town, follow their allies' progress, and prepare to face weekly pests.
The first version introduces the Raidstead world, heroes, alliance towns, a pre-season field guide, weekly pest reveals, progress tracking, town news, season countdowns, and more.
HiveSigner users can participate too.
This is an experiment in making community participation more interactive and fun - and we're looking forward to seeing where it goes.
Reliability, security and SDK improvements
A lot of work in 4.4.3 isn't immediately visible, but it matters just as much.
We've strengthened several areas of the application, including safer handling of untrusted metadata, improved error handling, protection against malformed content, URL-secret redaction from error reports, safer opening of external tabs, and better handling of taken-down content.
The Ecency SDK also received important transaction improvements, including transaction-size validation, better compatibility with encrypted memos, node failover when broadcasting transactions, improved block references for lagging nodes, correct authority serialization, and safer retries for ambiguous AI Assist requests.
Image uploads now retry temporary server failures as well, alongside numerous fixes for media rendering, metadata, editors, feeds, profiles, Waves, and browser-specific issues. Are you developer and building your own app on Hive? Go try out @ecency/sdk library smart and convenient...
Better media everywhere
This release includes a number of smaller changes that add up to a better media experience.
YouTube Shorts now render in their proper vertical format, 3Speak audio embeds appear as audio players rather than video frames, GIF handling has been improved, list thumbnails maintain their intended 16:9 ratio, classic editor previews can display video embeds, and NSFW media in Waves is covered appropriately.
We've also improved compatibility with content originating from other Hive applications.
Community contributions
Open source remains an important part of Ecency.
A warm welcome to 
And, as always, thank you to everyone reporting bugs, testing changes, suggesting improvements, curating content, building communities, and simply using Ecency every day.
What's next?
Ecency continues to grow beyond being simply another interface for Hive.
We're improving the fundamentals - speed, reliability, publishing, reading and discovery - while also building better tools for communities, curation, communication and new ways to interact with content.
Version 4.4.3 is a big step in that direction.
Update, explore the new features, try the Curation Desk, start a group conversation, listen to a post - and maybe pay Raidstead a visit while you're there. 鈿旓笍
See you around Ecency! 馃挋