Get quick access to all the Collectives you're contributing to

It's been a while since our previous changelog entry, but we're excited about this one. We've just launched the beta version of Collectives. They're a way for people to group up and share work around a particular topic or theme. It's in beta because there's still a few kinks, but the core flow is ready for your feedback.

There's something interesting about collaboration on "social media" that we don't see too often elsewhere. Creating feeds together is the first step. We have plans to develop Collectives into something much more over time. We'll be adding proper discussion topics, private feedback groups, and group curation.

The Grain and Emulsion collective for film shooters

Right now, anyone can create a Collective and choose how people join. You can have a moderator approve requests to join, or set them to automatically approve. Once you have people in your collective, you can then change their role.

The "Curator" role will be more important later on. Curators will be able to add other's work to the collective and manage the post submission process. Curation is still in progress, but it opens up some interesting use cases. It also opens Refrakt to photography enjoyers who may not be photographers themselves. For example Gallerists who want to curate online exhibitions.

Sam and some Refrakt regulars have already created a couple of Collectives. You can check them out on the Collectives Discover page. As always, we'd love your feedback, and don't forget you can add your suggestions directly to our Roadmap.

Improvements

There's been a lot of small improvements since the last update, so here's the more significant ones.

• Added default settings for new posts copyright notice, privacy, comments, and camera information.

• Added non-destructive borders for posts.

• Added the first version of our marketing/about page.

• Added a small AMA page where you can ask us anything.

• Added a way to manage muted and blocked users to settings.

• Improve the loading speed of the Discover page.

• Added NSFW settings to posts. Users can toggle NSFW blurring across Refrakt from their settings.

• Added a hover card to profiles in posts and comments.

Bug fixes

• Fixed social previews for posts and user profiles.

• Fixed created and updated timestamps preventing some posts from being published correctly.

• Fixed mentions and URLs display in comments and profile bios.

• Fixed double scrollbar issue in search on Windows.

• Fixed an issue that prevented creating a post without tags.