The first post on Refrakt where Sam prompted people with "What brings you to Refrakt, what are you hopeful for?"

A little over 6 months ago, we launched Refrakt in Private Beta. We did this so we could build out the core set of features and gather feedback from a small number of users. We had a wait list and periodically added new folks, and quietly got on with building. Things are holding up technically, and we have all the safety tools we need for on-boarding more people, therefore…

Starting from today, anyone can sign up!

This is a pretty huge milestone for us, one we weren't sure we'd see at times! "Us" is still just Sam, and it's not been easy building or marketing Refrakt as a one-person-company.

There's still things on the roadmap that we'd love to get to ASAP, but we have to be pretty ruthless in terms of prioritising. We've been doing a bit of reflection and planning on where we want Refrakt to go in the future, and for us, it's three main areas:

• Connecting with, and uplifting others

• Showing off your best work

• Pro-tools for advancing your photographic journey

We'll go into more detail on each of these over the coming months, but the things we want to build will largely align with these topics and roughly in that order too.

Spreading the word

Now the foundation has been laid, we feel a lot more confident in what we're building, and our plans for the future, but we still need your help.

If you enjoy using Refrakt, we would absolutely love if you told your photography friends about us. Sharing a link to refrakt.app goes a long way! Maybe even pop a link to your Refrakt profile in your social bios.

We'd love to see more work shared here, and more people aligned around our vision of becoming a more meaningful home for photography.

Thank you to our Patrons

Our wonderful Patrons have contributed to keeping the platform running, and we can't thank them enough for their support.

If you would like to become a Patron, you can do so at any time from the Patrons section on the About page. By becoming a Patron, you get a badge on your profile, a featured spot in search, early access to new features, and play a pivotal role in the platform's evolution.

Patronage is pay-what-you-like with a minimum amount of $20 to get all the perks.

Thank you to our Pathfinders

These are the people that joined the private beta and shared their work with the rest of the community. They've been an integral part to the platform so far, and we just wanted to say how much we appreciate them.

If you're a Pathfinder, we've added a little badge to your profile. It's yours to keep forever, and it signals your early support of Refrakt of which we're immensely grateful!

The new Pathfinder badge

Improvements

• We've cleaned up the design of the feeds so they're a little less distracting. There's now even more of a focus on the photos.

Bug fixes

• Fixed the layout of the notification settings page that meant the sidebar was hidden.

• Fixed a bug that meant navigating between posts when expanded, would do a full reload and you'd lose the ability to navigate to the next post.