Hello everyone! I'm ecstatic to share lots of very exciting updates to the Journaly platform with you all. There will be an accompanying YouTube video in the coming days, but I wanted to share it more personally here on the platform first :)
Table of Contents
- HUGE changes to Journaly Premium pricing
- Major progress with bugs in the Journaly Editor
- New Features & Improvements
- Conclusion
1. Huge Changes To Journaly Premium Pricing!
Ever since I first had the idea for building Journaly, a huge emphasis has always been on not running it like a typical business where the focus is on maximising profit above all else. As I've always said, my goal is to support free and accessible language learning as much as possible, and so I have made all of Journaly's core educational and community-building features free for everyone, against the advice of... well, basically every entrepreneur I know, and I've never regretted it.
I've been working on Journaly for almost four years now and have literally spent many thousands of hours on the project. A little over a year ago, my dear friend Ryan joined the team and has since invested an enormous amount of his own time, as well as tremendous skill, experience, and camaraderie – all of which I can say has been invaluable. All in all, from an engineering perspective Journaly has already grown to be a pretty huge, complex, and diverse project and while it has been incredibly challenging, I can genuinely say that it has been an absolute joy.
With that being said, this is a completely self-funded, advertisement-free project that's been built primarily by two developers, and does cost money to run. So, in order to achieve our goal of providing our core educational and community-building features to everyone for free and making our absolute best contribution to accessible language learning, we created Journaly Premium to deliver tons of additional value to the Journaly experience and to allow us to simply pay the bills – maybe one day even earning a modest income, too ❤️ We feel like while there is still so much work to be done, we're finally at a place where we can start working towards Journaly at least reliably paying its own bills.
With all that in mind, the goal is not to find the absolute highest price people are willing to pay and maximise profits. It is simply to find a price that people feel genuinely happy with – we just didn't know what that price was. So we created a survey and asked lots of our most active users for their honest thoughts. You spoke and we listened 😊
That's why I'm excited to announce a brand new pricing model, which drops the price considerably and introduces a student discount! 🎉
Monthly | £5/month |
Annually | £3.50/month! (£42) |
Annually - Student Discount | £1.25/month (£15) |
* To access the student discount, simply change your Journaly email address to a valid student email address, or write to hello@journaly.com if you need support :)
2. Major progress with bugs in the Journaly Editor
Building a Rich Text Editor is an incredibly complex and challenging task, and while I'm very happy with the Journaly Editor which has worked perfectly for a lot of you, there have also been lots of challenges that have impacted some of you a lot. Unfortunately, these bugs were actually nothing to do with our code – they resided deep within the code of a library we use to build the editor and even for them, things such as Android support and IME are hugely complex issues to solve. So it has brought me a lot of pain to see some of you unable to write on your Android devices or in languages that use accented characters or some scripts that use character composition.
I am VERY happy to announce that there has been massive progress and improvement to this situation! There are still a couple of smaller bugs that occur on some devices or browsers, but it is now greatly improved and should at least be usable for a lot of you who experienced problems. If anyone continues to have issues, please report them to us with details about your device, browser, and keyboard, and we'll continue monitoring things. I will also now be actively trying my best to contribute to the open-source codebase of the underlying framework to see if I can push remaining bug fixes through, but this will not be easy.
3. 🎈 New Features & Improvements
WOW - so many new things in the last month or two. Many things are behind the scenes, but here are the user-facing ones!
Free:
- "Native" Badges In Comments: One thing we learned from our survey is that many people care a lot about knowing whether or not the person leaving feedback is a native speaker. So we made a simple little "native" badge that appears at the top of a Journaler's avatar if they are a native speaker of the post being commented on!
- Advanced Filters: We saved lots of space at the top of the My Feed page by putting most of the filters in this menu, and we've also added lots of new very helpful filters! One of my favourites is needs feedback, which allows you to only see posts without feedback in a single click!
- Markdown Support In Comments: You can now format your comments beautifully.
- User Interests: You can finally add your own interests to your profile from the settings page.
- Profile Page Improvements: We fixed some tricky layout problems on those gorgeous profile pages, and you can now also follow Journalers directly from their profile.
- My Feed Page Improvements: Journaly now greets you in one of the languages you're learning each time you go to the My Feed page. Also, after publishing a new post, you will see it in the feed immediately and no longer need to refresh the page.
- Email Address Verification: We finally built out all the infrastructure for email-address verification! Another important step towards making Journaly a mature platform which also opens up the mechanism for offering the student discount 🎉 This impacts all new users and if you change your email address, you'll need to verify it ✅
Premium:
- Saved Posts: You can now "save" or "bookmark" posts for later, and then access your list with a new advanced filter action.
- Publish Posts Privately: Perhaps you're working with a tutor, a friend, or even a romantic partner and don't feel comfortable sharing your posts publicly; or you might even be working on professional documents like a translation or research paper that wouldn't be appropriate to post publicly, but you'd like to use Journaly's correction tools to collect feedback from a colleague. Well, now you can! This feature allows you to generate a private share link that you can give to anyone and you always have the option to publish publicly later.
There is also now a beautiful table that you can find on your subscription page which shows you not only all of our free and premium features side-by-side, but also the very exciting features that are coming soon – and trust me, there are so many good ones 🔥 In addition to what you see there, we are making very good progress with the huge project of building an in-app notifications system which will be done soon, and we'll also be totally revamping the UI and UX of Badges, making it an absolute delight to strive for and reach new milestones on Journaly!
4. Conclusion
Thank you everyone for building such an amazing community here on Journaly. We built the platform, but it truly is all of you who deserve the credit for making it such a delightful, warm, and supportive place to be. It is you who have provided over 200,000 comments to help each each other and build meaningful connections! I also want to thank our moderators – Linda and Emily – and our external code contributors. It blows my mind and warms my heart every single day to see all the activity and engagement. I promise that we are going to be dedicating an enormous amount of time and love in the coming months to continuing to make Journaly the home for writing in foreign languages online.
We absolutely love hearing from you and are all about being transparent and accessible, so please do feel free to join the conversation down below (or even highlight and start a thread!). Also, this was a pretty big release of new stuff and we did our very best to test everything thoroughly, but if you find any issues please don't hesitate to reach out to our customer service team (me 🤣) at hello@journaly.com
Sending big hugs and only the best vibes to everyone, and wishing you all happy language learning 🌎❤️
Woohoooooo how do you feel about all of these new updates!? Out of the current new features and those that are "coming soon" in the feature table, which are you most excited about? Let's get the conversation started! 🔥🚀
Hi Robin, wow, that's a lot of new stuff! Thanks for always working so hard to make Journaly even better :) Those new feature all sound pretty amazing, although I don't know how I feel about the "native" badge. I know the feeling of wanting to get good corrections. However, there are so many people with high levels in their foreign languages giving amazing corrections and advice that I feel like this badge might make their help less apreciated. Plus, those people often know the grammar rules better than any native. I don't know how often Eduard has explained German grammar to me :D So yeah, I feel a bit conflicted about this badge.
Thanks so much for your comment and kind words, @MimmiCaro! Yes, I had some hesitation about the "native" badge, too, because I have always said that we shouldn't treat non-native feedback as not being valuable. There are some incredibly skilled learners who can provide excellent feedback (that could be pure language skill or simply the skill of being able to explain things clearly due to having experienced the same struggles). In our survey, we found a lot of people even suggested disallowing feedback from non-native speakers, which I know other platforms do as well, but for the reasons you and I have both shared, I don't ever want to do that. So, for now, the "native" badge was a simple solution to at least allow Journalers to know at a glance if the feedback is coming from a native speaker or not for those people who feel it is important, but hopefully without devaluing feedback from the wonderful and amazingly generous community members who provide abundant feedback for languages they are also learning/have learned 😊
As always with developing a platform to serve such an incredibly diverse audience, it's really hard to find solutions that make everyone happy, so in these situations I'm always trying my best to find that balance of (a) finding solutions that materially improve the situation for some without negatively impacting others, while (b) never sacrificing the core Journaly values.
I'm always happy to get feedback on these decisions and nothing is ever irreversible or too "sacred" to change, so I do love and appreciate your feedback on this 😊🙏🏼
@MimmiCaro Another idea was to possibly just show everyone's level (perhaps using our "level gauge") in that badge, so it doesn't feel like singling out native speakers. What do you think about that?
About the native thing: To be 100% honest (a particularity of mine), my first reaction to the "native" badge thing was: "Oh :(". I mean, I think Journaly users are competent and intelligent enough to see, detect, understand or at least guess how experienced/able another Journaly user giving feedback is. Someone's birth place shouldn't count, in my opinion, as a qualification. I agree that it is a first indicator, but that's about it. I'd propose to go for something like a "reputation system" like StackOverflow's or similar. In Journaly, that could be the number of thanks (hearts) a user has been given in their posts under a given language. People like Linda or CocoPop have given a huge amount of feedback in form of comments and therefore received a lot of "thanks" for it. In my opinion, that's what should count as an indicator of how valuable those sources of information/feedback are.
Oh, just showing the language level is also a nice solution.
@robin I'm suprised to read to which degree some users disapprove of non-native feedback, as I personally have found it really valuable in the past. Plus, disallowing non-native comments would also mean that other learners would not be able to ask questions. Especially in Italian texts I often stumbled across corrections I didn't understand and have learned a lot from other people's mistakes :D
I like the idea of simply showing everyone's level. Would that mean that also for native speakers, it would just show the four bars instead of the "native" badge? That would be great because it wouldn't make natives visually stand out from everyone else.
Edit: it seems Eduard and me have been replying at the same time :D And I agree with what he's said. There is more to valuable feedback than being native.
On a more general note: I absolutely enjoy reading posts such as this one. It's great to read about what's happened and coming next just right here :). Observant Journaly users (hi Linda) detect such changes quite fast, but it certainly is much better to be able to read about them / see them announced. Great post!
About the payment possibilities: As I mentioned in the survey, I'd personally immediately switch to Premium if it was possible to use PayPal for it. I find the new prices quite ... "user friendly".
I'm not sure which thing I'm most excited for, I'm super excited for them all! I'm pretty excited that I can now write posts on my phone, that's probably the most helpful improvement (seeing as writing posts is pretty much the point). You all are doing such a great job, and I really appreciate that all the good features aren't locked away for only premium users. There's plenty of great features for free. I think that you have struck a good balance of what is free and what is premium only. It's worth it to get premium, but Journaly is still great if you can't or don't want to pay.
WOHOOOOOOOO
Is there a way to support ruby text (furigana)? I know there's extensions like Yomichan but tis not the same when you're writing.
Hi Robin,
First of all: Thank you so much for all the work and passion you've put into creating this amazing platform! ❤️
I'd also prefer to see the language level of the commenter instead of a badge saying that they're native. And I'd also prefer if it wasn't that prominent. Maybe place it in the bottom right corner of the profile pic?
Thank you everyone for the wonderful comments and feedback! ❤️ I think that showing the level gauge to indicate each person's level and making it less prominent is a great solution that accomplishes all of the goals. I'll try my best to act on this quickly 😄
@ReverendPenguin yes we should be able to do this, I think we have a ticket for that somewhere but I'll make sure it gets some attention. This one might take us a little time but I'll make sure it isn't forgotten 😄
@Azriel_Renee I'm honestly so glad to see that you feel that way about the balance of free vs. premium features, and also the value that each provides 🌟
@Eduard I've also thought about having some kind of a reputation system as you suggested, the only problem is that it's hard to guarantee that everyone will give thanks for feedback and so on. So, I think a great way to combine the solutions would be the level gauge as a first indicator, but then people could earn certain badges that would show within the comment, such as "top commenter!" (but more creative 😂)
Also, once we build "feedback types" where each feedback is categorised (grammar fix, alternative vocab suggestion, etc.) then we could have special badges like grammar wizard! for someone who frequently receives thanks for grammar fixes, or human dictionary for someone that gets a lot of thanks for vocabulary suggestions 😆What do you all think? 💡
Robin, thanks so much for all the hard work you put in Journaly! 💖
I agree on the native badge. In the last months I have seen "corrections" made by native speakers that were just not correct at all, or corrections made by non native speakers (hi @edufuga!) that where better than the native speaker's ones. So I would definitely vote for a language level badge instead of a native badge. Also, those special badges sound fantastic! Start with those, I'd love to be an official grammar wizard. 😆 # lifegoals
I'm also looking forward to the writing prompts, by the way! 🤗
I just want thank you @robin for this wonderful platform. I'ts such a great tool to use when learning a language, and the comunity here is always very kind, helpful and encouraging. I'm also really grateful that you have made Journaly free to use, and that having the premium versions just ADD to the experience, rather than taking away features from the "basic/normal" version. I also think it's great how open you are to feedback and suggestions. A huge thank you for everything Robin!
Good one, Robin! Your enthusiasm is contagious and Journaly seems to be more amazing every time I sign in. Thank you for the wonderful update. Wishing you and Journay great things!
If I could make one suggestion, it would be that eventually there be different-color correction highlighing options. For instance, one color for suggestions, one for corrections and one for typos (that disappears once the typo is corrected). Also, it would be great to be able to implement a correction with one click instead of having to go into edit. Tall order, perhaps, but something to consider hopefully.
I have a suggestion! Wouldn't it be nice if there was an option to hide the blue highlighted corrections/comments when reading someone's text? I sometimes find them distracting, even though I love the possibility of suggesting corrections directly in the text.
@Robin: Your suggestions (level gauge + badges) sound just great. I'm with Josanne about striving for the grammar wizard or even human dictionary badge! The last idea about the reading mode is also interesting... although I'm not sure whether that's compatible/coherent with the main philosophy of Journaly (language feedback).
Yes, this (https://github.com/Journaly/journaly/pull/686 and https://github.com/Journaly/journaly/commit/685eba45e6ed51c0d447993910246fef1bea3d10) looks much better 👍🥳🎉✍️✍️.
What does BUMP POST mean?
@CocoPop: That the post will be moved to the top of the feed again.
Ah, thanks!
Helloooo everyone! As @Eduard pointed out and as you may have seen by now, the level gauge has been implemented and I do think it looks much better - what a great team effort once again with your amazing feedback! 🥳 I am also really excited and happy to tell you that we're making fantastic progress with the In-App Notification system. Like always, we're not just building a rushed minimal thing that just works - I really feel like we're building a beautiful, sophisticated solution that is completely tailored to the Journaly experience and I just can't waiiiiiiiit to give it to you all. This release will contain a series of other improvements, too - stay tuned for another update post in the next couple of weeks!
@Josanne, @CocoPop, and @Chocolate_Frog - thanks so much for your kind comments and words. It really makes me happy to read your support, encouragement, and appreciation! 🥳
I'm glad to see some excitement about those special badges 😆 @Eduard I am definitely adding Human Dictionary to the special badge list! 😂
Oh! And @Coco_Pop both of your suggestions are actually already planned 😄 I think after we finish building these core community features (Direct Messaging, @mentioning, improved following experience, and possibly Groups) we plan to turn our focus back to the correction experience and build both "Feedback Types" and the ability to give "suggestions" where you can indicate the exact changes and they can be applied with a single click 🌟
Oh and @Chocolate_Frog your suggestion for "reading mode" - as @Eduard nicely called it - is quite interesting! I can definitely create a ticket for that to discuss. I love all the suggestions 🔥
I hope everyone is having an amazing week!
@Eduard apologies for reviving this thread but I wanted to make sure I reply to one of your earlier questions/suggestions that I missed before: you mentioned that the only reason for not joining premium is that we don't use PayPal, so I'd just like to give you some background on how we handle payments and give you the opportunity to elaborate on your concerns. Please know that this is not to suggest you are "wrong" or anything like that, it's purely to explain the situation from our side.
We use a company called Stripe for all of our payment processing and that is the backbone of our payments infrastructure. Stripe is a world-renowned company that is extremely good at what they do and are very popular. Every company I worked at in Silicon Valley uses Stripe for their payments, and both Ryan and I have a lot of experience working with payments infrastructure within small to medium-sized companies with Stripe. Furthermore, Ryan worked for a number of years at one of the largest banks in the U.S. (Wells Fargo), so he has a wealth of additional knowledge and experience working very specifically in financial software. As you probably know, building out subscription-based recurring payments infrastructure is a massive task and we both worked extremely hard for several months on it, taking every precaution possible to ensure the safety of our customers' money and information. We don't do any of the payment processing specifically from our servers and we don't store any payment-related customer data in our database – we let Stripe handle all of that securely. It's also worth noting that Stripe rose to such great popularity and with such a positive public perception, particularly in the tech world, due to totally outclassing PayPal particularly with developer experience, ease of use, and documentation, and PayPal has since taken a lot of cues from Stripe to improve those aspects of their products.
Lastly, a big reason that I decided to make Journaly an open-source project is transparency - the same reason that I do these posts and share so much information in YouTube Journaly updates, and try to make myself as accessible as possible to all our users. So in this case, as a very skilled developer yourself, you're totally welcome to look at our payments infrastructure code and let us know if you see even the smallest detail that gives you concern.
While we are not "married" to Stripe, their system is incredibly vast and they are extremely good at what they do, so we took a lot of cues from their system and APIs in designing our Data Model and throughout our system. It would be a lot of work to add a second branch for payments handling, not to mention continued development, testing, and maintenance for the rest of Journaly's lifetime. As an incredibly small team that would like to stay small (so we can always put our Journalers and their needs before anything else with no executive boards, investors, or shareholders calling the shots and pressuring us to put profits before everything else), we have to consider those kind of decisions and their impact on our ability to manage all areas of the platform long-term.
I hope that helps to explain various aspects of how we handle payments and the great effort we have gone to in order to treat your information with utmost care. If you still have concerns, please do feel totally free to share if there is anything we can do to put them at ease.
Thanks always for being an absolutely epic Journaler and star member of the community 😄
@Robin: First of all, I am sorry if my comment about PayPal sounded like I was critizing the current state of the art in the Journaly code or even demanding a new payment infrastructure from the Journaly team (you and Ryan), because neither is true. I was a bit shocked to read your comment, because I have the impression that there has been a misunderstanding with my comment, and that's why I am replying to your comment right now, although it's already quite late. I really appreciate the time and effort you took to answer my comment and the amount of detail and transparency you show (once more) in it.
Now let me explain my personal situation and the reason why I wrote about PayPal: I just mentioned that, because I don't have any credit card and PayPal is what I personally use for online money transfer (that and the gold old SEPA transfer). It's as simple as that. I never meant to imply any security issues with or distrust in the payment infrastructure of Journaly. I wrote my comment not as a software developer (in fact, I didn't take a look at that part of the code yet, but I guess I will eventually do, as you suggest) but as a user; I would really like to support Journaly, therefore I wrote my comment. I guess I should have stated it as a question like "Would it be much effort, or possible at all, to include PayPal as a payment modality"? Sorry for the wrong choice of words.
To be honest, I hadn't heard about Stripe until now. In my ignorance or naivety, I simply assumed that it would be possible to integrate PayPal into the "payment system infrastructure" (Stripe) the Journaly code binds to. So far, from what I can tell, your technical description is a confirmation of what I already implicitly assumed (that Journaly itself doesn't save sensitive data and that the payment processing is handled elsewhere). What I didn't know is that apparently it isn't as straightforward as I imagined.
I hope the reason(ing) behind my comment is clearer now.
Thank you for once more for taking the time to give me and the rest of the Journaly community reading this such a clear, transparent and honest answer.
Thank you for your reply @Eduard! I'm very sorry if my comment seemed like I thought you were criticising me or Journaly in any way, that wasn't my intention at all 🙏🏼
Over the months, a number of people have written to me that they would only subscribe to Premium if we offered PayPal because that's the only method they trust, so I think I misunderstood that part of your reason for wanting to use PayPal was due to general concerns and prudence around keeping your payments safe – which I can totally understand for anyone who has those concerns and I would not view that as criticism. So my only intention was to provide all the background, details, and transparency to set those kind of concerns at ease, but I really apologise for having misunderstood your particular reasoning which was unrelated to this.
I really appreciate that you want to support Journaly! And you didn't make any wrong choices of words. I'll chat with Ryan again and see if there's any simple solution we can think of to accommodate this situation 🧐
Thank you again for all of your amazing support and being a true Journaly rockstar 🎸🔥
@edufuga: Just being curious: Why don't you own a credit card?
@Linda: Auch, wenn dies meiner Meinung nach eine doch recht persönliche Frage ist, antworte ich sie mal: Ganz einfach, weil ich sie bis jetzt nicht benötigt habe. Als ich vor einigen Jahren nach Deutschland ausgewandert bin, habe ich mir bei der Sparkasse ein Girokonto erstellen lassen. Das benutze ich heute noch, obwohl langsam die Gebühren nervig sind. Irgendwann Anfang des Jahres habe ich mir ein PayPal-Conto erstellt und damit mehrere online Überweisungen getätigt (bspw. bei Ikea). Irgendwann werde ich mich mit Sicherheit um ein neues Konto kümmern, aber bis dahin bleibt es nun mal wie es ist.
Verstehe und danke für die Erklärung :) Falls du mal Tipps brauchst, welche Banken es mit guten Konditionen für Kreditkarten gibt, darfst dich gerne bei mir melden :)
@Robin: I don't know much about stripe but I'm wondering if they don't offer other payment options than credit cards. Maybe there is a way to include other options such as giro pay, SEPA Lastschrift (no idea what's that in English), invoice,... via stripe?
I'm putting you on notice Robin, this notification system is off the chain
Oh hello don't mind meeeeeee I'm just generating NOTIFICATIONS!!! 🥺😭❤️
I'm joining the party. Let's see who receives this paper airplane. Off it goes!
Hello, I just received some notifications 🥳
I still can't believe it. No endless scrolling through posts and trying to find the new post between the several hundreds xDDD. No need to remember the number of comments in every post. So much more time for sending paper airplanes.
@Eduard: The end of an era xDD
Hey, @robin, is there a way to automatically mark the notifications as read that one has seen in the browser? I mean, if I click on one, it automatically opens the popup/thread with the corresponding comment on focus. Is there a reason not to assume the user has read that comment? Otherwise there is the "extra work" of manually marking them as read or of deleting them. There you go, few minutes after seeing the feature I'm already compl...uh...commenting on posible improvements.
@robin: Another thing that I've noticed: the very first time I click on a notification (this one: https://journaly.com/post/13299#pc-25643), the page/post opens but the comment/thread is not focussed. The second time it works.
Weehooooooooooooo!!!! Ahhh this is so exciting! @Eduard yes absolutely! We have a series of small improvements we'll be adding over the next few days, including relative time stamps on the top-level notifications and automatically marking notifications as read once you have clicked into them 🥳 We will also be adding Browser Notifications that you'll be able to turn on with a simple little toggle (but we'll let you turn them on only if you want them).
I guess I should write a Journaly post to announce this huge new feature/milestone and I can also outline upcoming improvements, as well as collect people's feedback, thoughts, and additional suggestions there 😀
Oh, ok. Yes, I think you definitely should write that post :D.
@Eduard: I experienced the same thing you were describing.
@Robin: That would be awesome! It is such a huge improvement and everyone should know! Shout it out to the world 📣
Something else: once a notification has been marked as read, I find it makes no sense to keep showing the "mark as read" option any longer. Maybe changing it to "unread" like in an email inbox?
I'm finding a trend on Journaly that may be interesting to explore. For like the third time, after editing a post, I've been told that it wasn't posted for correction, but rather just to "express my feelings" (https://journaly.com/post/15476#t=175231 in the comments). There are other users who regularly publish really long posts and pay little or no attention to any corrections they might get. Perhaps users should have some type of "personal journal" where entries get published like a normal post, but live on their profile page, are visible only to their friends, and accept comments, but not corrections. I know this takes away from the purpuse of Journaly, but perhaps it's an unavoidable deviation that can be thus remedied and accommodated. This would also bring a truly "social" aspect to the site, whereby users can interact with their friends on a more personal level, quite aside from the linguistic aspect. Something to think about! YOURnaly!)))
Heyy @CocoPop! Thanks very much for the comment and sharing your thoughts on this :)
In some ways it's lovely to see people starting to see Journaly as a place they want to simply publish their thoughts or personal stories to share and discuss with the community (I also outline a number of other potential scenarios in that feature outline), but I totally see that this could be frustrating if caring community members then take lots of time to provide feedback/corrections, only to be told that they weren't actually wanted.
I think your thought of having these posts actually live somewhere else is interesting, although I do worry that it could fragment the experience a little bit. It's definitely something I can consider, though!
I actually do also have a rough design I did way back when we were in Alpha Testing for a feature that might really help with this, you can read the outline here. I'd love to get your thoughts on it – do you think that this could potentially solve the issue completely while keeping the User Experience more cohesive and the My Feed page as the central place to find new posts, especially if we make it easy to filter by this "post intent", or do you still think you'd prefer certain types of posts to live elsewhere?
I totally agree with you that all of this ultimately helps bring a truly "social" aspect to Journaly! I think that the upcoming "Direct Messaging/DMs" and "Groups" features will be huge for that, and I have some VERY exciting new ideas around that! xD
Robin, personally, I don't like the fact that there are people who want to use Journaly for social updates when there are so many other platforms for that, but I guess that any place you establish a community is where you eventually end up sharing portions your life. Going back to the post I cited above, I can't say it interested me any further than what needed correcting. It was extremely personal and something that should only interest the poster's friends. (Not to sound insensitive, but I'm here for the linguistic appeal of Journaly). In other words, they've already fragmented the experience, as you put it, by posting a love story and stating outright that they're not interested in corrections, so why not give them a place to do that? One would hope that aside from these social posts, users would also actually post things for correction. I would personally like to see a cleaner Feeds page. But as long as they're going to use Journaly, they should keep those personal posts out of the gen pop and make them visible to their social circle exclusively. It took me a good hour to make over 50 corrections on that post only to be told to get on my bike, as it were))) Having a place to post things only your friends can see would have other advantages. For example, I thought that at some point, it would be cool to meet up on ZOOM with some of the people in my own little Journaly community and be able to post a link to the meeting to that effect, so that only those people see it. A personal posts page would make that possible.
I just read the page you linked above. I think the simplest option would be to have a button to turn off corrections when you post something — or even at any time thereafter, once you feel you've gotten enough corrections, for instance.
@CocoPop: Journaly Premium offers the possibility to post privately. You get a link that you can share privately with your friends. As I understand your comment that's about what you're talking about :)
Yes, Linda, thank you, that's one aspect of it.)))