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Looking back at 2022 at Minds

InfoJan 31, 2023, 5:38:59 PM
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Hey there Minds community members! As we wrap up the year 2022, we wanted to take a moment to thank you for being a part of our community and to share some of the exciting things we've been up to. This past year, we've introduced a bunch of new features that we hope you've been enjoying, and we've also welcomed some talented new people to the Minds team.

It's been a busy and productive year, and we're grateful to have you along for the ride. In this blog, we'll take a look back at some of the highlights from the past year and give you a sneak peek at what's coming up in the future. We can't wait to see what the next year brings, and we hope you'll continue to be a part of the Minds community.

Development

Over the past year, we've introduced a number of new features that we hope have enhanced your experience on our platform. Here are some of the notable ones:

  • Improved onboarding experience for new members, to provide more smooth and seamless introduction to Minds
  • Improved recommendations to provide members with more personalized and relevant content
  • New activity designs, that enabled us to make further features, such as Multi-Image posting and Supermind (read our blog here)
  • Multi-image posting, a highly requested feature that enables members to post up to 4 pictures in a single post (read our introduction blog here)
  • Supermind, a feature that enables members to ask questions from their favorite creators  (read our blog here)
  • Nostr integration allows for Minds to be decentralized (read our blog here)
  • Spam detection is something that we are continuously working on, to make the platform pleasant to use for everyone (read our blog about spam here)
  • Many back-end and infrastructure updates that aren’t obvious, but absolutely essential to keeping the app running :)

If you want to know what we are up to at Minds, you can visit our @info page where we publish dev update blogs on bi-weekly basis (see blogs), but also changelogs and notices about site functions. Another way of seeing what is being worked on, is our gitlab.

Press coverage

This past year, Minds was featured in multiple outlets for its accomplishments.

Minds CEO Bill Ottman was featured on Joe Rogan Experience #1792 alongside Daryl Davis, promoting a study about censorship: The Censorship Effect. This podcast has been referenced in media by The Post Millennial, The Blaze and Rebel News. The study was later referenced by Washington Examiner, ABC Radio National and American Renaissance.

Later on in the year, Minds hosted the Festival of Ideas in NYC, for which ads were blacklisted on twitter, as reported on by Breitbart. The festival was referenced by Fox News, NTD and Vincent Kelley on Substack.

Minds team at the Festival of Ideas in June

Minds has had some comments concerning Parler and its closed source, reported by Cheddar News. Minds has also commented on Twitter dealings, as referenced in Fox News and New York Post articles.

Besides appearance on Joe Rogan Experience, Minds CEO Bill Ottman has also appeared in multiple Timcast episodes in May, June and October and on Quite Frankly podcasts in June and October. Daryl Davis has also appeared on the Same Drugs podcast in april.

Minds has also been listed as one of decentralized social media by Daily Coin and Coin Desk. To see more of our press coverage this year, you can see it here.

Improved communication

We were able to improve our communication towards our community this year. On our new channel, @info is used to communicate various information about what is going on on Minds, and in our Development team.

We have started bi-weekly Development updates that are in line with our Sprints, we have implemented changelogs for mobile releases, and we are also releasing some blogs about important things that happen on Minds.

We’ve been also using #betterminds to gather some invaluable feedback from our community, so make sure you use that hashtag if you have ideas for improvements on Minds!

New hires

This year, we've had the pleasure of adding some talented new team members to Minds. Let us introduce you to a few of them and give you a quick overview of their roles and what they bring to the team:

  • Product Manager - Ryan (@mellamoMRS)
  • Community Manager - Bashy (@Bashynx)
  • Lead Developer - Fausto (@th3realjohn)
  • Lead Developer - Mani (@manishoo)
  • Lead QA - Tanya (@tanyatech)
  • Site Reliability Engineer - Zack (@zackwy)
  • Lead Designer - Michael (@mwrobs)
  • Designer - Chaitanya (@chints98)
  • Marketing Director - Sean (@seanfracek)
  • Sales Representative / Brand Ambassador - Matt (@mantone)
  • Mobile React Native Lead - Vali (@valinaga)
  • Data Engineering - Michael (@michael)

Looking into future

We are still working on setting realistic goals for a more distant future, but in the near future, we are planning to improve our Boost system and the way we verify uniqueness. Another big task we are planning to undertake is changing how Minds+ and Minds Pro work, and improving on them.