Important note for those on desktop: while those apolitical communities are listed, they are not currently open (only the "Other Communities" are).
This update has been live on some other Win sites (such as conspiracies.win) for two weeks.
The update is a necessary step to facilitating cross-community pollination and growing into a real social media competitor. It is not perfect, and it is not a finished product.
The desktop site should be exactly the same as before, with the exception that Dark Mode is now dark blue instead of grey and black. This was not a change that we set out to make, but a blue navbar and sidebar with everything else grey and black does not work at all. We will continue to work on the new Dark Mode, and refine the different shades.
Overnight, I was flicking the update live on The Donald and disabling it again a few minutes later, just to harvest feedback in /new - which is about a 65/35% split of good to bad, without taking into account the vocal minority, and the fact that everyone (including myself) tends to dislike change. I wasn't entirely sure on whether we would keep it deployed today, or whether we'd continue making some small changes and try again tomorrow - but this post got stickied (not by me) and so I guess we are committed.
It is perhaps the biggest UI change that we've made since the very early days, and hopefully it'll be the only major mobile UI change that we make. Although we have intentions to continue improving the mobile interface, the goal will be to break changes into smaller updates, which perhaps many users will not even notice.
When we do release apolitical communities: the reason why Voat and many other alternative social media platforms failed is because the users went to the alternatives for the things that the main platforms didn't let them talk about, and those same users went back to the main platforms to talk about everything else.
This cannot happen here. If this happens, we will fail. I'll post more about this in the future.
final note: replies to stickied comments can only be seen by clicking "permalink"
While I have nothing against The Gateway Pundit, we actually had to ban links to that site on /r/The_Donald back in 2017 because at least one of their staff members would post links to the TGP website across a number of accounts many times a day, for months on end, despite us giving multiple warnings. This is a tactic that we normally see from malware-spreading Indians, not from news sites which want to be taken seriously.
As I said below with regards to developing a Discord alternative:
Yes - and this would be preferable, but the problem with this is that messaging platforms REQUIRE mobile apps, and we all know that isn't happening.
Expanding on that - we are also spread very thin as it is on the development of our Reddit alternative, so it's not a great idea and not something that we are seriously considering.
Having said that, if you are a developer with the experience and time to contribute to the development of a Discord (or Reddit) alternative, then send me a private message. (even if you've messaged me before - sorry, I am not great at dealing with messages)
Also, have you seriously considered making your own version of Discord?
Yes - and this would be preferable, but the problem with this is that messaging platforms REQUIRE mobile apps, and we all know that isn't happening.
Is that on a page where you are getting an error message? I had that too, but after I cleared my cache, those issues stopped. This will likely fix for everyone within a few hours when their local cache cleans up if this is true.