DFOS product roadmap (March)

One month in.

During that time, DFOS has gone from a quiet alpha to a living platform with 1,500+ accounts, spaces being created by people we've never met, and members building things against our API before we even documented it. The energy is real. But what is it building towards?

This post is a detailed update on where the product is, what just shipped, what's coming, and the bigger shape we're building toward.

What just shipped

The last two weeks were the densest stretch of product development since launch. Two major releases — 0.19.0 and 0.20.0 — touched every layer of the platform. Here's what changed:

The realtime system was rebuilt from scratch. Every event in DFOS — new posts, messages, reactions, role changes, notifications — now routes through a per-user delivery pipeline that checks permissions at the moment it fires. Before, events were broadcast to everyone in a space regardless of who they were. Now the system can answer the question "should this specific person see this specific thing?" That question is the foundation for everything that comes next: paid spaces, private channels, notification controls, gated content. Not many platforms would be proud of reducing notifications by 20x but we are.

Permissions got real. We moved from a flat admin/member split to a three-tier system: owner, admin, member. Custom roles now carry functional permissions. Admins can configure which actions are open to all members versus gated behind a role. This is the trust scaffold that lets spaces govern themselves differently — a read-mostly publication space, a space where chat is open but posting is curated, a space that restricts invites to control growth. This is backend for now, but frontend UIs for per-role permission grants and per-topic overrides are shipping this week.

Announcements. Admins can now broadcast any post to every member with a custom subject line. An admin saying "this matters, pay attention" and pushing it to everyone. This is the first step in posts becoming a distribution primitive. More on that below.

Post moderation. Admins can hide posts with a reason, optionally kick or ban the author, and the post author sees exactly what happened and why. Hidden posts stay in the database and can be restored. This is the first real content governance tool in DFOS.

Follows. The first cross-space social graph. Follow someone and their posts get promoted from ambient (a dot) to directed (a notification). Mutuals are the only outward signal. Your graph is personal.

The full notification system was replaced. Four-layer architecture: entity timestamps, member watermarks, directed notifications, cursors. The old system wrote one database row per member per event. The new system derives everything from two primitives: when did you last look at this, and what happened that's directed at you. Comments, quote-replies, link previews, and a redesigned members page round it out.

MCP server with OAuth 2.1. Claude can now talk to DFOS directly. This is already being used internally and by members building tools. The protocol layer is live and publicly verifiable — every piece of content is signed, content-addressed, and chain-linked.

What's coming

Three major threads are converging this month:

Money. Paid subscriptions, space gating, treasury visibility. The infrastructure for this already exists — plans, Stripe binding, price tiers, a double-entry ledger with bigint precision, a role that gets assigned to paying members. What was missing was the realtime layer being able to distinguish a paying subscriber from a free member at the moment content is served. That's now solved. The subscription checkout, treasury dashboard (balance, income, goals), and Stripe Connect withdrawal are the next things shipping. This will include multiple forms of payment, including one-time, recurring, or lifetime accrual, like a loyalty program, as suggested by Elle Griffin.

Distribution. Posts are about to travel outward from spaces for the first time. Announcements were step one. Next: public profiles (an opt-in identity visible outside the space boundary), public posts leaking (admin-curated posts surface on a space's public page with author consent), and newsletter blasts (post-as-email to imported contacts and members). Every step is consent-gated.

Space identity. This is the one I'm most excited about. Right now every space looks basically the same. But what if admins could shape their homepage the way you arrange your iPhone? Pin a specific post, a chatroom, a channel of posts, a specific function — each with a custom name and icon. The mechanism is simple but the implication is radical: every space becomes a genuinely different experience. I sketched this out over the weekend and the team is already exploring what it takes to build.

Alongside all of this: View Source (inspect the cryptographic proof layer underneath any post or profile), open-source SDK release (lib-crypto and lib-identity), notification preferences, and a "Today" view that gives you one calm surface across all your spaces.

The bigger shape

Amazingly, DFOS is already a living thing with its own culture, rhythms, and emergent behaviors. Members created a space directory. A working glossary. Custom member cards. Recurring Screenshot Saturdays. Someone built a community graph visualization against our API. The Chorus channel lets the community collectively tweet anything that gets 5+ upvotes. None of this was planned.

We’re also sometimes struggled with the overwhelm of how much has been going on. We’re trying to get our heads around that too. That tension is productive. It's pushing us toward something more intentional — spaces that feel editorial, like a place you visit with purpose.

The infrastructure shipping right now (permissions, roles, space customization, distribution controls) is what makes that possible. You can't build a calm, differentiated experience on a platform that treats every member the same and broadcasts everything to everyone. Now it doesn't have to.

March is the month the foundation becomes the building. Thanks for being here while the scaffolding is still visible.