Hacienda 1.1

It's here — Hacienda 1.1. What follows is the build-side runthrough, picking up from Yancey's On shared private internets. The big structural thing first: the migration out of the pre-app world is finished. Everything is an app now — the old topic, chat, and post surfaces are retired, and anything that didn't get moved over by hand was auto-migrated into Migrated Blog and Migrated Chat tiles you can rearrange and place wherever you want. The desktop is the front door now too — a space's URL opens straight onto it. With that settled, here's what's actually new.

Money works end to end now

A space could already take money in — paid access, keys — since launch; what 1.1 builds is the whole way back out. It works in three moves: a space treasury collects everything its keys earn, so there's one place the money actually lands; from there a Spacerunner pays members straight out of it — split a release's revenue across the people who made it, or just send one person their cut; and each member can withdraw their balance to a real bank account. That's the full loop — money comes in through paid access and goes back out to members, without anyone leaving the space to make it happen.

Your own wallet — balance, activity, withdrawals, payout account — lives under Wallet in the sidebar; the treasury and the pay-members flow live in the space menu for Spacerunners. And the money tells you about itself now: a notification when someone buys one of your space's keys, a note when you've been paid, an email when a withdrawal is on its way and another when it lands in your bank.

Permissions, back inside your apps

The fine-grained access control the app transition had temporarily knocked loose is back, and it lives inside each app now rather than off in a global settings page. On any blog topic or chat room you set who can post, who can comment, and who can chat — from the topic's three-dot menu — and you can set it at the moment you install an app too, so a space comes up already configured the way you meant it instead of you walking around locking things down afterward. The install flow itself got a real pass alongside this: name your rooms and topics up front, give them cover images, and the install dialog and the settings dialog finally read as the same surface.

Profile and identity

Your profile carries links now — up to three, across Website, Instagram, TikTok, X, Substack, Are.na, and Metalabel — shown on your identity card. That card is wired everywhere: hover any avatar to see who someone is, click through for their full profile.

Desktop

Deleting things on your desktop is more robust now — it cleans up properly instead of leaving stray content behind — and under the hood, deletes are no longer destructive. A full restore engine already exists below the surface; the user-facing trash will arrive in a later release, but if you ever delete something you shouldn't have, ask — we can get it back. Two smaller moves alongside it: groups can be filed inside folders, and Esc (or an app's close button) now steps you out one level — back to the folder or group you opened the app from — instead of throwing you all the way home.

MCP post-Hacienda

The MCP surface has been fully re-tooled around the new apps model, and it's open to every member now — no flag. An agent acting as you can read your spaces and feed, write posts, comments, and messages, manage DMs, and join spaces and groups, all bound to your identity and your permissions. Every write an agent makes is now recorded in a provenance ledger alongside the content it touched — groundwork for surfacing agent authorship — and we have a few ideas on how sub-identities can be used to represent non-human outputs.

Smaller things

Chat reliably opens pinned to the latest message now, across rooms, threads, and DMs. You can reorder blog topics and chat rooms from the settings menu, and add every member holding a given role to a group in one move. Announcements take an optional subject line — leave it blank and it uses the post title. Sign-in is join-aware: it shows which space you're joining and returns you there afterward. And admins can remove another member's post or comment, with the author notified.

Fixes

More than fifty bugs closed since launch. A few worth naming: chat messages no longer disappear on send — that was a race on busy threads; the message was always saved, it just dropped off your screen. A deleted post is actually gone now — it had been possible for a removed post to linger as an unkillable tombstone. Bare links in posts and chat stopped dead-ending on a 404. Upvotes, comments, replies, and bookmarks now work on a post no matter how you opened it — from a shortcut, a chat pulse, or search, not just from the feed. And notifications stopped following you into spaces you've left, with the unread count matching what's actually new.

What's next

Next cycle is Hacienda 1.2, and it's about media: video, audio, and real media support across all apps — richer posts, richer desktops. The first slice is already testing in beta — drag files onto your desktop and they become persistent tiles, images as thumbnails, playable audio and video, and everything else as typed glyphs.

And with Hacienda settled, we're picking back up on the open-source protocol and surfacing that integration in the product.

Money flows out now, not just in. Permissions live where the content lives. The desktop is the front door.

More soon ✌️