NCE Feature Update — 2026-04-22

You might be reading this in your inbox — that's new this week, and one of the things this update is about. Yancey laid out the direction in his Week 12 post; this is the build-side runthrough, continuing from last week's update.

Conversations follow you

DMs are no longer scoped to individual spaces. Every DM pair now has one conversation that spans every space you share — if you were talking to the same person in both NCE and DFF, those threads have been merged into a single thread. All history is preserved, and the migration has run across every existing user. Search, pins, notifications, and the inbox all operate at the global level now: threads and DMs live together in a single /inbox, not locked inside whichever space you happened to start them in.

The logic is simple: conversations belong to the people in them, not the surface they started on. Moving between spaces shouldn't mean leaving a thread behind.

The desktop, in pieces

Yancey previewed Desktop2 on Monday. What's happening here: an initial public alpha launch lands in parallel in the coming days — if you run a space, a Desktop2 icon will appear on your home and you'll be able to compose a new layout without affecting how current members experience the space. Side-by-side is the whole point. Next week: more apps in the library and migration tooling so space runners can cut their space over to the new experience when they're ready.

What it actually is: your space stops being a fixed layout we ship and starts being software you compose. You install a chat, a feed, a treasury. Drop them where you want, name them, icon them, wallpaper the desktop. The apps handle their own topology — you don't manage raw topics anymore, you install apps that bring topics with them. Every space ends up looking different because every space is different software.

I alluded to it some of this my post last week: the new app and desktop models directly connect with the way DFOS platform data will be available and synced over the DFOS protocol. Hop over to The Studio (#proj-dfos) in clear.txt to chat protocol, third-party app architecture, or prepare for Sign-In With DFOS.

More as it rolls out and the library grows.

Newsletter mode

The email broadcast system that delivered this post is live for all spaces. Any announcement post can be sent as email, with an audience preview that shows exactly how many members will receive it, a template preview, an email-health view in admin to catch delivery issues, and a short cooldown between sends.

You can access this through the existing Send as Announcement menu option in the post 3-dots menu as space admin:

Up next: recipient lists that extend beyond space membership, so newsletters can reach people who haven't joined the space itself — the groundwork for publications, digests, and announcements that travel further. Space runners, worth thinking about what you'd want to send.

Discovery, arriving small

We're also standing up a curated directory of public spaces — hand-picked to start, not algorithmic. More when there's more to show.

Editor and chat polish

Ilya shipped a meaningful pass on the long-post editor: sticky fullscreen mode so you don't scroll back up while writing, undo/redo, an inline image uploader that doesn't jump the layout when images load, and a round of mobile fixes. Chat got a redact / spoiler button — wrap text in ||double bars|| and recipients see a gradient redaction block they can click to reveal.

A new markdown formatting toolbar also landed in the chat input — common formatting like bold, italic, code, and links is a button press now, no syntax memorization required. Under the hood, the editor upgraded to Tiptap v3, which makes typing and edits noticeably smoother across the app.

Other things

Push email on by default — the first cohort of push-over-email testers saw 21% click-through, enough to roll it out to everyone. Accounts idle for 30+ days don't receive push, and push emails include at most the last 7 days of missed notifications.

Bug sweep — chat scrolling, notification counts, message editing, and a handful of long-standing irritations are cleaned up.

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DMs moved out of the space. Announcements moved off the platform. Soon the space itself will stop being a fixed layout and become software you compose.

People are already bending DFOS to fit their workflow — private workspaces, curation, exhibition infrastructure. Danielle wrote about her alternative uses this week. The apps layer makes those uses the native shape, not a workaround.

More soon ✌️