What's in motion

The platform is reorganizing around apps, the protocol is being wired back into the product, external apps and portable identity are on the way, and we're building toward a content operating system and shared private internets — not a social platform that follows the old rules.

A lot has shipped to get here and a lot more is in progress. Here's where things stand.

Where it's heading

The aim: your space as a desktop you compose from purpose-built apps you install and customize: chat, feed, treasury, note, etc. Organize them into folders, drag and drop, name them, icon them, make it yours. This is what Yancey previewed, and we're starting to open it up very soon — running alongside the current experience so you can try it early and give us feedback as we build it out. Access control changes have been vectoring us towards this. Topics are being internalized as primitives that apps compose on, so you won't manage raw topics anymore. Instead, you'll install a feed app, a chat app with a few rooms, a treasury with a goal. The apps handle their own topology. The desktop is the homescreen.

On the protocol side, the spec is finalizing and has been independently implemented — content replicating between systems that have never talked to each other, verified by cryptographic proof, no coordination required. The clear.txt community has been deep in this. The open source protocol just had its biggest cycle: full credential support with delegation and revocation, and the CLI converging with the relay into a single binary — your signing tool and a local-first sync node in one. We're now wiring the protocol back into the product, which is what opens the path toward personal data sync, offline access, portable data, and the real connectivity surface that eager builders here are already working toward.

All of this is converging toward three things.

• External apps inside DFOS — third-party tools installed in your space with authorized access to resources, your space as a host environment for software other people build.
• Your identity traveling outward — connecting to external services, authorizing agents, portable across platforms. We've designed the spec for Sign In With DFOS, and people in the community are already independently trying to wire DFOS identity into their own projects.
• Pure protocol experiences — independent software speaking the same identity and content protocol with no platform dependency at all. Apps come in, identity goes out, and at the protocol layer the platform is optional entirely.

The dark forest ethos doesn't change — proof is public, content is private, and the protocol enforces that by design. External apps and portable identity open new surfaces without opening the forest itself.

Everything about how software gets built and used is changing. The decisions we're making — private desktops instead of public feeds, protocol-first instead of platform-locked, composable apps instead of fixed layouts — are shaped by building through that disruption, not around it. You can't invite people to build on a complicated surface.

What's shipped and next

Last week the sidebar got a full redesign alongside global search and bookmarks — you can find posts, messages, and people across all your spaces from one place now. Global DMs are going live soon — DMs are being extracted from individual spaces into a single global conversation per person, and all existing space-scoped DMs between the same people will merge. Conversations will follow you instead of being locked to where they started. A unified thread inbox is next after that. Search, bookmarks, sidebar, and now messaging — all living above any individual space.

Email push notifications are live — turn them on in your user settings to get emailed when you're away from the platform. The system adapts to how long you've been idle, starting frequent and backing off. We're starting to turn this on for members who've been away, to bring them back into conversations they're missing — but you can enable it for yourself today. Sending a post as an email blast to all space members, like a newsletter or announcement, is next.

Post visibility got a big upgrade. Before, public sharing only worked in open spaces with a public profile and fully visible topics. Now any post in any space can be shared outside the forest regardless of space configuration. The new 'Set visibility' option in the three-dots menu on posts allows sharing (or locking down) any post at five different levels — from fully public to admins only. Every space can now have shareable post URLs whether or not you've set a custom domain or enabled a public space profile.

If you run a space, you've probably noticed access control getting simpler. The permission system that had dozens of configuration points connected by invisible cascades is now flat and direct-set — less surface area, same expressiveness. That simplification is what's clearing the path for the app model above. Directly managing space-wide topic permissions is going away entirely with the new app model.

We've also been fixing things people have been feeling — the app is snappier overall, and long-standing bugs around chat scrolling, notification counts, and message editing are cleaned up.

More soon ✌️