Changelog: v0.3.0

Making these changelogs a little more formal going forward. Their cadence will slow as tuhat approaches feature completion; less frequent updates, but more considered ones.

Moderation

Tuhat has always believed in free speech, but that doesn't mean we're obligated to amplify every voice equally. This release introduces a moderation framework that tries to balance openness with accountability.

You can now report a letter on your post that you believe isn't in good faith. Doing so removes it immediately and flags the author to the moderation team, with the report logged against their account. This isn't a tool for silencing disagreement; it's a tool for dealing with bad actors.

Alongside manual reporting, there's now automated moderation that monitors for suspicious behaviour patterns, including accounts that accumulate multiple user reports in a short period. These flags are always reviewed by a person. Nothing is actioned automatically. Depending on what the reviewer finds, individual posts can be unlisted with a note to the author, removed entirely, or in more serious cases, the account can be removed.

On the question of muting: an account deemed by moderators to be fundamentally misaligned with tuhat's values will have their posts excluded from the homepage feed. Their content continues to exist and function normally under their /u/ URL. We're not in the business of erasure. But tuhat won't actively surface it. We think this is the right balance.

Editor

The writing experience has had a significant overhaul. We're now using QuillJS for rich text live editing. Markdown is excellent, and we still support it; but having formatting rendered in place as you write simplifies things considerably, especially for writers who aren't comfortable thinking in syntax.

Your first header line is now used automatically as the post title, though you can override this if needed. We've also added choice of fonts (all preinstalled system fonts, no external dependencies) and control over line length; short, medium, or long, so you can shape how your writing feels on the page.

For those who prefer working in markdown, it's back. You can use markdown symbols directly in the editor to produce headers, bold, italic, links, and so on. The two approaches coexist comfortably.

Post Letters

This is an experimental feature, and we're curious to see how it's used.

Subscribers who follow you by email will now be able to reply directly to the tuhat newsletter they receive, and that reply will arrive in your letters inbox on the platform. It closes a loop that previously didn't exist: someone reads your post in their inbox, has a thought, and now they can share it with you without needing to create an account or navigate back to the site.

To protect readers' privacy, letters received this way are non-publishable by default. They're for the author's eyes, not the public feed.

Bio

Under site settings, you can now choose to share your full name, add a link to a personal site, and write up to 1000 characters about yourself or your account. Simple, but overdue.

Spam

This one's a bit of an anti-feature, and we acknowledge it might not be necessary for the current audience. But to keep the main feed from being dominated by any single account: only one post per day per user is added to tuhat's homepage feed.

This seems like a reasonable constraint. If you're creating original long-form writing, it's fairly unlikely you're publishing more than once a day. If you do write multiple posts in a day and need them up, they all still appear on your own page and feed. The limit applies only to homepage visibility. Nothing is hidden from your readers; it just won't be frontpaged more than once in a 24-hour window.

Multilingual

One of the founding motivations for tuhat; not the only one, but a real one, was to push back against the concentration of online publishing infrastructure in the hands of a small number of Silicon Valley companies, most of which treat English as the default and everything else as an afterthought.

Writing in another language shouldn't mean writing into a void. tuhat now supports full internationalisation across the following languages, meaning menus, buttons, and interface elements render in those languages, and posts written in them have their own dedicated homepage. For example, tuhat.net/es for Spanish. Also tag suggestions will now be scoped to your language.

Supported languages in this release: English, Chinese (Mandarin), Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, Swedish, Arabic, and Hindi.

If you write in a language that isn't listed, contact us and we'll add it. The translations were machine-generated, so if something reads oddly, contact us there too.

Author and Platform Support

We've started working seriously on how authors can make their writing financially sustainable on tuhat. This is harder than it sounds, particularly from South Africa, where access to major payment platforms is limited and the fee structures of those we can access are punishing.

The model we're working toward is threshold-batched micropayments. Rather than charging readers each time they want to support an author, readers allocate funds across the authors they value. When the total allocated breaches a threshold, that amount is charged and distributed to everyone funds have been allocated against. The goal is to avoid holding money in escrow while keeping individual transaction costs low enough that the economics actually work for authors.

tuhat's aim is to operate this at 5% or less of the money given. To make that concrete: if you want to give an author $5, the goal is that they receive at least $4.75 in their account, with all processing fees absorbed in that 25¢. For comparison, Stripe charges 2.9% + 30¢ to take a payment, leaving $4.555, plus a further 0.25% + $0.25 to pay it out. The author ends up with $4.29; roughly 14.2% gone before they see a cent.

We're not there yet, but this is the direction we're building toward. More detail will come as it takes shape.

Thanks

The diversity and quality of writing on tuhat has been genuinely impressive. It's a pleasure to provide a platform for it.

Writing is hard. Good writing is considerably harder. Sitting down and thinking carefully enough to produce a thousand words is no small thing, and we don't take lightly that people are choosing to do that here.