2021 w21 and w22: feedback is a gift.
I hope you’re enjoying another day on our special little planet. I have been thinking a lot about the purpose of these emails and it seems in one word it’s ‘feedback’. We’re curious about your reactions to things. We’re curious about your perspectives and your work. And learning from our community is something that we find deeply inspiring.
So maybe it’s worth starting this email with some questions:
- What do you think about Futureland? What's interesting about it? What's confusing about it?
- What do you think about these emails? What’s nice? What's not so nice? :)
- What are ya working on right now?
- Where in our world do ya live?
- What are you curious about these days?
- Do ya want to hang out with me? Lol
⟡⟡⟡
A few notes:
1 - How to Explain Futureland
Something I hear often from our most active users is “I use Futureland every day, why is it so hard for me to explain it to my friends?”. I thought this was an interesting question so I wrote an entry about it: https://futureland.tv/vin/entry/75489. I find that writing and talking about this question with my friends is very revealing. It has led to thinking about why things are difficult to explain in general and how so often we use things without fundamentally understanding them.
⟡ If you decide to read this, please tell me what you think about it. 💕
2 - A New Editor
We launched a new editor on Futureland which includes a new interface, markdown previews, smart typography, username suggestions and shortcuts for things like italics, bold and more.
⟡ Have you tried it out? What do you think about it? How can we make it better?
3 - New User and Journal Popovers
When you hover over any user or journal on Futureland, you will see a little pop over that provides a bit of additional context. It seems like little details like this add a lot to the overall experience of using Futureland.
⟡ What do you think about all of the visual changes we have been making to Futureland lately?
4 - Improving Comments
We made a bunch of improvements to comments on Futureland. User avatars are now displayed on each comment, styling has been cleaned up and we started rendering block quotes because our community has been using them to reply to each other a lot. There’s much to explore when it comes to discussions on Futureland. This feels like only the beginning of this path.
⟡ How do you think discussions could be improved on Futureland?
⟡ What general dimension of Futureland do you think are lacking right now?
5 - New (Experimental) Light Mode
We published an early version of light mode for you to play around with. There’s still a lot to tune in here with the colours and that will happen naturally over time. 🌀
⟡ What do you like most about Futureland's interfaces? What bothers you about it?
6 - New Upload and Publish Indicators
We integrated the uploading and publishing indicators right into a journal’s circle. This maintains a clean and fast experience while still providing useful information about the status of an entry.
⟡ What do you think about little improvements like this? Are you imagining anything here that can be improved?
7 - New Quiet Mode
Quiet Mode is a new mode on Futureland that removes all community activity from Futureland’s interface. As @christian describes it, “Turning on quiet mode shifts the home page into a stream of your own most recent entries across [all of] your journals”. It’s a way to focus on your own work and see the work of others whenever it makes sense for you.
⟡ What do you think about creating a tool that supports both individual and social modes like this?
8 - More profile updates
We are making continual updates to profiles on Futureland. We flatted the interface making things familiar and immediately viewable. We’re still preserving the Daily and Not Daily filtering on journals, which seems to be an important element of Futureland.
⟡ How else do you think we could improve these profiles?
⟡ If your profile represented your character in Futureland, what character attributes do you want to define?
⟡⟡⟡
Now a few journals to visit:
There has been some early experimentation with micro dosing psilocybin on Futureland through journals titled, 🍄. It's an interesting expression of behavioural journaling on Futureland and it makes me curious about what might happen as we continue on.
@mintie is a newer contributor on Futureland that we’re learning a lot from. His daily journals include things like meditation, typing faster, ever green notes, anki, training, applied statistics, time blocking, chores, and deepening his relationship with an adopted cat named Cleo.
@ririmon’s journals are pleasant to read. A few I enjoy regularly are drabblings and musings, kind reminders to myself, Path to the Spark Joy Notetaking System and Identi-tea things.
Morning pages is becoming a more common experiment on Futureland. It's something I have been experimenting with as well (100 consecutive days so far). @lucas has started tinkering with a little morning pages app he calls Pagi.
ty for everything <3
We’re distilling our experiences on Futureland (FL) into weekly emails. If you ever want to chat or hang out, just reply to this email. Your input helps a lot on independent projects like this. 🌀
And if you're curious about how you can use Futureland, watch this video on using it to design a morning routine. 🌞
