Lips App Product Roadmap For The Next 6ish Months đź’•
Ah! Our first product roadmap post. First of all, our team wants to give a huge thank you to all of the community investors who participated in our Wefunder campaign. Without you these new features and improvements would not be possible.
As a community-owned company, it’s important for us to communicate the vision of Lips with both our users and community investors. So, without further ado — here is what we have coming up for the Lips app improvements and technology builds in the next 6ish months.
REPORTING
As of now, users have only been able to report posts via email. With our new reporting features, users will be able to report posts to the Lips moderation team within the app, and will be notified as to the results of their reports.
Lips understands that the report feature has a history of being used as a tool for hate and harassment on other social media platforms, and for this reason we currently only allow approved users to report harmful content or copyright violations.
Something to note here is that because of our approved user posting system, the % of reported posts (posts that violated community guidelines) per number of users is extremely low (almost non-existent) compared to other social media platforms.
INCREASED PRIVACY MEASURES
This category includes the ability to customize your privacy settings (visible only to approved users, etc.), as well as measures to prevent screenshotting from mobile, and discourage/disable downloading images from desktop.
EDITING POSTS
This is a broad category that includes both front and back-end features. On the user-facing side, this includes the ability to edit posts and delete all re-posts, as well as the ability to add hashtags to your existing posts AND posts of other users.
Users will be notified if a new hashtag was suggested by the community and added to your post by a moderator. All new hashtags added to posts can be contested by the original poster. These hashtag system improvements might seem insignificant, but it’s a big step towards our larger vision of a community-moderated social media space.
CONNECT AND COMMUNICATE IN-APP
This was BY FAR the most requested feature when we first launched. We wish we could have implemented this feature earlier, but we needed to raise funds in order to take on such a big app feature addition, and we wanted to make sure this was done right — i.e. in a way that takes what we love about social media communication, but leaves out the things that harm us and our communities.
Comments will be the first iteration of in-app communication on Lips, and will be live on the platform most likely by early 2022. We are still gathering information on exactly the best way to make comments work on Lips, but from the first round of user feedback it seems that comments from approved users and selected followers is the way to go for now.
Be sure to sign up for our co-design sessions to give us input on commenting on Lips (and other features of course) as we build.
CREATOR MONETIZATION
This is an important one for a lot of reasons that if you are reading this post you probably already understand. Building a healthier social media for Lips users includes financial well-being, which sadly is becoming more and more difficult to achieve for marginalized online communities. This feature category in particular will evolve over time as we gather more feedback, for now it’s necessary to just start building and iterating, even if it’s not perfect right away.
The first version of monetization will come in the form of a “Tips Jar” — a feature suggestion from the community. This will be a way to start collecting funds from your fans on Lips either for yourself, or for a cause you’re passionate about. Think of it like a crowdfunding campaign that is always open. As we get feedback, we might add customizable aspects of this feature such as Goals and Countdowns.
As many in the Lips community are creators of all kinds, we are also working on building the first version of our marketplace. The marketplace might only be available to some at first so that we can properly test it, but rest assured that anyone wanting to sell and promote legal artwork, merchandise, classes and more on Lips will be able to.
Cryptocurrency payments are also very much on the radar for this app development phase. So if you are an artist who is selling NFTs, or a creator that prefers to be paid in Crypto — keep an eye out for this to be a part of Lips in the next few months. If you are a creator who is not familiar with cryptocurrency, Lips will help you to learn as this is going to be important for all marginalized creators in the future to monetize their work without dependency on biased banking solutions.
CUSTOMIZE APPEARANCE
In order to bring back some of the things about heyday tumblr and live journal we loved, we are prioritizing app appearance customization features so that the app can easily evolve and shift alongside our users’ gender identities. This includes app skins, profile color customization, even choosing what your cursor looks like. We are very excited about this app improvement, because besides making Lips more inclusive, it’s going to be rad.
COLLECTIONS
Collections is another really fun feature we are designing with the help of the community. Right now, all users have access to their “Lips Love” page (click the lips icon in your main menu opens this page), which is a basic collection of all the posts you have liked or given “lips love” too. This page serves as the foundation for our visions for what we are tentatively calling “collections” where users can organize their likes and make private and public collections of posts.
WEB ACCESSIBILITY COMPLIANCE
We recognize that the current version of lips is far from ideal when it comes to accessibility for the vision impaired. This is at the top of our priority list for determining how best to meet and exceed online accessibility standards.
JOIN A CO-DESIGN SESSION
All the above being stated, nothing about Lips is ever written in stone. We are an evolving community that is driven by the collective needs of our users. If you can spare 45min in the next two weeks, we would greatly appreciate your participation in an upcoming co-design session to give us some insights into the above, upcoming features.
Click here to get on the co-design list, and we’ll be in touch soon with dates, times, and how to join.