Ecency Web - Faster to read, easier to publish, more rewarding to use

We just shipped last of Ecency Web 4.3.9 changes, and it is one of the biggest quality releases we have put out in a while. This cycle was less about flashy new buttons and more about the things you feel every day: pages that load faster, a mobile app that gets out of your way, publishing that does not break, notifications that actually reach you, and a stronger, safer foundation underneath it all.

Here is what changed and, more importantly, what it means for you.

TL;DR

• Faster everywhere - new caching layer, lighter pages, and big mobile loading-speed wins.

• More rewarding - daily quests, a leaderboard badge, and smoother commenting.

• Cleaner on mobile - a hide-on-scroll top bar, inline search, and tidier action buttons.

• Better discovery - smarter "Read next," richer search metadata, and cleaner post URLs.

• Smoother publishing - editor fixes, sharper images, and more embeds.

• More reliable - steadier notifications and chat, plus stronger wallet broadcasting.

• Safer - a large security cleanup and many crash fixes.

• More languages - Thai and Turkish added.

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Speed: the site is noticeably faster

Most of our engineering effort this release went into making Ecency feel instant, especially on phones and slower connections.

• Faster post and feed loading. We added a multi-layer cache (with Redis) that serves posts based on their age, so popular and older content is delivered almost immediately instead of being rebuilt every time. Feeds got their own round of performance work as well.

• Lighter pages. We trimmed a lot of JavaScript that used to load before you could even read a post. The emoji picker alone was costing roughly half a megabyte on first load - it now loads only when you actually open it. The post editor, tipping flow, and wallet key libraries no longer get shipped to people who are just reading. Less code downloaded means faster, smoother pages.

• Better Core Web Vitals on mobile. We fixed how the main post image is discovered and preloaded, so the largest part of the page appears sooner. This directly improves the loading scores Google and others use to rank pages.

• Faster reading flow. Reading is now snappier because heavy interactive pieces are loaded in the background instead of blocking the page.

The short version: less waiting, more reading.

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A more rewarding, engaging experience

We leaned into the things that make Ecency fun and habit-forming.

• Daily quests. A new daily quests tracker lives in Perks. Complete simple daily actions, build a streak, and stay engaged with the community.

• Leaderboard badge. Finish all of your daily quests and earn a badge that shows up on the leaderboard. A little recognition for showing up.

• Easier commenting and interaction. We reworked the engagement flow so commenting, navigating, and acting on a post is smoother on both desktop and mobile. If you try to do something that needs an account, you are prompted to log in right where you are instead of being bounced away.

• Better post stats. Post views (visits) are now reload-proof and more accurate, and entry pages show the average time visitors spend reading - useful signal for authors who want to understand their audience.

• Ecency source badge. Posts published through Ecency now show a clear source badge on the post page.

• Perks, clearly named. The navbar button formerly labeled "Plus" is now "Perks," which better reflects what is inside.

  

  

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Mobile refinements

If you browse on a phone, this release will feel cleaner.

• A proper top bar. The mobile top navigation is now a full-width sticky bar that hides when you scroll down and reappears when you scroll up, giving you more screen for content.

• Expanding search. Tap to expand search inline, with the keyboard focusing automatically so you can start typing right away.

• Tidier action buttons. The compose pen and the scroll-to-top button are now a matched, properly aligned pair of circular buttons - small detail, much cleaner look.

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Smarter content discovery

We want you to always have something good to read next.

• Improved "Read next" and similar content. We rebuilt how related posts are found using Elasticsearch "More Like This," merged multiple sources, and prefetch suggestions so they are ready when you reach the end of a post. Thumbnails and previews for these suggestions were fixed too. More on Hivesearcher changes we will write in next post.

• View more tags. Easier to explore tags and dig into topics you care about.

• Index menu improvements. Cleaner navigation around the main index and feed filters.

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Publishing and the editor

Creating content should never fight you.

• Publish editor fixes. We repaired link editing, select-all, and a couple of crashes in the /publish composer so writing and formatting stay smooth.

• Better images in posts. Ecency-hosted images are now proxied properly, which means automatic resizing, responsive srcset, blur-up placeholders, and modern WebP/AVIF formats all apply. Your images look sharp and load faster.

• More embeds. Added support for Skatehype video embeds.

• Cleaner reblogs and replies. Promotional attribution footers are stripped from reposted content for a cleaner read.

• Sturdier rendering. Tweets and other embeds are now wrapped in error protection so one bad embed can never take down a whole post.

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Notifications and chat

Staying connected got more reliable.

• Notifications that reach you. We moved the notifications connection to a dedicated, more stable endpoint, keep that connection alive, and respect your browser permission settings.

• In-app toasts you can act on. When a notification arrives while you are using the site, you now get an in-app toast - and it is clickable, taking you straight to the related post, comment, or person.

• More reliable chat. We made the chat startup process idempotent and resilient, which fixes the intermittent errors some people saw when opening chat, and we now tell the difference between a brief hiccup and a real outage.

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Wallet and transactions

• Customizable aggregated balance. More control over how your combined balance is displayed.

• Encrypted memos. Send private transfer memos with proper encryption.

• More reliable broadcasting. We improved transaction reliability with smarter retries and automatic failover to a healthy node when one misbehaves, plus clearer error messages when something genuinely goes wrong.

• Cleanup. Removed the discontinued post-boost feature to keep the wallet focused on what is active.

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Sign-in and Hive extensions

• Pick which extension signs. If you have more than one Hive extension installed (Keychain, Keeper, Peak Vault, and others), you can now choose which one signs a transaction instead of being locked to whichever loaded first. The "Sign with Extension" experience was unified behind a single, consistent chooser.

• Honest error reporting. When a sign or broadcast fails, you now see the real reason, and we automatically retry through a known-good node where possible.

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Found more easily: SEO and discoverability

A lot of quiet work this release helps the whole community get discovered by search engines, which means more readers and more rewards for authors.

• Cleaner canonical post URLs. Every post now lives at one clean address (/@author/permlink), with older URL shapes permanently redirecting to it. This consolidates ranking signals instead of splitting them across duplicate links.

• Richer structured data. We improved site-wide structured data and enriched the metadata on posts, helping search engines understand and display Ecency content better in results.

• Better sitemaps. We expanded and hardened our sitemaps (posts, authors, communities) so search engines can find content faster and more reliably, while never pointing them at the wrong place.

• Smarter indexing signals. NSFW and empty or abusive content is now correctly marked so it does not pollute search results, protecting the quality of what represents the community.

• A content-forward home page plus a modern SVG favicon round things out.

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Security and stability

This was a heavy security and reliability cycle.

• Big security cleanup. We closed the large majority of open code-scanning alerts (from 136 down to a handful) and patched an SSRF issue in the import flow.

• ReDoS protection. We fixed and then guarded against a class of regular-expression vulnerabilities that could hang page rendering, and added automated linting so they cannot creep back in.

• Dependency updates. Multiple rounds of dependency upgrades keep the platform current and patched.

• Crash and error cleanup. We tracked down and fixed a long list of edge-case crashes - browser-translation conflicts, post-deploy chunk errors, hydration mismatches across Firefox, Safari, and older Chrome - so fewer of you ever hit a broken page.

You will not see most of this directly, and that is the point: it just works, more often.

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More languages

• Thai and Turkish are now available in the language picker. Removed half finished languages and only kept fully translated languages.

• We moved translation syncing to an on-demand workflow, making it easier to keep the interface up to date in every language without noise. Community-contributed translations continue to flow in through Crowdin.

  

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Under the hood

For the technically curious:

• Upgraded to Node 24 and Next.js, with Redis powering the new caching layer.

• Faster, parallel 3Speak video uploads using resumable upload concatenation, with a sequential fallback for reliability.

• Source maps are now tied to the release commit, making it faster for us to diagnose and fix issues you report.

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Thank you

This release closes well over a hundred changes - performance, security, mobile, publishing, discovery, and engagement - all aimed at making Ecency a faster, safer, and more enjoyable home for your content and community.

Try out the new daily quests, notice the snappier load times, and let us know what you think. Your feedback is what shapes the next release.

Full technical changelog: https://github.com/ecency/vision-next/compare/4.3.8...4.3.9

Happy posting,
The Ecency Team

Support our work: https://ecency.com/proposals/379