Substr progress update: faster navigation, cleaner loading states, better signer UX

I wanted to share a quick Substr update after a pretty busy round of polishing and fixes over the past week.

A lot of time has gone into improving how the app feels in day-to-day use, especially around speed, loading states, and account/signing UX.

Here’s what changed recently:
• Navigation between community pages and thread pages is now much smoother, so moving between /s/ and /p/ feels faster and less jarring.
• Loading skeletons were improved across key views to make data loading feel more intentional and less abrupt.
• Engagement loading was cleaned up, so replies, likes, and zaps no longer flash misleading 0 values before the real data arrives.
• Unnecessary duplicate fetching was reduced on important routes like thread and community pages.
• Discovery and joined feed loading behavior was improved.
• Several mobile UX issues were fixed across sheets, modals, and manage views.
• Parts of the signer flow were reworked, especially around browser extensions, remembered accounts, bunker/Amber support, and reconnect states.
• Remembered account handling was improved to make account switching feel more consistent, though switching between accounts still needs to get better overall.
• Share preview handling and fallback OG behavior for posts were improved.
• Moderation flow was continued with softer and more transparent removal behavior.

A lot of this work was not about flashy new features, but about making Substr feel more stable, faster, and less confusing to use.

Also, thanks to everyone who has been trying it, reporting bugs, and sharing honest feedback. That kind of feedback has been genuinely helpful and has directly shaped a lot of these improvements.

There’s still a lot to do, but it’s steadily getting more solid with each pass. More ideas, feedback, and rough edges are always welcome.

How Substr Polls Work Across Nostr Clients

We built polls as Nostr-native events, not as a closed backend feature.The poll itself is a normal Nostr post with extra tags like poll_option, poll_results, and poll_closes_at. Votes are separate Nostr events that reference the poll and include a poll_vote tag.

That means other clients can still receive and store the poll and vote data through relays. The only difference is rendering: clients that support these poll tags can show a real poll UI, while others will just show them as regular posts.