We've been shipping a lot of improvements lately, and @bitvid has become faster, smarter, and more reliable across the board. Here's a look at what's new.
Discover More Content
We've completely revamped content discovery with three distinct feeds:
• For You – prioritizes creators and content from your social graph while intelligently recommending new videos.
• Explore – surfaces videos you likely haven't seen instead of simply showing the newest uploads.
• Trending – highlights the most popular recent videos based on real engagement.
Together, these changes make it much easier to find great content beyond your subscriptions.
More Accurate View Counts
We've overhauled how views are counted across the network.
View events are now deterministically deduplicated using Nostr d-tags and combined across multiple relays, resulting in more accurate and trustworthy view counts. Refreshing a page or seeing duplicate events from different relays no longer inflates statistics.
Popularity Analytics
You can now view a video's popularity over time directly from the More (...) menu. Instead of only seeing a total view count, you can watch how a video's audience has grown over time.
More Reliable Playback
Playback is now significantly more resilient.
@bitvid will intelligently try multiple hosted sources before falling back to WebTorrent, leading to faster startup times, fewer playback failures, and a smoother viewing experience.
Smarter Content Availability
We've made major improvements to how videos appear throughout the network.
New configurable visibility policies, eager content probing, and smarter verification dramatically reduce disappearing video cards while still ensuring content is actually available. WebTorrent-only videos are now handled much more gracefully as well.
Improved Direct Messages
Messaging has received several quality-of-life improvements:
• Better compatibility with older Nostr clients through legacy NIP-04 support.
• Automatic login prompts when attempting to send messages while signed out.
• Conversations now automatically open when selecting a recipient.
Lightning Improvements
We've fixed several issues with Lightning zaps, including creator split calculations, platform split handling, and improved error handling for LNURL and CORS-related edge cases.
Better Channel Syncing
Channel pages are now much more stable by intelligently merging newly discovered events with existing content instead of replacing them. This prevents videos from disappearing while synchronization is happening.
Performance Improvements
We've reduced unnecessary relay subscriptions during login, improved synchronization behavior, expanded storage compatibility, fixed several UI edge cases, and eliminated a number of bugs throughout the application—including a long-standing processing spinner that could occasionally get stuck.
Spam & Access Improvements
We've also strengthened validation and access controls by improving npub verification, tightening whitelist handling, and making permission checks more reliable regardless of whether a public key is represented in hex or npub format.
Behind the Scenes
Alongside these user-facing features, we've continued improving @bitvid's architecture with expanded testing, better storage compatibility, cleaner release workflows, and a more robust foundation for future features.
Thanks to everyone testing @bitvid, reporting bugs, and helping us build a truly decentralized video platform. More improvements are already on the way.
Interested in helping shape the future of decentralized video? @bitvid is currently in early access, and we'd love to hear from creators, developers, and community members who share our vision. Apply for whitelist access here:
https://bitvid.network/?modal=application and become one of our early pioneers. Applications are reviewed manually based on community alignment.
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