So, two things:

1. You can now put markdown in topics. Like, for example, maybe you want everybody to visit a link to a site you want to talk about. Just put the URL in the topic and it will automatically render a link to that URL
2. I have switched insights and next steps to using server side rendering of their text

The second thing is all in service of doing more and more server side rendering for pretty much everything. This will reduce the burden on people’s browsers for doing expensive computation. It will also make coding the app much simpler.

The only issue I have now is that I was obsessed with end to end encryption for private messages. What this means is that, before a message is sent to someone else, it is encrypted in the browser before it is sent. This means the server can’t go and render the HTML form of that message. The other person’s browser needs to do that.

I have 2 options:

1. I can do away with end-to-end encryption altogether, or
2. I can leave it alone for now

I’ll need to do a bit more listening to folks about whether they even use private chat messages. Given how little traffic we have right now, that feedback may take some time to get. Which might mean we’re leaving chat message conversion for last.

If you have feedback, as always, please let me know!