The short version
- Tip with Lightning: any Lightning wallet can tip a creator, no Hive account needed, and creators can get tips in their own wallet.
- Import your videos from YouTube or TikTok, with title, description, tags and thumbnail filled in for you.
- A thumbnail editor in the uploader: text, stickers and any frame of your video.
- The Hive galaxy: a 3D map of a channel's follows, to discover new creators.
- Stories are open to every Hive account.
- 3Speak is a podcast app now: follow any podcast in the world, with charts, chapters, transcripts, offline listening and a full podcast player, plus sponsor spots and a pop-out player for 3Speak audio.
- Under the hood: a rebuilt encoder for community operators, smarter retries for uploads, Butter Drive for big files and a new Snapie release.
🌐 3speak.tv website
new-3speak-tv · 10 releases, all live
Tip with Lightning
Every tip window now has a Lightning tab. Anyone with a Lightning wallet can tip a creator, no Hive account needed: the tip goes through the creator's v4v.app address, and a paid invoice is picked up by itself.
- Creators can also receive Lightning tips in their own wallet (Settings, Connections tab).
- You can tip without signing in, and set up monthly tips.
- Lightning tips show under Supporters, in sats.
- Tip buttons on Shorts, in the audio player, and now also in the 3Speak video player and the audio embed on other sites.
Import your videos
Bring your videos over from YouTube or TikTok. First, prove the channel is yours:
- Open Settings (the gear at the top), go to Connections and then Linked profiles.
- Pick the platform and copy your personal 3Speak code into your channel's public description.
- Enter your channel and press Verify. Once it is linked, you can remove the code from your description again.
Then use Import videos on your profile or in the upload window, or open Import videos. Title, description, tags and thumbnail are filled in for you, and you can import a whole batch at once. (#536, #537, #544)
A thumbnail editor in the uploader
Step 2 of the upload now has a thumbnail editor. Pick any moment of your video, zoom and drag the frame, add text in 26 fonts with an outline or a box behind it, and place stickers, including 3Speak and Hive branding or your own images. Download saves exactly the picture that gets uploaded. On phones and tablets our server cuts the frame for you, so it works there too. (#544)
The Hive galaxy
On desktop, the planet button on a profile opens the Hive galaxy: a 3D map of who a channel follows and the creators those follows lead to. Look at a channel's Following, its Followers or the friends who follow each other, and choose how deep to scan, from an Orbit of 120 accounts up to Deep space with 5,000.
Accounts that the same people follow form circles, so you can see the little communities around a channel at a glance. Next to the map, Creators to discover lists the accounts many of the scanned people follow, and filters keep it to active accounts, a minimum reputation or creators with videos on 3Speak. Drag to turn the map, scroll to zoom, click a star to focus it and click the centre to fly back. Try badadib's galaxy. (#539, 3speakchecks #101)
Stories for every Hive account
Any logged-in Hive account can now post a 24-hour Story, from the Upload menu or from your own avatar in the stories row. Hovering an avatar in the row turns it around to a creator card: when they last posted, their bio and their follower, video, short and audio counts. (#535, #542)
Podcasts and the new Audio page
The biggest change of the week: the Audio page is now a full podcast app, for 3Speak audio and for any podcast out there.
- Any podcast, not just Hive: follow a show under External by searching for it, pasting its RSS feed, an Apple Podcasts or Overcast link or the show's website, or importing an OPML file from another app.
- Find new shows: top charts for your country and category, trending podcasts by language, and a People search that finds the shows a host or guest appears in.
- Show and episode pages with seasons, trailers, chapters marked on the timeline, transcripts that follow along, and the hosts and guests.
- Mine, Discover and Trends split the Audio page into three views, and phones get a Player tab of their own.
- A real podcast player: speed from 0.5x to 2x, 15-second skips, a sleep timer, Voice boost and Skip silence, casting to a speaker or TV, and your phone's lock screen controls.
- Share a moment: a link that starts at the current time, or a clip of 15 to 90 seconds.
- Listen offline: save episodes and 3Speak audio, and without a connection the Audio page opens your downloads.
- Never miss an episode: new-episode alerts in the bell and as push notifications, and shows can add new episodes to your queue by themselves.
- Tip podcasters in sats, straight from the podcast's own payment details.
- Every 3Speak audio has its own page, and an all-audio playlist can be followed like a podcast.
The full tour, with a screenshot for every button, is in our podcast post. (#536, #539)
Added since the podcast post
- Sponsor spots in audio: advertisers can book spoken tickers or their own audio clip on the advertise page. Creators choose in Settings whether ads play on their audio.
- A pop-out player on desktop that fits whatever window you give it.
- A smarter queue: tapping a cover while something plays adds it to the queue, and playlists offer Add all or Add new.
- Comment, Hype and reblog any 3Speak audio right from the player.
- Continue listening on Mine, and what you listened to shows in your Watched history, in a new Audio tab.
- New audio in Discover: the last 3 days of audio, one per creator.
- Earn while you listen: agree once in Settings and your listening counts toward listener rewards, which start once we have checked the numbers.
- 3Speak shows you follow under External get votes, comments, Hype and tips, and warm-up musicians and podcasters can now upload audio too.
(#538, #539, #540, #541, #543, #544)
Small touches
- Type
:in any comment box for an emoji list, and:fire:turns into 🔥. - The bell, Share, chat, settings and profile menus open when you rest the mouse on them.
- Video previews on cards fade in and out smoothly.
- Sharing a vertical video from your phone to 3Speak opens the Shorts uploader.
- Profiles keep their Hive badges when a Hive server is busy: the site switches servers by itself.
- "Mark all read" now clears the newest notification too.
- The tip nudge no longer stops autoplay and channel surfing.
⚡ Feeds and API
3speakchecks · 22 changes
The "checker" is the service behind 3Speak's feeds, ads, tips and the Audio page.
- Snapie shorts are back on 3Speak. Shorts uploaded through Snapie stopped reaching 3Speak's lists on October 5. They do again, and the 143 stuck shorts were restored. (#96)
- Lightning tips are recorded and shown under Supporters. (#91)
- The galaxy reads follows from HafSQL, so a scan of up to 5,000 accounts takes 1 to 3.5 seconds. (#101)
- Listening time for all audio, measured like watch time: only forward playback counts, and it stays anonymous. (#99)
- The stories row keeps a creator for 3 days after their latest short instead of 7, so it changes more often. (#111)
- Video Pulse gets a list of older videos people are watching again, so they can go back on fast storage. Video Pulse itself runs as a dry run for now. (#104)
- The server side of podcasts, audio ads, warm-up audio and the Audio page. (#92, #95, #97, #98, #102, #103, #105, #106, #107, #108, #109, #110, #112, #113, #114, #115)
🎞️ Encoder
3speakencoder · 21 changes
Community members run encoders that turn uploads into streamable video. This week the encoder got a full overhaul for them:
- Works with FFmpeg 8 and newer again: before, it failed to start. (#54)
- Installers that work: Windows finds and checks FFmpeg without admin rights, Linux and macOS get Node 20+ and a current IPFS (Kubo 0.43.1), Apple Silicon and Fedora are covered, and the encoder can start on boot. (#51, #72, #73, #74)
- A new dashboard in a Tokyo Night look, installable as an app, with an optional password. (#53, #57, #60, #68)
- Updates: the encoder knows which version it runs, tells you when it is behind, checks on demand and can update itself if you switch that on. (#56, #58, #66, #75)
- Uploads go only to hot nodes. If that fails, a local copy is kept, tracked and moved back later. (#62, #63)
- Tests and checks on every change, and up-to-date docs. (#50, #52, #55, #59, #61, #64)
📤 Upload service
embedvideos · 5 changes
- A failed encoding job is retried on a different encoder. (#43, #44)
- An upload can no longer get stuck at "uploading" when the IPFS announce hangs. (#36)
- The old supernode is out of the upload path. (#38)
- The admin view shows which version every community encoder runs. (#41)
▶️ Video player
snapievideoplayer · 1 change
The player now has a Tip button. It opens the 3speak.tv tip window with HIVE / HBD and Lightning, so viewers can tip even when they watch a 3Speak video embedded on another site. (#55)
🎧 Audio embed
snapieaudio · 3 changes
The audio player other sites embed got a Tip button too, plays 3Speak's sponsor spots, and reports listening time anonymously, the same way the player on 3speak.tv does. (#8, #9, #10)
📱 Snapie
snapie-io · 3 releases
- Pages that don't exist answer with a real "not found".
- The home feed no longer hangs on "Loading..." when a Hive node is slow.
- A post that fails to load has a Retry button, and Escape closes a conversation.
- Profile and post details are cached, so slow Hive nodes hurt less.
- Fixes for chat, unread notifications and payouts that flashed $0.000.
☁️ Butter Drive
butterdrive · 2 changes
Butter Drive, the desktop app for Butter Cloud storage, now uploads files over 100 MB in parts, and version 0.1.1 is out with installers for macOS, Windows and Linux. (#2, #3)
That's it for this week. Most of our code is open on GitHub at github.com/Mantequilla-Soft. Questions, bug reports or ideas? Drop them in the comments below.
