Building in the open

Our last blog post ended with a question: what do you want to see on the Chunky Guys app? And some of you have answered. Not a flood, but enough to start seeing patterns; and enough to confirm some things we've been thinking about too.

What keeps coming up

Location. Several of you, same idea, different words: some way to know who's nearby. Maybe you're travelling somewhere and want to know if there are members around, or you're at a bear event and curious who else in the room is on the app, or you just want to know whether the guy whose profile you're looking at is in your city or on another continent. It keeps getting mentioned, and it's been on our list for a while too. But it's also something we want to think carefully about.

We've all seen what location features look like on other apps. A grid of faces sorted by distance, designed to be scrolled through like a catalogue. It's efficient, sure. It's also completely dehumanising, and it turns people into options to be swiped past. That's not what we're building here, and we don't want to import that mechanic just because people expect it from a community app.

What we are going to do is add a distance indicator to profiles; a rough sense of how far away someone is when you're looking at their profile. Not a grid, not a map, not a pin. Just enough context to know whether someone's local or long-distance when you're already looking at who they are and what they're about. The person first, the distance second.

Beyond that, we want to hear what you think. There's a bigger conversation here about what location features should look like in a space that's actually trying to build community rather than just facilitate transactions. We have opinions, but we'd rather have that conversation with you than make those decisions on our own.

The bigger picture

Location is one piece of something larger. The feedback we've had, combined with what we've been seeing in how people actually use the app, points in the same direction: Chunky Guys needs to feel like its own thing.

Right now, too much of the experience is still borrowed from Bluesky. That was always the trade-off of building on top of an existing platform: you get a running start, but you inherit a lot of someone else's decisions about what a social app should feel like. Decisions that were made for a general audience, not for a community like ours.

Right now, when you open Chunky Guys you see your Following feed, your Discover feed, Popular with Friends. All of it is based on who you follow on Bluesky. Which is fine if your Bluesky account is already full of people you'd expect to see on Chunky Guys. But if you've just created an account, or you use yours to follow a mix of people and topics that have nothing to do with the bear community, the experience falls flat. You're either looking at content that doesn't belong, or you're faced with the prospect of extending your following list, or even opening a second account just for Chunky Guys. Not great.

What we want to build is a way for you to use one account (if you want to) that works for both. Your Bluesky follows stay your Bluesky follows, but when you open Chunky Guys the app gives you something different: feeds and discovery built around the community, not just around who you happen to follow. One account, two separate experiences.

We're still working out exactly what that looks like, and this is another area where we want to hear from you. But the goal is clear: when you open Chunky Guys, it should feel like walking into a space that's yours. Like the difference between a house party where you know half the room and a conference where the only familiar face is Geoff, your boss.

Right, about the bugs

While we're being honest about things: the app's had a rough couple of weeks. Some bugs have crept in that shouldn't have, and pretending otherwise would be a bit insulting.

Here's what happened: we were heads-down building new stuff (notifications, boops, the features we've been writing about in previous posts) and testing slipped. When you're a tiny team and you're trying to ship things quickly, it's easy to convince yourself that something works because it worked on your device, or because the obvious paths through the feature seem fine. Then someone uses it slightly differently, or on a different phone, or in a slightly different order, and it falls over. That's the honest answer. It's not a great one, but it's the real one.

The app's stable now, and there's a release in the queue that tidies things up further. It polishes a few inconsistencies, adds the ability to take photos and video directly from chat instead of having to go through your phone's gallery, and for iOS users it fixes the issue where iCloud photos and videos just refused to work. We're just sat here waiting for the app stores to wave it through.

But patching things after the fact isn't really the point. We need to not ship the bugs in the first place. So we're slowing things down a little. Not stopping, just giving ourselves and our beta testers more time to catch things before they go out the door. Rushing features out and fixing them after the fact isn't a great pattern, and a bit more breathing room between builds should make a real difference.

On that note: we need more Android users willing to beta test. If you're up for running early builds and letting us know when things break, get in touch. The more eyes on a release before it goes live, the fewer surprises for everyone else!

Keep talking to us

We've heard from some of you, but we want to hear from more. What would make you open Chunky Guys instead of Bluesky? What's annoying? What's missing? What would make this feel like home rather than just another app on your phone?

This isn't a token gesture. We're a small team building something for a specific community, and we don't have a product department running focus groups. What we have is you, telling us what you want. Every bit of feedback, even the stuff that's just "this thing is annoying", helps to shape what gets built next.

So tell us. We're listening.