andrewthebold

I tried it out for a bit and I think it's generally pleasant.

Some thoughts:

- The cleanliness and whitespace make it feel like information's been lost compared to the previous version. Probably just psychological and I'll get used to it.

- I wish the header search button was a search bar instead. While it looks cleaner, I actually had a moment where I thought they removed search completely. My preference would be to have a large, highly visible search bar in the header. Increasing the click/tap area would help as well, as I misclicked on the dark mode toggle.

For anybody who comes into this thread in the future, I've closed off public signups for the iOS beta. I've hit a critical mass of testers and want to make sure the app isn't overrun by trolls and predators. Reach out to me if you really want in [0]!

To know what's on the roadmap, checkout my public trello board [1] for more info.

[0] Email beta@gentle.app

[1] https://trello.com/b/65BxuxBa/gentle

It's coming soon! Blocked by me getting my hands on an android device to test with.

Sorry for the trouble if you were hoping to try it out. If you're interested, you can join the subreddit for updates [0].

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/gentleapp/

Thanks for catching that! Fixed it up.

Thank you!

My impression is that my use of Flutter has been successful (especially in an iOS build) because of my heavy use of custom-designed components. There are packages built by the Flutter team to mimic native behavior, but they aren't good enough in my opinion. I'd go with react native if you want something that feels (at least on iOS) native.

The biggest plus for Flutter in my opinion is its great animation system. It's difficult to learn, but it makes things that would have been near-impossible in react native relatively straightforward.

I'd use Flutter again for sure. I'd rate it like an 8/10?

Thank you for the praise for the design :)

My path to using flutter was that I wanted to use SwiftUI because of its native-ness, but found it was too buggy. I know react native well, but I realized that a lot of the interactions I wanted (e.g., animations) would be much more difficult. Flutter was a compromise that's overall been great to work with.

I do feel very at-the-whim of the flutter team's progress (mainly native behavior I can't hide behind custom UI like text editing), but that's not unique to flutter.

If you don't mind a link to reddit, I also wrote a comment about the decision [0].

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/g3qrkj/gentle_is_a_s...

Thank for you trying the app out!

On your first point: scroll down on your mailbox screen to see a history of what you've opened up! Sorry about that. It's a poor design decision on my part to make it so undiscoverable. Will fix it soon.

Reactions of some sort are one of the high priority features I plan to build.

No strong opinion from me on horizontal cards and swiping. It is intentional to add some friction to skipping a message (so it feels a bit more weighty), but I'll play with it!

Thank you for the praise for the design!

Hey! For now I have it locked to portrait orientation and no official support for iPad. Very sorry for the trouble with this — it does sound annoying. I'll look into enabling iPad-specific rotation.

Not at all arguing that this is novel or innovative — rather my own take on the genre. I'd argue that some aspects of the system incentivize better behavior:

- It'll be a purchased app (not free), so the stakes of being banned are higher. Right now in beta, it is more open for sure.

- The 1:1 message sending doesn't give any feedback to bad actors, so attention-seeking behavior is more limited.

- I'm also hopeful to continue to design an experience that's calm and cheerful, and provides guidance about good behavior (in a way that's more in-your-face than most social media).

Of course, there will always be malicious people, and neither I nor this project are perfect. As I mentioned elsewhere in this post, I'd be quick to shut things down if it got out of hand.

Happy to discuss this more.

Thanks for the info! I guess it also only happens if you have some VR device setup. Sorry for the trouble with that. I'll swap out the vimeo embed soon since that sounds like annoying and unnerving behavior.

Also, thank you for the praise!

That's... unusual and concerning. You're talking about the gentle.app site, not the testflight link, right?

The only thing I could think of to cause that is the embedded vimeo iframe. But why? If you're open to share, I'd love to know what browser you're using.

Thank you! I'm really happy you tried it out

Hey! It's a Flutter application, so I'm using their concept of Hero animations [1]. It renders a new component (the flight shuttle?) that does the visual animation.

[1] https://flutter.dev/docs/development/ui/animations/hero-anim...

Thank you and that's amazing! It's great that you're really embracing the attitude of thinking about this other person and trying to empathize.

I think there's better scaffolding/explaining to do with content guidelines and expectations, but the general idea is that content that causes concern like this should be reported. A lot of explicit content would probably already be caught by a filter for manual review.

It would be taken down and I would send a message to the writer with mental health or counseling resources (ex: crisis text line). I take all messages seriously by default, even if it appears to be trolling.

If that person continued to write content like that, I'd do a bit more digging. This is where it'd be subjectively up to me as the moderator to take action. Banning or shadow-banning would be a last resort, generally.

There's no strong accountability on my end (beyond people not using the app), but I'm interested in creating a system people can trust. If the app continues to gain traction, I'm thinking about writing formal moderation rules and expectations and seek input from the community.

If you have any ideas, I'm eager to listen!

Thank you! I appreciate the praise.

If you have any feedback or suggestions, feel free to share~

I hear you. I've turned off all the analytics I can with firebase, but if you don't trust Firebase/Google, I'm happy to recommend avoiding this app.

Checkout my privacy policy (and critique it too!) if that's useful: https://gentle.app/privacy

Thank you! I appreciate the praise

Thank you! I'm a bit wary of giving big hints to how the filters work, but I was inspired by:

- npm packages like redact-pii, bad-words (and numerous other "bad word" lists)

- askismet's open source spam code

- regex unicode categories

I also wrote a variety of checks for word counts, combinations of words, known "bad patterns", etc. You may not realize it, but the text input forms block a lot of potential inputs.

It's not perfect, but that's why I'm manually handling things that surface. Happy to answer any follow-ups.

Yeah! My main email for gentle-related stuff is andrew@gentle.app

Feel free to reach out and connect.

Thank you!

I know, right? It's definitely a quirky vibe

If you're looking for a more gamey-version of this concept, check out Kind Words. I'm a big fan of it!

Thanks for sharing! That's super cool and very similar in concept.

I'll look into iPad-compatibility and see if there's some low-lift stuff I could do. To be transparent, I would probaaaably invest in a webapp before a fully-blown iPad variant.

I hear your frustration about the limitations of what you can share. I stand pretty firmly by it for safety reasons, but I don't totally rule out the potential for a way to connect further.

Thanks for the feedback about the skip button — I agree that it's confusing. I'll work to address it soon!

Happy to take any other feedback or suggestions you might have~

Hey! That's one of the main features I want to add before actually launching the app. Expect to see something like that soon if you stick around in the beta!

Happy to listen to other feedback or suggestions you might have~

Thanks for the feedback. I'm so sorry for the frustration caused. I'll address it!

If you're curious where that comes from, the app is built with Flutter, which tries to mimic native behavior. Text editing is something that's not quite there yet, unfortunately, so I'll have to manually make fixes.

Super true! I'd argue the experience would probably be different in the context of reddit (like ads and it not being quite as streamlined), but your point is valid.

I think this specific flow of creating a post and then receiving non-public replies back isn't normal on reddit or fb groups. I don't doubt it's possible!

Do correct me if I'm wrong.