Feature Spotlight: Profiles
This February we’ll be rolling out refreshed profiles for everyone. The newly redesigned profiles are more customizable, have new privacy controls, and feature content in new ways. You can now choose what information is displayed on your profile, including tags and pronouns. Additionally, we've made it easier to edit and update profile photos, bios, and even change your handle.
This is part of our larger effort to ensure that each creator has control over their social presence, and ultimately what information is available or visible to others. We've also made significant improvements to blocking, account suspension, and account deletion functionality; making nenos a safer platform for everyone. This also helps folks better understand why they may not be able to view an account.
Right away, you'll notice that profiles show content based on media type (for now just prose and photos), and dynamically respond based on what you’ve posted. The privacy and profile editing enhancements are also great ways for you to choose what remains visible on your profile.
This update to profiles lays the groundwork for a large swath of future improvements including:
Profile photo editing
Zooming on profile photos
Additional privacy controls
Post archiving
Profile verification
Custom profile colors
We’re excited about sharing new ways to customize your profile and present yourself as, well, you, in the coming weeks and months.
We’ve put in a lot of extra time and effort to rewrite a large portion of the code underlying profiles in the app. First, we’ve begun migrating the backing store for our caching system to Swift Data, and away from a convoluted system of in-memory and longer-term disk storage. We’ll detail more about this transition to Swift Data in another engineering-focused post once we’ve completed it. Second, we’re beginning to embrace the new Swift Observation macros to take advantage of optimizations in view refreshing. As with Swift Data, we’ll have more to share on this engineering journey once we’ve completed our transition. For now though, these changes mean that profile loading should be much faster and more reliable.
We’re excited to bring these new profile content and privacy features to everyone this February. We can’t wait to see what everyone does with their profile!
