A Sloth, a Princess and a Pile of Fixes: SlothBuzz Dev Update
Hello Sloths, and all of you who haven't figured out yet that you are one.
The last three days were a ride. Two months of work got finished, bundled and pushed live on SlothBuzz — all of it, in one go. My favourite Sloth Princess, @slothlydoesit, had reported a whole mountain of tweaks and fixes since the last update. Most of that mountain is gone now, and I'm waiting for the next batch. Well, "waiting" is the wrong word. If there is one thing this sloth can do at speed, it's testing and reporting. He genuinely cares about the SlothBuzz community and about Hive as a whole, and he keeps showing up with a truckload of ideas — sometimes honestly too many for one developer.
Take Sloth Mining War. I refused to build that game for ages, simply because I don't have the hours. So he went and made it happen with another developer, and damn, it looks good. Go have a look: https://miningwar.slothbuzz.com
Me, I stay on the SlothBuzz interface. That's the whole point. When we started this (back then as DApps Buzz, in the Steemit days) we wanted one thing: an interface that makes the blockchain usable for people who don't care about crypto. That's more than eight years of chasing the same idea now, with plenty of highs and lows along the way. Crypto is a restless world, we watched a lot of projects come and go. The project that originally brought Sloth and me together collapsed, and that one still stings — we gave it a lot and did everything we could to drag it forward.
Since then Sloth and I are basically a married couple. Loyal, stuck with each other, we love and we fight the way a proper marriage does. What never leaves the room is the fun, and the laughing. Nothing on this planet is as much fun as running a project with Sloth. I like to think that passion shows in the interface, and in our community — which, by the way, still welcomes every lost sloth out there ;)
Yesterday I recorded 30 minutes of video walking through the interface. Today I'm already at the point where I'd need to record another one. Speaking of video: a big shout-out to the 3Speak community and their developers. Wow. Those folks have been on fire the last few months. Using 3Speak is actual fun now, which I could not have said in the past — navigation, uploading, clipping into Shorts, flawless. You people at @threespeak are fantastic, thank you for all of it.
Take a Look
Right, SlothBuzz. Here's yesterday's video for those who want to watch it and can stomach my ugly English and my thick accent:
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=patlebo/izvbxvup
Fixes and Improvements
Now the boring part — fixes and improvements. In broad strokes, because nobody needs to know every single patch:
Security got serious. We ran a full audit of the whole codebase and fixed everything it turned up: hardened HTML rendering, a strict content security policy, updated every dependency with a known hole, locked down our API relays, better protection for keys stored in the browser. If you log in with a key, this matters to you.
Comments behave. Reply boxes open where you clicked, deep threads stay readable instead of shrinking into three-letter columns, and Engage no longer cuts things off on the phone.
Mobile layout cleanup. Sidebar, bottom navigation, widths, safe areas — a lot of small things that made the phone version feel off.
Hangs and Engage. Real pagination (no more "no more hangs" after 20), the full conversation context when you reply, badges and filters fixed.
Login fixes. The QR/HiveAuth login race is gone, the login page is a normal page again instead of a fullscreen wall.
Share images, broken links, payout displays, the Videos page freezing — all the stuff Sloth kept poking at. Fixed.
Every page now carries the same header with your profile picture and notifications — no more hunting for the bell.
Features
And the exciting part — the one that will drag a fresh round of fixes behind it, plus a video that will already be outdated the day I publish it. The features:
Our own video player. Videos from 3Speak play right inside SlothBuzz: a proper watch page with theater mode, a Shorts viewer for the vertical stuff, and a mini player that keeps playing while you scroll on. On the phone it sits as a little bar above the navigation.
Notifications. Bell top right, votes bundled per post so a vote train doesn't bury you, plus a Notifications tab in Engage to scroll through everything. Read status is stored on chain, like the other frontends do.
Friends. A new page that shows who you actually interact with — not just who you follow. Your network, your followers, a person card with the stuff that matters on Hive (HP, voting power, reputation, communities), and a little ring graphic of your inner circle.
Log in with your posting key. Desktop and mobile, no extension needed. The key stays in your browser, encrypted with a PIN or passphrase, never on our server. Money moves still need Keychain or the Keychain app — on purpose.
Your vote defaults, stored on chain. Set 100 % for posts and 15 % for comments once, and every frontend that reads our settings could pick it up.
Radio volume slider that remembers your setting, an install banner so you can put SlothBuzz on your home screen, join and leave Bushes directly, a Bush search that actually searches all communities, and smart paste — drop a 3Speak or SlothBuzz video link into a post and our player takes it from there.
Hive Relations. More on that below.
Friends and Network
Yesterday I posted a Hang: https://www.slothbuzz.com/hangs/patlebo/hang-1789464767934-bbomq0 — I said I'd go see what I could steal. And I did find something. Hive Grove has this friends-network listing that I found really interesting, so I took the idea for the SlothBuzz Friends area: you now see your actual network. Good idea, shout-out to @hive-grove for that. If you want to check out the game — earn a bit of Hive every day by watering a virtual plant — here you go: https://hivegrove.up.railway.app
Relationships
Then I built something into the profile that I know from Facebook and always thought would fit Hive perfectly. Every now and then I read stories of couples and families on Hive, and I kept thinking: the relationship feature everyone knows from Facebook belongs here. So now you can add your partner (they get a request and confirm it), add relatives, set your relationship status, and so on. Go have a look — you'll only find this on SlothBuzz ;) But since we're all on the same Hive blockchain and this place runs on open standards, every interface can read and offer this feature. The spec is coming in a separate post.
Alright, that's already too many words. I should be coding, and that's exactly what I'll do now — back into my Bush I go. Until next time, dear sloths.