← All news

Friends: a handle, a code, and everyone's milestones

Pick an @handle, show someone your code, and their thousandth word turns up in your feed. Following is one-way, there's no messaging, and nobody can search for you.

Learning alone is the usual way to stop. So there are other people in the app now — a very small number of them, deliberately.

How it works

Pick a handle: three to twenty letters, numbers or underscores. That's the whole of your public self. Anyone who knows it can follow you.

Following is one-way. You don't approve anybody, and you see their milestones only if you follow them back. When someone reaches a thousand XP, learns their hundredth word, or practices thirty days in a row, it turns up in your feed and you can heart it.

Your profile shows your XP, your streak, your last week and the words you've learned, per language. Nothing else is on it.

What there isn't

• No messaging. None, in any form.
• No searching for people. A handle is found by typing it exactly, or by scanning someone's code. You can't browse a list of learners, and neither can anybody else.
• No way back in for someone you removed. Removing a follower also stops them following you again, unless you let them.

Each of those is enforced in the database rather than in the app, which is the difference between a rule and a hope.

The code

Your handle also has a QR code, and there's a scanner for other people's. Point a phone at a laptop and you're following each other in about four seconds, without either of you spelling anything out loud.