Building in Public: Where World Is Headed in 2026
We have been quiet about the roadmap until now because we wanted to see what the early community actually needed before we committed to anything publicly. We have seen enough. Here is what we are working on, what is shipping soon, and what we are still figuring out.
This post is going to be long. We think people who care about World deserve the unfiltered version.
What just shipped
Premium customization. Custom CSS, twenty five starter templates, custom avatars, custom banners, custom URLs, featured sections. This is the first big visible step toward making profiles feel like real personal spaces. The blog post about it goes deeper if you want the full pitch.
Shipping in the next 60 days
Profile songs. Your profile gets an audio embed. Pick a track, set a default volume, autoplay if you want. Yes, autoplay. Yes, with a mute button. This is on purpose.
Guestbooks. A scrollable wall on your profile where friends can leave you notes. We are bringing back the ritual of signing someone's page. It was a good ritual.
Top friends. Not a leaderboard. A short list of the people you want highlighted on your profile. Yours to arrange. No ranking pressure unless you want it.
Community rooms. Real time chat inside communities, with persistent history, threads, and pinned messages. This is the feature people have been asking us for the most. It is coming.
Mobile app beta. iOS first, Android right behind. Not a stripped down version. The same feature set as web, including custom CSS rendering on profiles.
Shipping in the second half of the year
Tipping and subscriptions. Direct support from fans to creators. Low fees, fast payouts. The financial plumbing has taken longer than we wanted because we want to get it right and we are not going to ship something that costs creators money.
Community marketplaces. Sell merch, art, zines, music, downloads, anything, directly inside a community. The community owner sets the rules. The platform takes a small cut to keep the lights on and that is it.
Visitor history. Optional. See who has been on your profile recently. Off by default, you can turn it on per profile.
Moods and presence. A simple status that tells your friends what you are up to without writing a post about it. Reading. Working. At a show. Sleeping.
Communities at scale. The next wave of community features for groups in the few hundred to few thousand member range. New moderation tools, new layouts, new ways to onboard members so the room does not collapse under its own weight.
What we are still figuring out
These are real questions and we do not have clean answers yet. We are sharing them because we think the people who care about the platform should be in the conversation.
Direct messages. Should DMs on World feel like text messages or like email. We have strong opinions on both sides of the building and we are running tests with the early community before we commit.
Native video. We know people want video. We also know that video, done wrong, turns into TikTok. We are taking our time on the format.
Federation. Should World profiles be portable across other platforms in the same way Mastodon profiles are. We are sympathetic to the idea. We are also trying not to slow ourselves down by solving every problem at once.
Algorithmic discovery. We are anti algorithm in the sense that we will never have an algorithm decide what your friends see from you. We are open to the idea of an opt in discovery surface that helps you find new communities. We have not built it yet because we have not figured out how to do it without it eating the rest of the product.
How we make decisions
A few rules we follow:
If a feature would make the relationship between a person and their friends more direct, we ship it. If it would put more software in between them, we do not.
If a feature would make a community feel more like a real place, we ship it. If it would make it feel more like a feed, we do not.
If a feature exists on every other platform and we cannot articulate why it makes World specifically better, we do not ship it just to keep up.
If the team disagrees on whether something is a good idea, we build the smallest version of it, give it to a few hundred people, and watch what happens.
The thing we are not going to do
We are not going to take outside money from anyone whose business model depends on us turning World into an attention extraction machine. We have turned down meetings, and we are going to keep turning them down. The investors we are talking to understand that the product we are building is incompatible with engagement at any cost, and that the long term value here is in being the platform people actually want to be on, not the platform people cannot put down.
This constraint shapes everything else. It is the reason the roadmap looks the way it does. It is the reason we are taking our time on monetization. It is the reason we are obsessed with profile customization and small communities and slow social. We are not optimizing for the same thing the big platforms optimize for. We do not want to.
Get involved
The early community is the most important thing about World right now. If you want to shape what gets built, the easiest way is to use the product and tell us what you think. We read everything. We respond to most of it. Several of the features above came directly from messages people sent us in the first few months.
This is your platform too. Help us build it.
More soon.