Changelog: Announcing DEV Connect! (Beta)

#meta #changelog

We're excited to announce a new part of the site called DEV Connect. Spurred on by an interest from the community in this sort of thing, we've added a place for connecting and chatting with other community members.

It's a messaging section which many will find immediately useful, but we plan to progressively enhance with some really nice dev-oriented tools. Here is an (early beta) example of what you can do:

Connect is live, but is very much still a work in progress. We plan on pairing these sorts of features with initiatives around mentorship, office hours, and all sorts of goodies. You are going to have a lot of fun with all of this.

We also expect that Connect will become a hub for interacting with the content of the broader platform. Consuming, creating and sharing DEV posts will be very native. This next feature is not live as I write this (but may be when you read this), but here's a quick shot from my local environment of what I'm talking about.

For now, you may open a channel with anyone you mutually follow. As DEV Connect evolves we'll make the configuration of who you can chat with available in finer detail, but the mutual-follow model is a pretty well established protocol for this sort of feature across the web.

We also have some group channels which are available to some members at the moment for testing. We will make those more accessible as we work out the details.

This is very much a beta feature, so things might be randomly broken, but we invite you to check it all out.

dev.to/connect

Happy coding ❤️

Latest comments (57)

dumdumdev • Oct 2 '18

This is great and I think could be very useful. Thanks!

Yashu Mittal • Sep 20 '18

I still didn't get it, how to set a message using connect?

Adrian B.G. • Aug 5 '18

dear "connect", please stop triggering my OCD, I click this icon 100 times daily, and there are no new messages, I cannot stop! I will soon run out of battery!

Adrian B.G. • Jul 21 '18

Since the icon, It is related to telegram?

And how can I leave a group?

Ben Halpern • Jul 21 '18

Sorry we don't have the button for this on the UI yet, but you've been removed from the one you wanted to.

Adrian B.G. • Jul 23 '18

since the groups appear I have a bug, I have false notifications on connect icon (it says 1 or 2, I press on it, no new message exists).

I presume I was removed from the JS group but I still receive their notification.

Igor Moura • Jul 8 '18

Kinda late to the party, but I find the mutual follow requirement to be a bit annoying. As @kspeakman said, I'm not really a fan of following many people in order to keep the content I see unfiltered, but now I feel like I have an obligation to follow back everyone because they might want to talk to me.

I'm really open to discuss anything with anyone, and, as others said, a toggle to enable chats from people that you don't follow would be perfect.

Kasey Speakman • Jun 18 '18 • Edited

This is an awesome feature!

Request: I would like to be able to dev/connect without following the other person.

Essentially, I want to be open to questions/discussions about content that I post (or whatever) via dev/connect. However, I follow very few people because I mostly want the content I see to be unfiltered. With the exception of a low-pass quality filter to de-prioritize things like buzz-word-bingo ad posts.

I'm weird in the way I use "social" features. And at times I will read pretty much anything, even about techs I'm not planning to use. To see what's going on over there or because the post has other interesting considerations that aren't familiar to me.