Summer '26 Stage 2 release notes Audience Mode, Reactions & Expandable Menu 🎭 Audience Mode + Raise Hand Per-room audience mode toggle. Audience members get canPublish=false, canPublishData=true (they can chat/react but not broadcast audio/video). Stage members (owner/mod/promoted speakers) keep full publish grants. Promote/demote uses LiveKit UpdateParticipant for live grant changes with no reconnect, AND persists stage membership to DB so grants survive reconnect/refresh/token regen. Toggling audience mode mid-room iterates current participants and updates their grants live, with a broadcast data message for immediate UI sync. ✋ Raise Hand lk.raisehand topic carries { event, participant_identity, pubkey?, display_name? } — LiveKit identity is used for tile mapping and promote actions, pubkey only for profile display. ✋ indicator on tiles + a moderator queue list in RoomControls with "Bring to stage" action. Twitter-Spaces-style layout: stage tiles in grid, audience as a compact avatar strip; verified on small mobile screens. 🎉 Emoji Reactions on Tiles lk.reactions topic { emoji, participant_identity } renders a floating emoji overlay on the sender's tile that fades over ~4s. Client-side rate-limited. Reuses the EmojiPickerPopover from Stage 1 with a limited reaction set. ⌃ Expandable "^" Vertical Menu New ExpandableMenu replaces the leave slot in the custom control bar. A chevron "^" expands upward into a vertical list: Raise Hand, Reactions (mini emoji popup), and Leave (red, destructive style). Sits above the video layer and transparent chat layer with top z-index; works within the existing mobile floating pill bar CSS. special thanks to @buttercup @yeghro Sooly, Tomekk , Reed, Tigs and AJ for helping out with testing #updates

Are you seeing the epic feature we’re bringing to Hivetalk? Help us keep this FREE by helping is reach our July #ZapGoal at

HiveTalk

Hivetalk Honey Dashboard

HiveTalk Honey dashboard - Manage rooms, events, and connections

(Can’t zap? Repost to help us reach more people as we #grownostr 💜⚡️) View quoted note →

Damus Relay now removed from list of Hivetalk relays for profile searches. If there is a WOT relay or similar relay for profile lookups you would prefer, please feel free to let us know what you'd like to have. #updates

Summer '26 Stage 1 Release Highlights for the current release! Out today! ⚡ Zap Notifications in Chat When a participant zaps another participant, a structured ⚡ system entry appears in chat: "⚡ sender zapped recipient, N sats ⚡". Uses a dedicated lk.zap data topic with a typed payload — not parsed from chat text, so it can't be spoofed. Sender and recipient display names are plumbed from the participant tile through to the payment modal. 🔒 Lock/Unlock Disconnect & Toast Visibility Reproduced and fixed the lock/unlock disconnect behavior live (two-browser test). Restyled the disconnect/reconnecting toast to amber/orange so transient connection states are clearly visible against the video layer. 😀 Emoji Picker in Chat A small curated emoji popover in the chat input — inserts at cursor, no new dependency. Componentized as EmojiPickerPopover for reuse by Stage 2 reactions. 💾 Download Chat Transcript Download icon in the chat header serializes the current chat to [HH:MM] Name: message lines and downloads as a .txt file. Room name is sanitized for the filename; falls back to hivetalk-chat-{date}.txt when no room name is available. 🔇 Mute Screenshare Audio (Per-Viewer) Speaker toggle on the screenshare tile mutes ONLY the ScreenShareAudio publication for the local viewer — does not affect video, the mic track, or other participants. Mute state is tracked per participant + publication SID so it survives track re-publishes. 🛡️ Moderators Approve Lobby Joiners Fixed the broken moderator lobby-approval flow. Root cause traced through the promote path — live LiveKit participant attributes now correctly reflect moderator="true", and mods can approve/deny lobby requests end-to-end. Regression test added. special thanks to @buttercup and @yeghro #updates

Hot fix for zaps not working from July 2 Special thanks to Jordi for finding this one!

Hot fix deployed for the 4 hour room bug. Previously all rooms were closing at 1 hour. Now permanent rooms are back to 4 hrs #updates

We have 5 new releases in the works. Every week there will be new hivetalk release, new features, new updates, bug fixes, hot fix pushes. keep your eyes peeled 👀, this is going to be the most aggressive push out for Q3 2026! #updates

You asked for it, we delivered - Amber sign in ! If you're an Amber user and are up for some testing, please hit reply to this note and we'll set you up.

We'll continue with our weekly testing sessions next week. Keep your eyes peeled as we start to push new releases every week. 🔥 #updates

Thanks to everyone who joined! You can keep testing our new features at the link below, and if you like what we’re doing, don’t forget to help us reach our July #ZapGoal :) Your #zaps keep this product free with new features being introduced to perfect it continuously. Cheers! ⚡️💜⚡️ View quoted note →

Changing the testing room for additional features. 🔥🎶 Join : https://stagetwo.hivetalk.org/meet/hive View quoted note →

Hey bees! We’re looking for some generous souls who want to help out testing Hivetalk. Who are the epic bees who’re gonna join us?? 🐝🐝🐝

Stumble upon a locked room? If LOBBY is ON, you can always request access so the owner can let you in!

🐝 Question for the community: 🐝 What kind of events do you think it would be fun to enjoy publicly on Hivetalk?

Monetization Musings: #Zaps , V4V, and the Pay-to-Play Pivot. Sustainability is the bee’s knees, and 2025 was our lab for micro-strategies: - Zap Goals: Timed targets under 100,000 sats/month, embedded site-wide. Hit ‘em, or the server’s off—keeps us lean and accountable. - Donor Badges: Big zappers get flair. Early supporters, you’re the real MVPs and are awarded rare Nostr badges. - Educational Content: Knowledge drops to empower users—because informed bees build stronger hives. - Pay-to-Play (Planned for Q1 2026): Recording and live-streaming to external sites. Some Hivetalk users log 10+ hours daily (love y’all!), but the economics need to work. Observations from the #Nostr projects? Subscriptions are a hard sell, V4V’s hit-or-miss (audience engagement is key), and growth might slow in 2026. Enter “Pay to Play”—could it be the direct, engaging path to better outcomes? We’re experimenting, because value flows where engagement hums. Stay tuned for updates.

Hivetalk Mantra: Code Quality Comes First Thanks to awesome new #AI based tools we were able to rapidly accelerate our build cycles, experiment more and turn around our code releases faster, while building the project in our free time. A little over a year ago, churning out 100,000+ lines of code at this speed would have been unthinkable! We put a lot of work in grinding out the new version, making a lot of revisions and trial and error along the way. While velocity matters, shipping responsibly matters more. We invested heavily in DDoS relay hardening, and enforcing NIP-42 authentication on our relay, two critical infrastructure layers that matter but don’t show up as user facing visible work. We also tackled tech debt cleanup—the unsexy but essential work that prevents yesterday’s shortcuts from becoming tomorrow’s bottlenecks. Check out our progress in this beautiful Hivetalk Honey Build animation.

Community Buzz: Small Businesses and Very Busy Bees If there’s one word for our user base this past 2025, it’s *vibrant*. We’ve watched small businesses and solopreneurs turn HiveTalk into their secret weapon for zap-powered transactions and global reach. Take @npub1m7h20lqwnjd8snaf8alefep6xfkdeanlv74ce4my5p4drjed5l2qsq0yf8 , the English teacher zapping his way through lessons for Russian students—frictionless peer to peer lightning payments, no banks involved. Or @npub18ams6ewn5aj2n3wt2qawzglx9mr4nzksxhvrdc4gzrecw7n5tvjqctp424 , who hosted weekly “Shakespeare-vibe” coding sessions to demystify #AI tools for the community. These aren’t outliers; they’re the norm in our hive. Check out this talk from Nostr Valley about Nostr for Content Creators and see how Hivetalk plays a role!

Did you know? #asknostr Now when you create a permanent room on Honey Hivetalk, you can attach a calendar event (Kind 30313) to your room, and it will pop up seamlessly as an event scheduled on honey.hivetalk.org. But, there’s more - since #nostr is decentralized, these calendar events will show up across the ecosystem on other nostr clients, bridging the gap. This is much more than just “sharing a link on another website” - the cryptographically signed and verified event data is also replicated - who created it, when it was created, the event details, location, time and relays where the data is published. Here are two clients that replicate Honey calendar event data: plektos.app and nostrcal.com

The differences between Vanilla and Honey in a nutshell.

@Dave Nicholls what are your preferred Vanilla features that you would like to see on Honey? 🐝💜