Entering 2.1.0
August 20, 2023
Upgrades and lessons learned
No rest for the team as we keep gathering feedback and suggestions from the community! We've been super thrilled with the warm welcome you all gave to 2.0 since we launched it on May 1st this year, but obviously we did not wanna go back to the former mood of "letting things run, and hope for the best"
Let's have a little retrospective look on that launch, and then dive into the new stuff that we're releasing today!
The past 4 months
As mentioned earlier, we got mostly positive feedback since the release of 2.0. Alongside that release, we made ourselves a pretty nice Murrtube Statistics page, which makes it oh so much simpler to check the app's health and usage. Lemme show you some of that!
Impressions
This is the video impressions counts
On the top, we got the weekly number of videos that have been viewed, and at
the bottom is the grand total.
That giant spike in May is a bit of a fluke. During the first 3 days of 2.0,
there was a bug that would count impressions twice most of the times. What's
cool to see tho is that nevertheless, our weekly impressions count plateau-ed
higher than before the release, and recently even more!
BTW, yea, impressions were only implemented in early 2022, so we don't have
impressions data for before that, only unique view counts.
Traffic
This is the provenance of traffic on Murrtube
Quite a big change here! It used to be more balanced between Germany and the
USA, but since the latest release, Americans have taken a big lead in the
fapping contest!
Keep in mind that since your privacy is of utmost importance to us, this data
is completely anonymous and stored as plain numbers!
Likes and Comments
This is the comments number on Murrtube
This is a place were we failed a bit in my opinion. But it was foreseeable. We
do notice on a much milder level that the likes count have been following a
similar trend.
With 2.0, we took the unanimous decision to hack through the comment section,
no more replies, it's less visible, etc.. And this has inevitably driven
engagement down. Y'all come to watch the videos, but don't feel it necessary
or practical to engage with the content.
This is a big debate for now and we will come up with something, of that I'm
confident!
Storage capacity
This is the total content length Murrtube
The other good news! With all the optimizations we did on storage and
encoding, even though we provide better video quality, we have freed up
massive space on our storage server!
We estimate, with current encoding settings, that we can accomodate up to
75000 minutes of porn. That's one hell of a fapping session. With our previous
settings, we could have barely reached 40K.
That's still a lot of margin, but margin is comfortable! Even more so knowing
that we're only sitting at 20% capacity for now!
Pretty nice right?
We're super happy about how this turned out, after all, re-writing Murrtube
from scratch was quite a piece of work! It brings a lot of joy to see that
this was the right direction to go :)
But as I said at the beginning, that doesn't mean we should stop here. We have
some features small and huge planned! But we'll keep some of those a surprise!
The new stuff
The random section
This is one you probably already know about because we actually deployed it
around a week ago as a test. The screenshot is from our staging server so
don't mind the placeholder thumbnails >.>
We liked what we did with the rotating trending section on a front page, as it
allows for more trending stuff to stick out aven after some time. But this was
suggested to us: it would be nice to have the ability to discover more videos,
older, or that didn't apply to the trending anymore. So that they don't all go
to die after a few weeks.
So we simply added a Random Videos section on the front page! 5 randomly
selected videos from the entire library, refreshed any time you land on that
page! Good way to discover some lost gems :3
Social Media on your profile
This feature was added (a few days ago actually) because we needed it for the
next feature we will present. Essentially, anyone can now link their social
media on their profile, with pretty logo icons for clarity. We have opted for
Twitter, BlueSky, Telegram and OnlyFans. Not JustForFans, sorry, couldn't find
an official version of their logo that fit into a circle (if anyone has it,
send it our way!)
You can set these in your Edit Profile modal, at the bottom!
Yes, the bird logo stays for Twitter, fight me about it. Don't wanna add some
close-button looking logo on here.
Get tagged by the bot!
That's what I meant about the previous feature. We had to implement it in
order to make this one possible.
This is simple: when you set your social media handles, you can decide for
each if the bot should tag you or not. Now, say you said okay for Twitter
sharing, when one of your videos gets published, our Twitter Bot will post a
tweet about it. But it will also tag you on Twitter!
Hopefully this helps all of you to get even more visibility :)
BlueSky integration
With the whole Twitter debacle and the growing migration of our communities to
the safer haven that is BlueSky, we decided to expand over there too.
Murrtube now has a bluesky account :
@murrtube.net.
We have finished integrating our automation process there, so our account will
post about newly published videos on BlueSky as well. And just like for
Twitter, you can decide to be tagged on our posts too!
BTW, this integration uses an in-house micro python API, made with Flask,
deployed on our servers, and based on the BlueSky documentation.
It allows us to create BSky posts with a simple HTTParty call (basically
a cURL call). You can find the repo for this
right here!
A new video player
We went a bit overboard with 2.0, and decided to go with a full featured
video.js player, and on top of that, it was poorly implemented, which would
cause slowness of the whole app, and for video switching.
So the more reasonable move was to go back to a classic HTML5 video tag, with
a super tiny bit of JS to handle our HLS files. Long story short : Back to a
simpler, more efficient video player!
Get creative in your descriptions
Well, creative is a big word. We have just added support for bold, italic and
underlined text in video descriptions. It works with as basic as respective
html tags for each of those.
No, the real upgrade in video descriptions is that we now render your URLs as
actual links!
Some URL reworking
As you may have seen already, we also changed the URL routing of the
application to allow for shorter video URLs. Basically, what would be
https://murrtube.net/videos/video-title-in-url-format is now
https://murrtube.net/v/1A2B
Do not worry! the previous routing still works, and all the old links from the
bots, or that you have shared, will still work!
We also have the murr.tube domain now, and it's a straight up redirect from it
to murrtube.net:
https://murr.tube => https://murrtube.net
https://murr.tube/v/1A2B => https://murrtube.net/v/1A2B
Neat lil trick if you want even shorter links to share!
A wee bit of restyling
Most of everything else is restyling.
-> New main font to replace the previous, cute but difficult to read one.
-> Some paddings fixes, some backgrounds and contrasts added.
-> Tooltips over every 'time ago' information that displays the precise time
(of a comment or video publication)
-> New styles applied to the various peripheral Murrtube webapps
What now??
As I said above, I don't wanna spoil all of the future updates we have planned, but some of these include :
-> Support for multiple languages
-> Scheduled video publications
-> Featured profile video
-> Community and Staff video selection highlights
-> Choosing your own video thumbnail
And that's just some of the smaller or medium sized ones!
That's all folks!
Don't forget, if you have anything to suggest, some feedback or anything, you can let us know on our Feedback Form. Should you need a more *personal* touch, we're reachable via DM on Twitter or directly via Telegram (preferred).
That's all for now, have a lovely rest of your day/night, we'll see y'all soon! :3