Today is the day! Bard, originally known as Spart, is a community based social media platform for collaborative world building, storytelling, and discussion between artists, writers, actors, musicians, and more! We have been working on improving and evolving Bard over the last 8 months. This included everything from adding features, fixing bugs, and improving the look and feel of Bard to improving the underlying code so that we can continue to move quickly in the future.

But let’s get to it, here are some of the things that changed.

Feature Changes

Private Communities

• We have added private communities! This is one of our largest changes with Bard and as Bard grows communities will be at the center of it all. Right now you can create, join, invite to, and manage your communities. Eventually we want you to be able to attach projects and events to them and perhaps to be able to run supporting campaigns like Patreon, for your collaborative events and projects.

Themes (with stars!)

• For some time now, many of you have been requesting more customization on your profile and with the app. With this release we have released 4 new themes for you to set the tone of Bard for yourself. Continue to expect more customization as we grow!

New login flow

• We’ve changed the tools we use to let you login to Bard! With this change comes the ability to login with Google and improvements to stability (aka less bugs).

Onboarding

• We have added a new onboarding flow, which essentially means a few pages you can fill out to get yourself setup on the app. This will hopefully make it more seamless for you and others to join Bard.

Email newsletter

• You can now sign up for our newsletter through the app in both the onboarding and in settings. We will be sharing news, updates, and information surrounding Bard every 2 ish weeks, but really only as we need to. No spam here.

Pro plan for all of you!

• If you ever posted on Spart/Bard in the past you will now have the benefits of the Bard pro plan for life! You can still subscribe if you’d like and we would appreciate it, but regardless, you will have the benefits.

Complete collaboration filter

• We’ve added a filter so that you can easily view the completed (visual, audio, and writing) collaborations on Bard.

Full size images

• On most pages where you are viewing a visual that doesn’t link to a new page, if you click on the visual it will open up in full screen so that you can appreciate the details in the work.

Accessibility improvements

• We improved accessibility across the app. Whether that’s improving labels, screen reader support, or visual cues for features and events.

Quality of life improvements

• We have added a variety of small quality of life improvements.

Things We Removed

Embedded video support

• We added embedded video support awhile back but we found that it added quite a bit of complexity, confusion, and accessibility issues. We may consider video and animation support in the future but for the time being we are putting that on the side.

Likes and saves from feed

• On many social media platforms you can like and save posts as you scroll. We had this on Bard as well but we’ve decided to remove it. We believe it encourages non meaningful engagement between creators and we have no algorithm that could use the data to determine what posts you want to see.

Instagram and Twitter links

• We have had Twitter and Instagram links in your settings for some time now but with those came requests for other social media platforms. Rather than adding dozens of fields for all social medias we would encourage you to use the website field to link to a hub where people can access all your important links.

Prints, merchandise, and tracks fields

• We removed the prints, merchandise, and tracks fields from settings. At one point we were considering building a marketplace but we are steering away from that for the time being. The commissions open field is still available for advertising your services.

Bug Fixes

Over the last 8 months we have pretty much completely rewritten the platform and we have likely fixed most of the bugs you may have experienced in the past. However, we may have also introduced new issues with all these changes. If you run into any problems let us know and we’ll try and hop on those ASAP.