Hello everyone! While it's been a little quiet from Deegram for a while, a lot of work has been done and a lot of progress has been made. We are continually improving and making the app ready for an open beta, and we are ready to share some of the updates with you.

What's been going on

There have been several changes to Deegram over the past month, and we are happy to announce that they are now going through internal testing and will be released to the closed alpha test group in the coming days.

Press coverage

A while ago we had an article about Deegram in [Khrono](https://khrono.no/deegram-innovasjon-robin-amir-rondestvedt-moudnib/studenter-ble-konfrontert-av-advokat-etter-de-lanserte-utfordrer-til-instagram/281309). Khrono is an online paper owned by several universities in Norway, and cover politics, students and entrepreneurship. This article is mainly covering the legal war with Instagram LLC. and Facebook Inc. Just recently, we were contacted by E24, one of, if not the largest business outlet in Norway with around 320.000 daily readers and around 150.000 followers between their Facebook and Twitter accounts. They wrote a nice [article](https://e24.no/jobb/ledertalentene/ledertalentene-2019-gr-ndere-skal-gjoere-likes-om-til-penger/24649108) about Deegram and the team, featuring a picture from @steemfest 2 in Lisbon.

Donations and charity - working with @azizbd, @schoolforsdg4 and @womenempowerment

In Norway you pay an additional deposit price for all plastic bottles, which after consumption can be deposited back at a store to get the money back, each bottle at between 15 and 30 cents. When depositing bottles, you can choose to donate this to Red Cross or take the money back for yourself. If it's 20 or 30 cents, you might not really care about taking the deposit and choose to donate it away. This initiative has raised over $96 million USD in total, and $32 million have been given directly to Red Cross. Through market research, user feedback and inspiration from the Norwegian "bottle deposit lottery", we are happy to announce that you can now donate your earnings directly from Deegram. From the wallet view, you can now enter the donation section and have a look. ![donate1.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/1200x400/https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmRvM6bNrMjiEzSaaohzd9avRkFrNB5TsQYYDPfoQvjMKW/donate1.jpg) The projects we are including now are @schoolforsdg4 and @womenempowerment, initiatives from @azizbd. Please read up on the projects and all the great work he's doing! In the long run, we aim to identify and verify charities within all categories of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDG), so that your social media activity can help fund a project or organizations that you truly care about. We are very open to suggestions to other charitable projects we can add as potential recipients of donations!

https://steemitimages.com/400x400/https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQoxnYieajxqFmta22XpegxxAj5Ns1WRTGQGEoCY7hCCn/notifications.jpg https://steemitimages.com/400x400/https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmWreBbiEs2sUSHCLXySCBFawPGNbJ3zDbeF3oFpQizxQn/discover.jpg

Notifications

From the new bottom navigation bar you can now see the latest votes, comments and replies to your content ordered by the time of the notification. You will also see notifications for all incoming transfers to your account. Further, we plan to thumbnails and/or previews to the content that received the vote/comment/reply in a future update.

Discover

We have made it easier to discover new people in your network based on who you already follow. By default, there is a list of active and popular users on Deegram, but when refreshed Deegram fetches up to 20 personalized recommendations. Don't find anyone interesting? If you refresh again you can find some new suggestions, as the list is randomized based on an algorithm.

UI updates

* Navigation bar We are now introducing a bottom navigation bar. We have been working to add more features and twists to Deegram over the past months, and we reached a point where navigation around the app was becoming increasingly complex. To simplify and make it easier, the bottom bar now contains navigation to the feed, discover, uploading/posting, notifications and your profile.

https://steemitimages.com/400x400/https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmXjLqGBudo7UbnpwkWrSjvbgD3ZJqKFKDnV8fYhNHMjo1/bigImage.jpg https://steemitimages.com/400x400/https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmVmnNieyqNeehuXoQGtcNqmSd3hriJ38bRakQZzhbhL2g/feedSwitch.jpg

* Bigger images A while ago we invited some photographers to join Deegram testing, and one of the most prominent comments were that they wanted their pictures to be larger, and we agree and didn't quite like the ratio and layout restrictions we had in place. Posts now take up a larger part of the screen, and any background space has a black fill color to make the feed tidier and visually pleasing. * Feed switching Several users reported that they did not like our current switch between feeds (four buttons switching between my feed, trending, hot, fresh and promo). As the profile button is now moved, the feed switch is a picker in the top right corner to keep the feed screen cleaner. * Profile images on posts and comments Posts in the feed now have the profile image of the author. Comments now also have the authors profile picture next to their name. * DTube embedded We have always wanted to add support for several media types in Deegram, however, the time and resources available has prevented us from introducing it sooner. As a start, however, we've now added embedding of videos from @dtube in the app. https://steemitimages.com/800x800/https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmWFkiS9WPz8wkY4UCqed1WVRMgiTu6icFfZ6vfshxWhKy/dtubeembedd.jpg * Edit profile - profile picture The edit profile functionality is now updated so that users can change their profile picture.

In the time to come

We will be performing further adjustments and tweaks on the current build of the app based on feedback from testers, while we in parallel work hard to work through the backlog of new features we wish to add. Some of the focus areas for the next few weeks are listed below. * Deegram web client The Deegram web client is making good progress, and we are closing in on a build that we are comfortable opening up for testing. * Profile redesign and rework We are working on redesigning and reworking the profile. The profile header currently takes up too much space, and the profile loading time is far from optimal. The profile will be revisited and reworked both from a design and functional standpoint. * Transfers * Resteem/share * Various UX/UI improvements That's it for now, thank you for following the project and for all the support we receive. We can't wait to bring you more news and new updates in the future, please don't hesitate to ask us any question you have! Best regards, The Deegram team