Pods: Shared Gratitude

We released Pods in November 2019 with the goal of making it easier to stay motivated and keep up your gratitude journaling habit. We liked the idea of having an accountability buddy - a way to check in with friends and share your progress. It's common for fitness apps to leverage your friends to help you run an extra mile or get in those extra steps, so why shouldn’t your journal do something similar?

Pods have been especially popular in recent months and we've received overwhelming feedback. Most commonly, families, couples, and friends have all requested that we add a way to actually share your moments in Pods.

We loved the idea of being able to share your gratitude with others, so we decided to rethink Pods and make some major updates.

Update April 28, 2020: Updates are released on Android as well!

Introducing Pods 2.0:

We redesigned Pods from the ground up into a colorful, interactive feed of positive progress and happy moments. Stories in this feed are a mix of friends completing their daily journaling and sharing specific moments and photos from their day.

What's New

• New Layout: The Pods screen now displays a feed of activities from friends, like completing a day or sharing a moment.
• Shared moments: Moments and photos are mixed in with progress updates, making it much more fun to check in on your Pods and see if anything new has been shared.
• Member circles: Pod members are listed across the top, showing their current streak and whether or not they’ve completed today. Soon these may be tappable to see their shares, journaling progress, and more.
• Pod filtering: Your feed can be filtered by specific Pods by selecting one from a dropdown menu in the new header.
• Reactions: Now you can send reactions to individual activities in your feed. You could send a 🔥 for completing a 100-day streak or a 🍰 for sharing a fun moment.

How To Share

You can share any moment you like, even ones from your daily memories. Tap on any moment and you’ll see a new option to share that moment with one or many different Pods.

If you’d like to change your sharing settings for a particular moment, you can tap-and-hold on that moment in your Pods feed. Keep in mind that unsharing will remove any reactions!

To keep things simple, you can only share moments after they've been uploaded. We’ll likely be adding an option to the upload form to share directly with your Pods in the near future though.

Why Now?

I’ve noticed that more and more people have started (or restarted) using Happyfeed since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. Many of us are stuck at home, feeling isolated and anxious, and looking for any way we can to connect with others.

While I think it’s incredibly important to stay informed and keep up with the news, I think too much exposure to negative headlines is giving us all anxiety. Happyfeed was always meant to be a small escape from the unpredictability and stress of social media. Now, with Pods, you’ll hopefully have an extra dash of serendipity to go with your existing gratitude habit.

Sharing a moment or sending a reaction feels like a little way to say, "Hey, we're all in this together and there's definitely still some good."

Your Stories

I think it’d be especially fun to put together some stories from actual Happyfeed users. If you’ve made a Pod, I’d love to hear from you. We might even feature a few stories here on the blog. Reach out to me at [email protected] with the subject “Pods Story” and we can get a conversation started.

We’re excited for what’s next with Pods and can’t wait to hear your stories about using them.

Note on Privacy

Happyfeed is first and foremost a journaling app that focuses helping you cultivate personal moments of joy. Pods are completely optional and moments will only ever be shared to the groups you specifically select. We encourage you to give them a try if you have a friend or loved one who you’re especially grateful for 💜