Overview#
What started out as a simple patch became another full release. Seven weeks after Concord was integrated, 518 Vector-specific commits have landed: a second generation of the Concord Protocol, ephemeral messages also known as self-destructing messages, keys that never touch the app, and optimizations across the board, alongside a long run of bug fixes and platform work. Every supported operating system got attention this cycle, Android most of all.
- 518 Commits - 7 Weeks of Work - ~2s First Sync (previously 1m) - 17 New Features
The other half of the story is that Vector is no longer only a place where people type. With the Vector SDK now public, bots are being built and brought into chats by the team, by outside developers, and by community members. A new slash command picker lives right in the composer, so setting up a bot and talking to it is as simple as typing /. Self-destructing messages arrived in the same release, along with 16 other features. Update, open a chat, and the whole experience should simply feel quicker and lighter than it did seven weeks ago.
The Short Version#
- Concord v2: Community addresses are now derived from the owner's own key, and every admin action carries proof of the authority behind it.
- Bots & Slash Commands: type / in any chat to browse bots and run their commands, all over encrypted messages.
- Ephemeral Messages: per-chat expiry that truly erases messages on both ends, rather than hiding them.
- Holographic Badges: the promised Bug Hunter badges, tiered and tilt-rendered, with real in-app perks attached.
- Amber Signing: on Android, your private key can live in a separate vault and never touch Vector at all.
- Speed Optimization: first sync drops from about a minute to about two seconds, with Communities painting newest-first.
Concord Protocol Evolves#
v0.4.0 introduced Concord, our from-scratch protocol for fully encrypted Communities. Seven weeks of running it in the wild taught us exactly where the armor needed thickening, and v0.4.1 ships the result: Concord v2. Every new Community you create now runs on it.
The headline change is identity. In Concord v2, a Community's address is derived from its owner's own key. The room's name on the network is a cryptographic commitment to who runs it, which closes a whole family of impersonation tricks in one stroke.
In v2, an invite that lies about a Community's owner isn't detected and rejected. It's unmintable. The address itself won't exist unless the owner's key says so.
Moderation got the same treatment. Every admin action in v2, every ban, every role change, every channel edit, now carries a verifiable citation of the authority it acted under. Clients don't take an admin's word for it; they check the chain. A kicked troublemaker can't quietly slip back in, an un-ban can't resurrect a ghost, and a mid-rank admin can't promote themselves above their station. The rules aren't policy anymore. They're math.
Your existing Communities keep working exactly as before, v1 and v2 run side by side. And there's a bigger door opening for them very soon; see What's Next.
New Features#
Bots & Slash Commands#
Type / in any chat and Vector opens a command picker: pick a bot, pick a command, and fill in its typed parameters from a structured composer. It's the flow you know from Discord, running over encrypted DMs and Communities instead of someone's datacenter.
On the other side of those commands is the new Vector SDK, a bot framework in the discord.js spirit: a few lines of Rust get you a bot that speaks NIP-17, advertises its commands, and answers them. Price tickers, moderators, reminders, whatever you can imagine, they all live on the same rails as every other Vector user, with the same encryption.
Ephemeral Messages#
Set a per-chat timer and messages erase themselves on schedule, on both ends. Not hidden. Erased: gone from the database, gone from memory, and refused by the renderer itself, so an expired message never paints again, not even for a frame.
Holographic Badges#
Remember the promise at the end of the v0.4.0 post? Paid in full. The Bug Hunter badges are here: tiered NIP-58 badges for the people who found what we couldn't, rendered as holographic cards on an interactive 3D tilt that follows your device. They aren't just trophies either; higher tiers unlock real in-app perks. More badge lines are already designed and waiting for future releases.
Amber Signing (Android)#
Your private key can now live in Amber, Android's dedicated Nostr key vault, and never touch Vector at all. Vector asks Amber for each signature over NIP-55 and only ever receives the result. It's the hardware-wallet principle applied to your identity: the key stays in the vault, the app just knocks on the door.
The Long Tail#
- Clipboard Files: copy files out of Vector and paste files straight in, on every platform.
- Image Metadata Control: photos ship stripped of EXIF and location data by default, with an opt-in toggle when you want the original kept.
- Private Notifications: hide the message, or the sender and the message, from your notification shade.
- @Mentions Everywhere: npubs render as tappable mentions in messages, bios, and system events.
- Chat-List Menu: right-click or long-press any chat for Mark as Read or Unread, Mute, Block, and Leave.
- Link Spoof Guard: markdown links whose text hides their real destination are blocked outright, with a safety preview on hover or tap.
- Reaction Control: revoke a reaction you regret, or shift-click to stack several without the panel closing.
- Automatic Media Mirroring: every upload is copied to a second media server, and messages carry their backup sources, so one dead host never kills a file.
- Storage Breakdown: a donut in Settings shows exactly what's using space, with per-category deletion.
The Speed Pass#
Encrypted messaging carries a tax that most apps quietly pay in your time: everything is sealed, so a client can't just ask a server "what's new?" and trust the answer. Early Vector paid that tax at every boot. v0.4.1 stops paying it. The client now remembers, per relay, exactly where it left off, and asks each one for precisely the slice it's missing. Sync the least data possible, as fast as possible.
| What | Before | Now |
|---|---|---|
| First DM sync on boot | Up to a minute | About 2 seconds |
| Community boot paint | Minutes on big accounts | Seconds, newest first |
| Hex encoding | Baseline | Up to 59x faster (SIMD) |
| Long voice message decode | Baseline | 4.4x faster |
Communities get their own trick, and we like the name so much it's staying: Volley Sync. At boot, Vector fires mass-batched requests for the freshest messages of every channel in every Community you're in, most recently active first. The channels you actually read paint in the first seconds; verification and moderation data ride in right behind, invisibly.
Deeper down, long chats now render in a sliding window that stays smooth at any depth, deep syncs commit in single batched transactions, and unread counts come from an in-memory cache instead of the database. The audio player joined the party too: stereo-native now, where it used to fold everything to mono. The app doesn't just sync faster. It feels lighter everywhere.
Join the Vector Community#
Every feature in this post was shaped by people standing in the official Community, using it daily, and telling us exactly where it hurt. That's the loop, and there's a seat in it for you.
Download v0.4.1 from the Website or GitHub, and join the Vector Community!
What's Next#
Upgrade Day for v1 Communities#
Concord v2 shouldn't be reserved for new rooms. On August 4th, Community owners will find a one-click upgrade in their Community settings: press it once, and every member follows automatically, same room, same history, new armor. No exports, no re-invites, no ceremony.
Frontend Refactor#
It is time for a deep clean, and for a pivot away from a vanilla frontend to the frontend framework called Svelte. Svelte compiles away at build time, so Vector ships lighter and the UI updates itself when state changes. Less code, fewer places for bugs to hide.
Widescreen Desktop (v0.5.0)#
The promise from last release is now running in the lab: a true three-pane desktop shell with channels, conversation, and members side by side. v0.5.0 is where Vector stops being a phone app that happens to run on a desktop and becomes a communication hub that earns the screen it's on.
Special Thanks#
Last but not least, a special thanks to the Community members who sat through round after round of testing across these seven weeks. Your time, your patience, and your dedication are the reason this release is what it is. With v0.4.1, the new Bug Hunter Badge has been awarded to everyone who reported an issue and took the time to document it properly. If you reported a bug and didn't receive your Bug Hunter Badge, please contact the team through the Vector Community.
It is not a vanity badge. Every tier of Bug Hunter carries either partial or full premium access, and it is the first working piece of something larger: a gamification layer that rewards Vector users in-app for contributions they are already making, and the groundwork for Vector Augment, the premium model we have been building toward. More on both in the releases ahead.
For anyone who has read this far, one thing is worth saying plainly now. Vector is free and open source, and it always will be. Vector Augment is being designed with the base user in mind: the free experience is meant to stay competitive with, and in most places ahead of, what most paid messengers ship today. This premium model exists so that development can keep pace with that promise because Vector does not expect to rely on generous donations by community members and grants.
Vector Privacy is a free, open-source, decentralized communication platform built on Nostr. No KYC. No metadata. No ads. No compromise.
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