Where Woodstar is headed next, and how far along each piece is. Milestones is the story of what's already shipped; this is the honest plan for the road to V1 — the release where the whole thing feels finished, not just working. Updated as the tracks move, in plain language: what you'll feel, not how the box is run.
Toward V1 · reviewed 28 August 2026
V1 isn't a feature list — it's a bar. Five things have to be true before we'd call it finished.
The work that gets us over the bar, grouped by what it's for.
Posting, threads, DMs, search, faves, invites, profiles — working today at woodstar.app.
Changes ship to woodstar.app most days, straight from reviewed work. The V1 work is polish — every rough edge that reads as a prototype gets smoothed until the first five minutes feel obvious. Latest: the app opens in one piece, no half-built page while it loads, and the feed holds still while it updates.
Passkey sign-up and sign-in are live; recovery is the remaining work.
Today a passkey unlocks your identity on a new device. Next: recovery paths (email, more passkeys, a recovery code that's actually findable later) so that "lost my phone" is a shrug, and moving the identity seed into the device's secure hardware.
The trust gradient: invited, followed and verified people skip the toll entirely.
Someone with no connection to you pays a proof-of-work stamp to reach you — hardest for cold mentions and DM requests. You never see any of this; legitimate people graduate out of it instantly. Spam stays priced; the word "proof-of-work" stays on this page and out of the app.
Posts say which app sent them, and other people's apps are welcome.
Open a post and it quietly says via Woodstar web — or via whatever app its author chose. The name travels inside the signed post, the Apps page lists every client we know about, and an independent app gets its name on its posts the moment it exists. No registration, no approval, no API key to beg for.
Follow anyone, wherever their home is.
The design is done: following name@otherdomain reads their home instance directly, and nothing in the protocol cares which box anyone lives on. The client just needs to learn to read more than one relay. Handles stay the names you chose — that already works.
A company account real people can post as — revocably.
Today sharing an account means sharing its recovery code: all-or-nothing. The real design is delegation — the account grants each person's device permission to post as it, auditable and revocable one person at a time. Born from wanting @tito to be shared properly.
Your old posts come with you; your new ones reach friends who stayed behind.
Hand Woodstar your Twitter archive and your whole history moves in, original dates and pictures intact, browsable end to end. Turn on Mastodon and people there follow you at the name you already have. Turn on Bluesky and you're you.woodstar.app — a web address that opens your profile, made in your own browser and yours outright, on Woodstar's own machinery rather than a borrowed bridge. Replies and likes from both find their way home. Leaving a place shouldn't cost you your past or your people.
Notifications that arrive when the app is closed.
Mentions, replies and DMs pushed to your phone — without the push service being able to read any of it. The notify service already exists server-side; the delivery leg is the work.
A real iPhone app — not a website in a costume. It signs in and reads.
The app now opens with the same one-tap sign-in you use on the website — same account, nothing to set up — and your timeline reads the way a native app should: dense, calm, conversations threaded together. You can post and reply from it. Next: pictures, profiles and messages, then it goes out to early hands.
Run your own instance — even on a machine that sleeps. The first slice works.
Running Woodstar is already copying two small programs somewhere, and the first slice of the rest is built: a home instance keeps in sync through a shared meeting point, so your public posts stay reachable while your machine is off and everything catches up the moment you come back. Still ahead: making it a one-command affair, with honest instructions on one docs page.
Real plans, deliberately held until the core is finished — named here because we'd rather be honest about the direction than quiet.
Relay mirroring: your signed history replicated to other instances, so one box dying — ours included — never takes anyone's words with it.
Mute, block and report are yours today — kept in your encrypted pocket, so not even your instance knows who you've had enough of. Every post now chooses who can reply: everyone, people who follow you, or only the people you mention. Next come label services: competing, optional filters you subscribe to, the way you'd pick a spam filter — never a central authority deciding for everyone.
Competing indexers for search and who-to-follow — glue, not gatekeepers, and swappable like everything else in the stack.
Private accounts: posts sealed to a circle you approve, and follow requests you answer.
Turn it on and only the people you approve can read what you post — encrypted to them, so the servers holding it hold nothing readable. Nobody is approved at the start, because Woodstar never told anyone who follows you; the people already there ask, and the ones you plainly already know come back without you lifting a finger. Anything that cannot keep a secret is switched off rather than half-trusted — the archive importer, and the Mastodon and Bluesky mirrors.