What has changed

If you have accepted analytics, I can now see which parts of Together get used: which panel you open, which map layers you switch, flat or globe, and that a search, comparison, chat or tour was used. I never see what you searched for, which places you compared, who you talked to or what you listened to. If you have not accepted analytics, none of this is sent. The privacy page has the details.

On a phone, the map sheet and the rankings page used to jump as they finished loading, which could send your finger to the wrong place. They now hold still. On text pages the words come first and the map behind them follows a moment later. Search engines can also find the sitemap now, through a proper robots.txt.

Two new switches. Weather paints the whole map with temperature, rain, wind or cloud, whichever you pick. It is a broad world picture updated hourly, not a local forecast. Charts puts a note on 50-odd countries: tap one to see what is most played on Apple Music there and what tops Steam. These show what is popular, not actual sales, because good open sales figures by country do not exist.

A new rocket switch puts a small rocket on every launch pad with something coming up. Tap one for a live countdown, the rocket, the mission, who is flying it and a webcast link when there is one. There is also a button to watch an illustrated launch rise from the pad across the map. That flight is my own sped-up drawing, not the rocket's real path, because most real paths are not published.

Zoom right in, anywhere in the world, and the map turns into real roads and buildings, wherever OpenStreetMap has them. Every mapped building becomes a small 3D house on its real footprint. Its colours and roof are generated, so it will not look like the actual house, but it will look the same each time you visit. Some places are mapped beautifully and others have little yet, and I will never show who lives where. Close up you now also get parks, woods, rivers and lakes, and road names. Houses now draw on your graphics card, so big cities are smoother and towers overlap properly, and very close up they get windows, which light up at night in dark mode.

A new switch shows public shortwave receivers around the world. Tap a mast, pick CB channel 19, amateur bands, Atlantic air traffic or broadcasts, and that receiver opens in a new tab already tuned. These are real radios that their owners share, so you hear whatever is on air there, which on CB is often nothing until someone talks. True CB repeaters are rare and often not allowed, and the usual VHF and UHF repeaters are above what these reach, so they are not here yet.

Satellite cards now show a real photo where I can find one, and Starlink is in.

The main layers are now icons beside the logo, so you can switch them with one tap. The search box stays in the top bar whatever else is open, and it now searches what is switched on: places, teams, the squad you have open, news, conflict lines, radio stations and satellites. It works with the arrow keys and Enter. On a phone it shrinks to a magnifying glass until you tap it.

Satellites look like satellites now, with solar panels once you zoom in, and the ISS has its long truss. Tap one for a small 3D model you can drag around, its path around the Earth, and a Follow button, just like planes. The models show the type of craft, not the exact one.

There is a new Satellites switch above the map. It shows the International Space Station and China's Tiangong by name, and thousands of working satellites as small dots, at their real height on the globe. Tap one to see how high and how fast it is going, with a line for its path around the Earth. Your browser works these out from published orbits, so they are calculated rather than tracked live. Starlink has over ten thousand satellites, so I show a sample of them to keep the map smooth.

Turn on the sports layer in the map's layers and you get 220 teams from the big football leagues, the NBA, NFL, MLB and NHL, each with its crest at home and a live score when they are playing. Rivalries are drawn as lines, because every team has a nemesis, and it is usually next door. Tap a team to see its colours, today's game, its rivals and its squad, with a line from where each player comes from to the club.

News flags now sit still right over their pins, and lean towards your cursor as it comes near. A row of quick switches sits above the map for news, conflict, sports, radio, planes and ships, day and night, and terrain. And a playing radio station now shrinks to a circle you can drag anywhere, while you keep clicking around the map.

Civil wars now show too, in Sudan, Myanmar, Yemen, DR Congo, Somalia and Mali. Those lines are my own list and join each side's main seat rather than showing the front.

Tap a line of reported fighting and you can now join a chat about it. You can choose to show a broad place on your messages, so people can see when both sides are in the room, and it is off unless you pick it. Places in active conflict are not offered, to keep people there safer. Every message now has Report and Block, and anyone you block is not told.

News flags are now small floating cards with the headline on them, each tied to its place by a moving dotted line, like the ones on the sheff.events map. More important stories rise higher. Lines of reported fighting, such as Russia and Ukraine, now show without you having to switch them on. They are machine-read from news reports, so some can be wrong, and you can turn them off in the layers panel. The radio layer also works now, and the panels on the map no longer sit on top of each other.

The news markers have turned into flags standing on their places. On the flat map each one is a small flag on a pole, drawn on the map itself and bobbing gently, though slower devices keep theirs still. On the 3D globe they are real flags, rising straight up from the surface, and they sway gently in the breeze. If you have asked for reduced motion they hold still. The Earth hides the ones on the far side, and you can tap the cloth, the pole or the foot of a flag to open the story, just as before, with the outlet's leaning on the card.

Height means how important a story is, and I have tried to keep that honest. An alert is the tallest, a story TalkFuse features is in the middle, and everything else is short. Where several different outlets ran stories from the same place in the last day, its flag stands a little taller, but never enough to jump up a height. That is all it is. There are no votes, likes, comments or reactions behind it, and I ignore TalkFuse's "boosted" mark in case someone paid for it. TalkFuse's map does not say what is breaking, so I do not claim to show that. The layers panel and "Map in words" say all this too.

Nothing flashes, and no flag is red, because I am keeping red for the lines of fighting. There are no pictures either, so your browser makes no request to anyone else. The slider still sets how many places you see. On a phone or a slow device I draw fewer flags and the rest stay as plain pins, and on the flat map a flag that would sit on top of a taller one becomes a plain pin too. If a radio station stands at the foot of a flag, whichever you tap closest to opens.

What I have not done is try this on a wide range of real phones.

I have added a Radio stations layer. It is off by default, and while it is off nothing is fetched. Switch it on in the layers panel and small broadcast marks appear around the world, spread out so no one city crowds the rest. Tap one to see its name and place, then press Play to listen. Nothing ever starts on its own, only one station plays at a time, and there is a Stop button. If a station is offline, or won't play in your browser, the card says so.

This is the one place Together lets your browser talk to someone else directly, so I want to be plain about it. The list of stations comes through our server, which reads the Radio Browser directory every few hours and shares it with everyone. When you press play, your browser connects straight to that station, and the station can see your IP address. The card tells you this before you press anything. Together does not keep a history of what you listen to, does not count plays, does not tell Radio Browser, and does not save your last station, not even on your device. I chose pins by spread between places, not by votes or popularity, so the loudest stations do not win.

While a station plays you see a calm ring on the card. Most stations do not allow a page to read their sound, so for those the ring is a slow decorative animation and the card says so, rather than pretending it is the music. Where a station does allow it, the ring really follows the audio. The playing station breathes a soft pulse on the map; nothing flashes, and if you have asked for reduced motion it stays still. On a small or slow device I draw fewer stations.

To make this work I had to loosen one security rule, and only that one: the site now lets audio come from any secure (https) address, and nothing else was widened. I have recorded the decision in the project rules and the safety notes.

Still to come: shortwave (HF) receivers and repeaters. They are not in this version. What I have not done is test many real stations on a wide range of phones, so expect some to fail.

When you turn the 3D globe to dark mode and look past the Earth, you now see the real sky instead of scattered dots I made up. Every star you can see with the naked eye, about 8,900 of them, is where it truly is, with its own colour and brightness. The sky turns with the Earth by sidereal time, so it agrees with the day and night on the globe. Polaris sits over the North Pole, and Orion is where it should be for the date and time.

The Milky Way is there too, drawn from a real all-sky survey (NASA's Deep Star Maps, built from the ESA Gaia, Hipparcos and Tycho star catalogues), not painted by hand. It is on by default in the layers panel, because it costs very little. The 88 constellations, as lines with their names, have their own switch and are off by default, because I think a quiet sky is nicer to start with. It is astronomy only: no star signs, and nothing about people.

On a small or slow device, or if you have asked for less data, I draw fewer stars (the brighter 1,600 or so) and use a smaller Milky Way image. Nothing is fetched until the dark globe is showing. "Map in words" describes the sky, and without WebGL2 nothing changes: you still get the flat map.

Credits: stars from the HYG database and constellation lines from Stellarium, both CC BY-SA 4.0 (so my cut of them is shared the same way), and the Milky Way from NASA/GSFC SVS with Gaia data from ESA/Gaia/DPAC. They are on the sources page. What I have not done is test it on a wide range of real phones, and the sky uses the equinox of 2000, which is out by about a third of a degree today, far too little to see.

I have built lines between countries on the map, and they are off by default while I check them. You will find two switches in the layers panel, under "Lines between countries": Reports of fighting and Diplomatic talks reported. Each has its own switch, and the two look different without relying on colour: fighting is a red dotted line and talks are a blue long-dashed one. Neither moves or glows. I first drew fighting in a muted ochre, and changed my mind: red is what people expect, and the dots are what keep it from shouting.

A line only appears when at least five separate news outlets, over the last three days, reported fighting or diplomatic talks involving the governments or militaries of those two countries. Tapping a line opens the reports behind it, with the outlet names and links, and a credit to the GDELT Project, which reads the news for us and lets us use it with credit. It is read by a job on the server, not by your browser, and your browser never talks to GDELT.

Tapping a line also shows recent stories from TalkFuse at each end, each under its own country's name. A story counts for a country only when Together's own list of places says so for certain; I do not guess, and if an end has none it says so. These are stories placed in that country, not stories about the line. Next to each story, and on the news cards on the map, you can see the outlet's leaning as TalkFuse rates it. That is TalkFuse's own editorial rating of the *outlet*, not of the story, the country or you, and an outlet it has not rated says "Unrated". It comes from a hand-made list, so it has limits. Tapping "See other outlets that reported this" asks for the other outlets TalkFuse grouped with a story, and most stories have none yet. I do not use anything TalkFuse generates, such as summaries, and the leaning is only there to read: it never affects what is shown or matched.

It is a machine reading the news, so some lines will be wrong. That is why they are off. I will judge a sample of 50 and only turn them on by default if at least 90% are right; that check has not been done yet. The wording says only that fighting or talks were *reported*. It never says two countries are at war, it has no summaries or casualty numbers, and it says nothing about the people of a country. In a comparison, if you have the lines switched on, Together shows any link between the two countries, worked out in your browser, so the pair you compare is never sent to our server. Nothing here is ever used to match anyone or to say anything about you.

I also fixed news pins on the map: tapping one now opens its card even when no side panel is listening for taps on places.

I have added a Near me switch under the news slider in the layers panel. It shows stories reported in the part of the world around you, and it works on its own, so you can have the slider at none and still see local news.

It only ever uses the public place Together already holds for you: the city or country you are on Live now, or your home place if you are signed in. It never uses your phone's location. That place is turned into a large fixed square of the map, about five degrees across, and the server fetches stories for the whole square and shares them with everyone, so the request says nothing about you and I do not record which square anyone looked at. If Together holds no place for you, the panel says so rather than asking where you are.

Coverage is patchy. TalkFuse places stories from a list of known places, so some areas have little or nothing, and then you will see "No nearby stories at the moment". I will not pad it with far-off stories to look busy. A square is also big, so "near" is generous. Still to come: lines between countries, once I am happy they are accurate.

The map can now show what the world is talking about. Small quiet rings sit on the places in the headlines, and tapping one gives you the headline, the place, the outlet, how long ago it ran and a link to read it. There are no pictures, no scrolling feed and nothing that moves.

Open the layers button and you will find a news slider with five stops: none, few, medium, more and most. It starts at medium, which is my decision, even though I usually keep new things on the map switched off until you ask for them. Slide it all the way down and the map asks for no news at all. You can also turn topics on and off, and your choice stays with you on that device. On slower phones and data-saving settings it never shows more than 75.

The pins are chosen by how recent the story is and by spreading them between places, so one city does not crowd the rest. Nothing is ranked by what gets the most attention, and nothing about you is used. The places are as TalkFuse reports them and some are wrong, so please treat them as roughly there. There is also a plain-words line about it under Map in words.

You will find TalkFuse on the sources page now. Behind the scenes, Together can fetch the headlines TalkFuse places on its map, so that one day the map can show what the world is talking about.

Nothing on the map has changed yet. When it does, news will be optional context and nothing more. It will not be a feed, it will not be ranked by what gets the most attention, and it will never be used to match you with anyone or to say anything about you. Places are as TalkFuse reports them and can be wrong, so I will not pretend they are exact.

If you had said no to location sharing, going live or waving used to send you off to the privacy settings to change it, and most people understandably never came back. Now the choice is made right where you are.

When location sharing is off, the Go live button says exactly what it does: Share my broad place and go live. Beside it is the plain version of what that means: only your nearest city of 100,000 people or more, or your country, as an unnamed dot. Never your exact location, and never your IP address. If you tap Wave while you are off the map, the button becomes Share my broad place and wave, with a Not now if you would rather not, and your wave follows as soon as your dot is there. The same button is on the You tab if you want to appear with a name.

It changes that one choice only. Analytics and chat stay as you set them, or off if you had not chosen yet, and you can still turn location sharing off at any time in privacy settings, or with Hide me for now.

Waving at a place used to be a small button right at the bottom of a comparison, and only when someone happened to be in exactly that place. Now, as soon as you compare two places, the first thing under the title is a row for each of them: who is live there, a Wave button and a Chat button.

Your own place has no wave, because you are already there, but it does have Chat here, which opens your city's room, or your country's. For the other place, Chat there opens its room if people are in one, or the bridge between your two countries. If nobody is live in a small town you are looking at, the wave goes to someone elsewhere in that country instead, and the button says so, for example "Wave to France".

Waving at someone who is just an unnamed guest on the map is easier too. The Wave buttons are no longer greyed out when you are not on the map yourself: one tap puts your dot there first and then sends the wave. The Live tab now opens by saying plainly whether you are live, with a single Go live button if you are not, and Connect's "join in" prompts go live in one tap rather than sending you to a form.

A wave still carries only your broad place, never your name. What is still to come: waving at a whole chat room, and a gentler way to turn location sharing on if you said no to it at first.

I tested Together on my phone and it was a mess: the chat tabs sat on top of the account window, the consent banner and the tour card, the chat itself was a cramped box with two rows of buttons, and the little speech bubble got buried under the tour offer. I have rebuilt how a phone handles all of it.

A chat now opens as a full screen of its own, with a back arrow, the room's name, the bell and a cross at the top, and the box for your message sitting above the keyboard instead of behind it. The cross closes the chat into your Closed list, the same as on a computer, and the old expand button and "Close chat" text button are gone. Your chats list is a full screen too. At the bottom, the tabs are now a row of round marks with a small dot when something is new, and they stay put whichever height you have the panel at. The account and admin windows now fill the screen and cover everything, and while one is open, or the consent banner is showing, the chat marks step out of the way so nothing can be tapped through it. The buttons are bigger, at least a thumb's width, and everything now keeps clear of the notch and the home bar.

I have not tried it on every phone, and the tour card can still cover part of the panel while it is waiting for an answer. If something still overlaps on yours, tell me which phone and I will look.

I tried Together on my phone this morning and it got hot and slow. The cause was the map: it kept redrawing the pulsing dots for everyone online about thirty times a second, even when I was not touching anything, and it was drawing at the sharpest your screen can manage.

On a phone or other modest device the map now redraws those dots ten times a second at most, draws at a slightly lower sharpness (text stays clear), holds back the place names and city glow while you are dragging and puts them back when you stop, and keeps a smaller store of towns in memory. If you leave the page alone for half a minute the pulsing stops until you touch it again, and nothing animates while the tab is hidden or the globe is showing. Waves, typing and comparisons still move as before. On a big screen almost nothing changes.

In my test, with a phone slowed down to a quarter of its speed, the map's busy time fell from all of it to about half, and to almost nothing once it had rested. What is not fixed yet: the Live panel has a slow background shimmer that repaints itself constantly, and that alone keeps a phone warmer than it should be. I will tackle that separately.

I have added push alerts, so a message can find you even when Together is not open. They are off until you ask: open your account, go to Security, turn on "Push alerts on this device", and let your browser allow notifications. After that, when a pen pal writes, or a room whose bell you have turned on has a new message, your device shows a notification, and tapping it opens that room.

I have kept it small on purpose. You only hear about rooms where you switched the bell on. A pen pal's alert shows their name and the start of the message; a regional room's alert shows only the room's name, never what was said. You get at most ten a day, none between 10pm and 8am in the place you chose, and none while you have the site open. Signing out turns it off on that device, and if your browser drops it, it stays off until you turn it on again.

What is not there yet: I have to add the keys on my server before the switch appears, and some phones only allow alerts from sites added to the home screen. There is nothing for waves or reminders, and I do not plan to add any.

I said last time that the ripple was on the flat map only. It is now on the globe too: press Drop your dot with the globe showing and your dot falls onto your broad place and sends out two rings, in the same time as on the flat map. If your device is set to reduce motion, it simply appears.

The lighter site had a gap I could not close on its own. It is served straight from my server, so it never learns where a visitor is, and it could not offer to start from your place. Now, when the full site offers you the lighter one, it passes on your broad place (a city of 100,000 or more, or a country, nothing finer) in the link, and the lighter page shows it with a Not this place? link and fills in the first box of the comparison. It is used for that page only and is not stored. What it cannot do yet is put you on the map from the lighter site without a name; for that, the full site is still the way.

I have rearranged the sidebar so the things people reach for come first. In the Live tab the chat rooms for your city, your country and your continent now sit above the list of people, each with how many people are in it and a Join button that joins and opens the room in one tap (Open, if you are already in). Sections of the Live tab fold away with a click or the keyboard, and stay as you left them for the visit. On a wide screen the map search now lives at the top of the sidebar rather than in the bar over the map, the spacing is a little tighter, and when you hide the sidebar the search goes back over the map where it was. On a phone, the sheet now has a grip you can drag, with three buttons beside it, Map, Half and Full, for anyone who would rather not drag. The chat tabs stay above the sheet whichever height it is.

What I have not done: only the Live tab has folding sections so far, not You or Connect, and the You, Connect and Live switch was already a single control, so I have only trimmed its padding. I would like to hear whether the sheet needs more heights than three.

I have added some quiet help for people who are not sure where to begin. About twenty seconds after the page settles, if there are people in the chat for your city (or else your country) and you have not been in it, a small speech bubble pops from its tab at the bottom: "4 people are in Sheffield chat right now. Say hello?" One tap on Say hello joins the room and opens it; Not now closes it. It appears once on a device, whichever you pick, never while a chat is open, and the number is only the one already shown on the tab. It never sends anything for you.

In the Live tab, "Be here too" has become a single button, Drop your dot. Your dot falls onto the map at your broad place and sends out a ripple (if your device is set to reduce motion, it just appears), with the soft chime if you have sounds on. The dot is still unnamed unless you add a name, and hiding it is one tap away. Once, after that, I offer to wave to your city: it is the same wordless wave as ever, so it goes to one person's dot there rather than to everyone, and it opens the chat so that saying more is up to you. The ripple is on the flat map only for now; the globe shows the dot as before.

The first time any chat opens on a device, the message box carries a gentle idea in grey, such as "What is a sound you can hear right now?", chosen from a short list of eight and the same one for the same room. It goes once you type and is never sent. Last, the Live tab opens, on a first visit, with a welcome card of three plain steps: drop your dot, say hello locally, connect two places. There are no ticks or bars: a step you have done is simply no longer listed, and the card goes when all three are done or when you press Not now. All of this is remembered on your device only.

Setting up an authenticator app now shows a QR code to scan, drawn on your own device, with the typed key tucked away for anyone who cannot scan. The app step is optional for me as the admin too: with it on, signing in still asks for the code; without it, the password alone opens the tools. I will keep mine on.

I have changed how chats work on a larger screen, because the column I built earlier made a chat feel like a place you had to go to. Chats now open as small windows along the bottom, the way a messenger does: the tab grows into the window where it sits, so you never see a chat and its own tab at the same time, and you can have several open side by side while the map and the Live sidebar stay where they are. If there is no room for another, the oldest one shrinks back into its tab. Click a window's name to fold it away, and click the tab to bring it back. Escape does the same from the message box. If your device is set to reduce motion, the growing and shrinking are skipped.

The X on a window now closes the chat. It leaves your tab row and waits under Closed chats, exactly as before, and a new message still will not reopen it behind your back. Hover over a chat tab, or tab to it with the keyboard, and a small X appears so you can close it without opening it first; on a touch screen it is always there, just small. The separate Close chat button has gone from larger screens.

The column is still there, but now it is only for managing chats: your list with Closed chats, joining nearby rooms and bridging two places. Opening a chat from that list opens a window and leaves the list where it is. A button on each window can send that one chat to the column if you would rather read it there, and a button in the column sends it back. On a medium screen the column still takes the sidebar's place, with the same swap button. Phones are unchanged. What I have not solved is that with the list open on a 1280 pixel screen there is room for only one window, so the others fold into their tabs. I would like to hear whether that is the right trade.

I have built a page that shows what has been happening on Together in the last two hours, for live.to.gether.earth once I have set up its address. It is a list, newest first, and it reads without any script. It tells you when people arrived, though never who: a minute with fewer than three arrivals is just "a few people arrived", and a bigger one says "5 people arrived, from Lagos, Lima and Sheffield", with the places in alphabetical order and no count for any one of them. Waves between places, a chat bridge being opened between two countries and a regional chat room becoming active show up the same way. Alongside them it notes the sun reaching large cities (rounded to the quarter hour), the warmest and coldest of a sample of large cities, how many airline flights and ships are showing, and the Moon that everyone shares. Every line says where it came from and links each place to the full map.

I have been careful about what this is. It does not name or rank anyone, count anything for popularity, or keep more than the last 200 events for two hours, and there are no cookies or analytics on it. It is not an endless scroll. The same picture is available as JSON at /api/v1/public/moments, described on the developers page. I have not built a live stream, because it would tie up the server for every open tab, so the page quietly refreshes itself every minute while you are looking at it. On a quiet day most of it will say "a few", which is the point. What is still to come: the address itself, and your view on whether three is the right number for naming a place.

I have built a lighter version of Together for when you are away from home, on a slow connection, or paying for every megabyte. It lives at lite.to.gether.earth (once I have set up its address) and is the same Together with the map and globe left out: plain text you can read before any script runs, in a few kilobytes. It shows how many people are on the map and the places they are in, listed alphabetically with counts and never names, where your own connection seems to be with the same one tap to stop sharing it, and a plain form that compares any two places: the distance, both clocks, when you are both awake, daylight, season and the Moon. You can still appear with a first name and open community chat. The full site stays the real one, and every lighter page has a "Full site" link back to it.

It only ever moves you there if your browser explicitly asks to save data, and choosing the full site is remembered so I do not send you back. Otherwise, if your connection looks slow or you seem to be in a different country from your remembered place, the Live panel offers it once. "Stay here" is remembered on your device and I will not ask again. The lighter site has no analytics at all and the same privacy rules. What is not there: the map, the globe, the data room and the phone remote. Because your browser keeps its choices separately for each address, your privacy choices, name and sign-in start afresh over there. I have measured the lite home at about 4 KB compressed (page and stylesheet); the script that adds chat and sign-in is much heavier because it still needs React, which I want to slim down next.

I've opened a small public data API for anyone who wants to build with Together's places. It is free, needs no key and only reads. You can search coarse places, find the ones nearest a point, read the facts Together holds about a place, and ask for its weather, the height of the land, its local time, daylight and Moon, and how many people are on the map right now. Every answer says where it came from, under what licence and what credit to show, and each dataset keeps its own licence. The map count shows only places with at least three people, and never a name, a trail or a member. I do not keep anyone's address: the limit of 60 requests a minute is counted against a hash that changes every day. The details are on the developers page. It is early, so please tell me what is missing. Venue data from Sheff.events will come later, through a separate contract.

Once the flat map has drawn and your browser has nothing else to do, Together now quietly fetches the 3D globe's code and its two small landscape images, so the first time you switch to the globe there is less to wait for. It skips this if you have asked your browser to save data, your connection is very slow, or your device looks modest. The images are also decoded away from the main part of the page where your browser allows it, so the map should stay smoother while the globe loads. On phones and other modest devices the globe now draws at a lower pixel density and does not download the largest landscape image, which saves about 420 KB and some memory at the cost of a slightly softer picture. I have measured this in a desktop browser only, so I will keep checking it on real phones and adjust.

The stylesheet every page waits for is now about 28 per cent smaller (23.5 KB down to 16.8 KB compressed). The styles for accounts, chat, the site tour and the data room used to be bundled into every page; they now arrive with those parts of the site, and the data room's styles load only on the rankings page. Reading pages should start to paint a little sooner. The chat and account buttons appear when their code loads, as before. The saved offline study page still includes every stylesheet. If you see anything that looks unstyled for a moment, please tell me.

If you turn the bell on for a chat, Together can now tell you when someone writes in it, even if you are looking at another chat or another tab. The page title and the little icon in your browser tab show how many unread messages are waiting in chats with their bell on, and nothing else: no other chat adds to that number. Your browser asks for permission once, when you first turn a bell on, and I never ask when the page loads. If you already have bells on and have not allowed alerts in this browser, the chat list shows one line with a button. Tabs you are not looking at now check for news every 15 seconds instead of every few seconds, which is gentler on your battery and on my server. Alerts only arrive while Together is open in a tab; I have not built alerts for a closed browser yet.

On a wide screen, an open chat now sits in its own column next to the Live sidebar, so you can read a conversation and keep exploring the map at the same time. On a medium-width screen there is room for only one of the two, so the chat takes the sidebar's place and a small button swaps them back. Phones are unchanged. The chat tabs along the bottom are still where you open a chat. The old expand button is gone on larger screens because the column does that job.

Every chat now has a Close chat button. It tucks the chat out of your tab row and into a Closed chats list at the bottom of your chat list. Nothing is deleted and nobody is told. If you had its bell on you will still get an alert when a new message arrives, and the list shows how many messages are waiting, but the chat stays closed until you open it again yourself. Pen-pal chats can be closed as well, as a gentler alternative to deleting them.

When I am around to chat, I can now tell the map. For up to four hours, while I am on it, the Live tab shows one quiet line: "A host is on the map now. Open your city chat to say hello." It has a button to open the chat list. It shows no name and no count, and it never appears unless I switch it on myself. I also built a way for me to hear when someone new appears; that is for me only and does not notify you. I will keep it small and see whether it helps anyone say hello.

I have made the globe check which city dots and connection arcs are in view with less work as you turn and zoom. Their positions and appearance stay the same. I will keep checking this on slower devices.

I have made the city grouping switch actually gather nearby dots into population-sized markers on the zoomed-out map. Terrain and landscape colouring now start off, including for people with the earlier saved default, and live connection arcs stay visible without a switch. You can still turn terrain on when you want it. I will keep refining how the grouped cities look on different screens.

I found that some media-server responses are missing a browser header, which makes the map retry files it can already get from Together. After the first failed request, the page now uses its own copies for the rest of that visit. The map remains available while I sort out the media-server configuration.

I have made city dots vary more clearly with population at closer zooms. The largest glows are bounded so they do not wash over neighbouring places. I will keep checking the balance on busy parts of the map.

I have moved the open comparison to the top of Connect, with the place search behind a clear button and the sharing tools together beneath the heading. I have given the narrower sidebar more space for both place names.

I have tidied up the icon and added the iPhone home-screen settings, so Together opens as its own app when you add it from your browser. The map and saved public study material can be available offline, while live people and chats still need a connection. I will keep checking how the installed version feels on different phones.

I have added a quiet family of sounds for map details, waves, new pen pal connections and different chat rooms. They use the same tone in different short patterns, so you can tell them apart without a loud alert. Sounds are off until you turn them on with the speaker button at the top, and your choice stays on this device. I will keep adjusting the balance as people try it.

I have moved the Ace Media Discord update to once every three hours. It now shows how many people have joined and how much public conversation happened in that period, alongside the number currently on the map. When someone chooses analytics, Together also keeps short-lived hourly counts of page views, shares and sign-ins for this update. The bot still shares no names, places, message text or report details. Google Analytics and Clarity remain optional, and their separate reports are not copied into Discord.

I have added private counts for people on the live map and recent activity in public chats, sign-ups and reports, so I can see whether this first test is working and whether anything needs my attention. If you choose analytics, Together now counts public page views, successful sign-ins, confirmed sign-ups and shares without sending names, places or conversations as events. I have masked the account and chat panels in Clarity and updated the Privacy page to explain this. A counts-only ten-minute summary also goes to my Ace Media Discord channel through the existing bot, without names, places, message text or report details.

I have fixed the sign-in button after a password change so it opens the form instead of an empty account panel. I have also made the Safety and Privacy pages clearer about exploring without an account, choosing a temporary name and confirming you are an adult. I still need an independent UK legal review before inviting a wider audience.

I have fixed the emailed password link so it opens the new-password form even when confirming your email has already signed you in. Once you change it, Together signs out the earlier session and offers a clear way back to sign in.

I have made the logo take you back to an overview centred on the places you are comparing, or on your broad place when there is no current comparison.

I have updated account confirmation and password reset emails with the current Together mark, the site's colours and a clearer link. The message still includes plain text if your email app cannot show the styled version.

I have written down the rules for conversations, how I handle reports, how quickly I aim to respond, and how to ask me to reconsider a decision. Reports still come to me, and the admin queue records what I do. I still need an independent UK legal review before inviting a wider audience.

I have updated the Safety, Privacy and How it works pages to explain the return choice for named Live now visitors and the current account signup route. The old wording described an earlier version of the site. I still need to publish a report response time and written rules with an appeal route before inviting a wider audience.

I have added small invitations in Connect, Live and You to make it easier to appear at a broad place or find a conversation. The chat links open the available rooms when chat is enabled, or take you to the privacy choice when it is not.

When you choose to appear by name, this device now remembers that choice, your broad place and your adult confirmation. You can return without repeating the form while Live now location sharing is on. Leave stops future returns; leave and forget clears your saved name and place. Signed-in members still use their account's map setting. I will keep refining where these invitations are useful.

I have stopped the Connect panel from moving the map away from the view you saved when you return. The globe now eases back into the same place, zoom, direction and tilt. Opening a shared place link still takes you to the places in that link. I will keep checking how this feels across browsers.

I have steadied the globe's background while detailed terrain arrives, so it does not change shape just because one tile has loaded. Detailed child tiles now wait for their graphics textures before replacing a parent. I still want to see how this feels on different graphics hardware.

I have made the map remember its last view on this device, including the globe's place, height, direction and tilt. Reloading now returns you to that view. I will keep checking that this feels natural when switching between the flat map and globe.

I have added Control or Shift and trackpad scrolling for tilting the globe, with two visible tilt buttons as another way to set the view. Pinching still zooms. This should make the globe easier to explore on Macs where Control-click opens a context menu. I still want to check the feel on a real Firefox and Mac trackpad.

I have made new map detail arrive from the place you zoom towards, spreading outwards as you explore. The map now keeps a little detail ready beyond the screen, draws terrain shading between frames, and shows a small globe beside the logo while tiles load. I have also made the map follow the sidebar more gently and use smaller WebP files for night lights when they save space. I will keep measuring how this feels on slower devices.

I have moved the public map files to the media CDN, so opening and exploring the map can load them without asking the main site server for every file. The site keeps a local copy to fall back to if the media service is unavailable, and saved offline study still works. I will keep an eye on loading times as more places are explored.

I have made the account form's soft background fill its side of the window, and centred shorter forms so they are easier to follow. An expanded chat now takes the map's space while leaving the right panel available for exploring and sending a place into the conversation. The chat's alerts and expand controls sit together as icons. I will keep refining both layouts on smaller screens.

I have put the to.gether.earth mark on the sharing cards, with its larger dots and a clear space between the bridge and the letters. The main card now follows the line from London to New York, while a comparison still shows the two places you chose. New share links use a refreshed card address so they can pick up the new image. Posts already made elsewhere may keep their earlier preview.

I have given the world data page room for its ranking and chart, and fixed narrow screens that pushed the Sources and phone remote pages sideways. The You, Connect and Live panels now link to the relevant reading pages. I will keep refining these pages as the data grows.

I have brought the visitor name and Live now choices into one section of You. You can save a chat name or appear on the map from the same field. I have also made an open chat take the actual place of its bottom tab. I will keep checking how both feel on smaller screens.

I have renamed Here to Live, because the people shown can be anywhere. Live now also offers a short list of active place conversations you can choose to open. The chat expand button is now an icon, and expanding a chat fills the map's main side panel. I will keep refining what is useful to show as more places join in.

I have added an optional tour of the map, search, panels, conversations and sharing. It is offered once on this device, can be skipped at any point, and can be replayed with the Tour button. I hope it makes the first visit easier; I will keep refining the guide as the map grows.

I have changed the chat dock so an open conversation takes the place of its bottom tab. Avatars now sit beside the pointed edge of a message, names start the message, and times read in short form. This leaves the map visible beside the chat and makes conversations easier to scan. I will keep checking the layout on smaller screens.

I have brought the two visitor name boxes into one field in You, so the name you choose can be used in community chat and when you appear on Live now. I have also kept You, Connect and Here on the map when the sidebar is closed, and made the active tab move smoothly as you switch. I will keep refining how these controls feel on smaller screens.

I have added public chat bridges between two whole countries. You can open one or deliberately join one from its map arc. Messages are screened and disappear after seven days, just like other place chats. People who chose places at either end help a bridge stand out, while anyone may join without being labelled by origin. I will keep checking how these rooms work for people before opening the beta more widely.

I have changed the logo in the site header to read to.gether.earth. The two larger full stops now hold the small bridge over “gether”, bringing the familiar symbol into the name itself. I have cleared the curve around the letters and dots so it stays behind them. The sharing images still use the earlier mark; I will update those once the new card design is settled.

I have added email confirmation for people joining without an invitation, and a one-use password reset link for existing members. A new public account stays closed until its owner confirms the email address. I will open public registration only after the new domain and the live email journey have been checked together; existing invite links continue to work in the meantime.

I have split the town catalogue into geographic chunks, loaded one at a time around the map view. Town dots and local shapes arrive with a short staggered fade; reduced-motion settings show them straight away. The flat map now uses one shape level at a time: city shapes with town dots, then local shapes with city dots.

Public place records, facts and outlines are saved on your device for offline study, with their cache dates shown when you are offline. Facts refresh after 30 days and outlines after seven days, but expiry or a failed refresh does not erase your last saved copy. Once the Offline study panel says the page is ready, you can reopen it without a connection, search towns in saved chunks and read saved reference material. You can clear that study data from the panel. The browser may reclaim storage, and unsaved material, photographs, recordings and live features still need a connection. Chats, accounts and live visitors are not saved in this cache.

I have also softened the city-light edges and made the globe's low-resolution night imagery fade before close zoom stretches it into large pixels. City markers keep their population-based sizes.

I have kept the privacy choices above the chat tabs and study control, so the buttons remain reachable on a phone.

I have made distant city dots smaller, with a clearer population-based size difference in both map views. Their sizes blend as you zoom, and cities stay more prominent than smaller places when those appear.

On the flat map, a matching city shape now replaces its dot earlier, while smaller places remain dots until closer zooms. When smaller shapes take over from an oversized city shape, its city-centre dot returns for orientation. Dots inside shapes remain clickable. This still depends on complete, matching local boundaries being available; I do not invent missing outlines or show country borders.

I found that a dense boundary response could discard every area instead of keeping the complete shapes that fitted. I have narrowed the nearby lookup and fixed that limit. Hyphens and spaces in place names now match consistently, so a sourced village shape can replace its dot. Zooming inside a village also keeps its shape until a smaller area can take over. A slow lookup no longer pauses every other town, although provider-wide limits still apply. Coverage still depends on the available mapping, and a provider outage can still leave dots visible temporarily.

When the provider times out, I now reuse available cached local outlines for up to 30 days instead of throwing them away. Older cached country and regional borders are filtered out before reuse.

Clicking a smaller area now selects that area before its containing city, including when the smaller place has no matching catalogue dot.

Existing outlines also stay on the map while the next nearby lookup loads, so moving between places does not blank shapes we have already fetched.

I have made complete local boundaries into clickable shapes as the flat map gets closer. A city can give way to smaller areas when it becomes too large for the view. City dots and labels are stronger than smaller-place markers while both are visible, and parent-city dots disappear at very close zoom. Country and unclassified state or province borders are excluded; the world map remains about land and people, not national dividing lines.

These shapes depend on OpenStreetMap coverage. I keep a marker when a complete matching outline is missing, and an unmatched area opens its source rather than pretending to be a different town. Boundary loading is bounded around a named place, so this is not a promise of every village outline everywhere. Credits now sit above the clock pills without a background, with full details on hover, keyboard focus or a tap.

I have also stopped using a country's Wikipedia article as a town's introduction. Smaller places now look for an exact GeoNames-to-Wikidata match, and a missing or ambiguous local article is stated plainly. Where that source records a town or borough within the other place's administrative area, the comparison explains that local relationship.

I have added chat avatars, with abstract shapes for guests and anonymous members. Signed-in members can open named members' profiles and wave through the existing pen-pal system. Anonymous identities stay separate, blocked profiles stay closed, and face photos remain for pen pals. Optional social profile links are also for mutual pen pals, with a warning before leaving Together for another network.

Chat tabs keep their positions when opened. The recent chats that fit stay along the bottom, with the rest in Chats, and an expand control lets a conversation use the map space.

You can share a public Connect view or a sourced atlas point to a chat, pen pal or another app. The chooser starts with your open chat, but nothing is sent without your click. Opening a shared point restores the comparison and scrolls to it, with reduced-motion preferences respected. Sourced connections are easier to spot; private answers are never included. Figures can change as their sources are updated.

I have brought the flat map's smaller places onto the 3D globe. Towns and villages appear as you zoom in, nearby places gather into groups, and individual places can be selected to compare. This uses the existing place catalogue, not every settlement in the world, and does not make anyone's public location more precise.

Switching between 2D and 3D now keeps the place at the centre of the clear part of the screen and matches the north-to-south ground scale. I have removed the automatic tilt and jump towards a selected pair when entering 3D. The flat map stays visible until the globe has drawn its first frame. A globe and a flat map still distort space differently, particularly near the poles, and returning from a tilted view restores a north-up map rather than a seamless projection morph.

I have smoothed how the globe reads ground height between elevation pixels, so the camera no longer steps from one pixel's height to the next as you move. I have also stopped drawing the hidden backs of the globe and terrain. Checks now cover steep viewing angles and both sides of the date line, but real-device performance and visible detail transitions still need testing.

I have moved You, Connect and Here into the top bar, where they open the matching sidebar panel. There is no separate Live map link: the map is the main site. Privacy and Changelog are in the footer, and the information pages link straight back to each map panel.

I have also increased how far the flat map can zoom in. Regional outlines load automatically around the selected city or town as you get closer, with finer administrative outlines appearing further in. There is no extra toggle. These come from OpenStreetMap, coverage varies, and they do not change how approximately people appear on Together.

There is a new “Map in words” summary, and a quiet three-stop journey through sourced facts when you compare two places. If two people are sharing a screen, they can also answer one gentle question: both must agree before either answer is shown, and skipping or hiding clears it. Remote pen-pal moments are still to come.

I have started a small place-audio prototype with two attributed London recordings. Nothing plays automatically, and places without reviewed recordings say so. This is a first example, not a claim to represent every voice or place.

The expanded checks also caught a delay in regional chat: newly signed-in members could take about a minute to count as active. I have corrected that so an active room can appear straight away.

I have added a small emote picker to chat, using ordinary Unicode symbols that remain part of the message rather than becoming public reactions or popularity counts. The map also has an optional approximate time-zone layer, showing solar-time bands and their current local times while being honest that real civil borders and daylight-saving rules differ.

The 3D globe now keeps detailed terrain through a wider transition range, judges detail by what a tile actually covers on screen at shallow angles, and uses smaller pixel and tile budgets on modest devices. This should make mountain detail feel steadier as the camera turns without asking low-end phones to do the same work as a large screen.

The smaller lights on the world now lead somewhere. Tap any displayed town or village and it becomes a full Connect destination, with its own population, coordinates, civil timezone, current weather and everything Together can responsibly inherit from its country. Antarctic research stations can be compared too, with their recorded opening details and source. Where a station's civil schedule is not reliably published, Together says clearly that its displayed clock is approximate solar time instead of presenting a guess as fact. These finer places never become anyone's public Live now location.

Community chat now works properly for visitors as well as members. Allow it in the privacy choices and Together gives you a friendly temporary name, then places the nearest regional conversation at the bottom of the map straight away. You can be the first person in the room; it no longer stays hidden while waiting for somebody else to arrive. People who made their privacy choice before visitor chat existed are asked about the new option clearly instead of being silently left without it.

Joining a regional conversation now opens that conversation immediately instead of dropping you back into the chat list and asking you to join again. The updated privacy notice also says plainly when an earlier cookie choice is being replaced, and asks you to agree to the updated cookies.

Together is now much more than a map. Choose any two places and it reveals the human stories between them: shared languages and roots, food and crops, climate and daylight, history, holidays, culture, trade, nature, health, sport, twin towns and much more. Every fact links back to its source, and you can compare up to four places at once or follow their histories on one timeline.

The map itself has become an experience. Switch into a tactile 3D globe with real mountain relief, sunlight, stars, the Sun and Moon in their true positions. Zoom towards the ground for finer coastlines, rivers, glaciers, landscape colour and city lights after dark. Towns and villages now emerge progressively as the map gets closer: busy regions glow together first, then separate into towns and finally individual villages at the deepest views. Together can now travel twice as close as before without making the opening view noisy or revealing anybody's precise location. Watch live aircraft and ships, follow their journeys, explore old maps and ice-age coastlines, or drag countries around the world to discover their true size.

The globe's night can now truly glow. A separate city-lights switch brings in NASA's Black Marble view only when asked, with population-weighted places shining on the dark side of Earth. Smaller places now shine more quietly, and distant towns gather naturally towards their busiest centre instead of sitting in a visible grid. The infrastructure layer traces mapped submarine internet cables across the Atlantic, Pacific and other waters in cyan, telecom routes in purple, mapped landing stations and data centres, operating and in-construction gas pipelines in orange, and the share of people using the internet in each country. Antarctica is back in full, with 144 research stations to discover on both maps. The new data room ranks sourced measures and lets you place two truths together on a chart, always naming the period and warning that a pattern is not proof of a cause.

Together now works beautifully across screens too: stretch one world across several displays, leave it running as a living screensaver, or control a big screen from your phone. A redesigned Live now sidebar keeps the world spacious and can be resized or tucked away whenever the map deserves the whole room; its handle now stays clear of the navigation even when the rail is narrow. Search beside the map's Share control to fly straight to a city or country. Nearby location dots grow towards the pointer, while connection lines illuminate and carry a travelling spark when you approach them. Open a World Heritage Site to see its freely licensed Wikipedia photograph and credit, and share any connection with a made-for-it preview card carrying Together's own type, mark, places and route into Discord and other chats.

The map can now become a shared journey. While somebody is live, a few of the coarse place-to-place connections they have just explored glow faintly on the world and appear beneath their dot. Open one for yourself or follow along as their curiosity moves. The trail disappears with them and is never kept as a history.

The first private beta also opens today. Invited members can create an identity, choose how they appear, wave to people elsewhere and become pen pals when a wave is returned. Pen pals can exchange thoughtful letters and privately share a real photo, while blocking, reporting, downloading and deleting your data remain firmly in your hands. Public map lines show that a connection exists between places, never who the people are.

Chats now sit at the bottom of every page. Pen pals can talk under their chosen names, with a conversation that remains until either person deletes it for both. Members who share a city, country or continent can choose to enter a room once somebody else is there. Anonymous members receive a room-only name, and every regional message disappears after seven days. Browser alerts are optional. Messages are encrypted in storage, screened before delivery for serious safety risks, and reportable without turning ordinary swearing into a crime.

Chat now feels part of the living map instead of part of its sidebar. On a large screen, conversations open over the map with a tab for every joined room; on a phone they become a focused panel of their own. A small target tab offers your nearest regional conversation and shows how many people are active there now, without joining you automatically. Pen pals appear with a shared picture when available, while regional chats use recognisable shapes of their real countries and continents. Direct conversations are clearly private and no longer describe two pen pals as a crowd.

Regional conversations now live on the world itself. When a place room has active members, a small speech bubble floats over that country, city or continent on both the flat map and 3D globe. Its number shows how many active members have joined; bouncing dots reveal that somebody is typing without revealing who or preserving a draft. Tap a bubble to inspect the room and choose whether to join it, even when the conversation is somewhere else in the world. On desktop, the chosen bottom tab now expands into the pinned chat window and disappears as a duplicate, just as a proper chat dock should.

Community chat no longer stops at the account gate. Visitors who allow its cookie receive a friendly automatic anonymous name and can join regional conversations straight away. You can choose a temporary name from You or turn that visitor identity into a full account later. Real member names stay reserved, so a temporary visitor can never pretend to be somebody who has registered. The same encryption, safety screening, reporting and seven-day regional history apply to everybody.

Together went online with one honest promise: help people notice what connects them before borders, politics or prejudice tell them what should divide them.

The first release introduced a living world map showing day and night as they really are. Visitors can appear as an unnamed dot at their nearest large city or country, choose a first name if they want to be seen, and send a simple wordless wave across the world. Nothing reveals an exact location, and closing the page makes you disappear.

Connect made any two places feel closer. It showed the time and season in both, the distance between them, when both people are likely to be awake, and what the Sun and Moon are doing overhead. “Find me” translated a device location into only the nearest large city on the device itself, then forgot the precise position.

From the beginning, Together was designed not to become a dating app, popularity contest or profiling machine. Its privacy controls use plain language, its sources are checked and credited, and its core pages remain useful on slow connections and without JavaScript. The purpose is simple: curiosity first, people first.