12/20: Group directives, groupchat shortcuts, video selfie identity adherence, regen & continue streaming, & selfies V5 closed beta

Hi everyone, today we rolled out a number of changes:

  • Group directives: within groupchats, you can add group directives that apply for every participant. They will function just like normal directives, and be appended to Kindroid specific directives. Use them to steer groupchats, but note that directives are NOT absolute commands and are merely suggestions, and your Kindroid might not follow them if they choose.
  • Video selfies have been updated to have better identity adherence - so face morphing past the 1st frame to a different person should occur less often.
  • In groupchats, clicking on Kindroid profile picture left of their message will shortcut you to their home page for easier accessing through menus.
  • Regeneration & continue now have streaming if you have it generally enabled - this should help with perceived speed and seeing progress even during peak hour traffic.
  • Dropdown components are made to be more accessibility friendly - this includes model dropdowns, language dropdown, etc.
  • Model select is in home & selfies pages. The UI will likely be streamlined soon to be a collapsible menu next to pinned messages icon, but for now the large text is displayed as we need all users, even those not in communities, to know about model changes and have an easy access way to change them and we're finding many don't know how to change.
  • Selfies V5 is starting closed beta - this is the first step and will be invitation only beta, and will be more broadly available in open beta once it's more stabilized through the testing.

Final note - we see speeds as a good bit slower in V6, due to intrinsic cost of serving them as well as sustained high overall usage - we've increased servers by 40% but will have further optimizations in the coming weeks. We're aiming for speeds to be passably not super slow, but it will be slower than the old optimized version of V6 we served. Thanks for the patience while we scale up!

Edit on speeds: it should be back to normal speeds for the most part - thanks for patience!