Announcement

(For folks who use Tree Town and Good Vibes.)

We will start supporting a simpler Tree Town with v3.70.0— it will purely be a friends list of Finch users who are mutual friends with you. It sounds simple and perhaps obvious, but Tree Town previously had a lot of complexity behind the scenes. Shifting to a simpler experience has some important downstream implications though.

Tree Town’s complicated product mechanics unfortunately prevented us from supporting new features that we truly believe can help users better support each other. After a lot of thought and consideration, we’ve decided to move forward with some decisions that we recognize can be hard for some of you. We’ve made similarly difficult decisions in the past that folks were able to adjust over time and hope we can support those impacted. For details on for how Tree Town will get simplified:

• When a friend uses your Friend Code/Link, they will automatically be added to your Tree Town too. Previously, when your friend added you, they would “follow” you and have access to your birb without you needing to add them back. This could create unintentional “dangling” relationships that prevented us from creating new meaningful features for friends. With the update, we hope the friending experience is more intuitive. Please be mindful of this when sharing your friend details on the internet. (more details)
• Friends who were very inactive or not mutually added will be removed from your Tree Town. We will migrate as many mutual friendships as possible but are unlikely to for users who haven’t used Finch much in the past year-ish. You can re-add friends by sharing your Friend Code/Link with them again though. If it’s hard to find Finch friends, we created supportive communities for this very reason where many Finch users would love to friend you if you are interested: Facebook, Discord, Reddit. (more details)
• Non-Finch-users (tags) will be moved to Tree Town Settings. Users were able to add literally anything in their Tree Town even if they were not Finch users. The intertwined systems of Tags and Tree Town complicated our ability to invest on both supporting Finch Friends and reflecting on people outside of Finch. (more details)
• Automated Good Vibes from Finch Employees will no longer be sent. We built this automated feature to help users connect with others if they didn’t have friends on Finch, but we’ve seen this as a mixed source of confusion as well. As much as we wish to send Good Vibes to those who want it, the product experience hasn’t been scaling well and we hope we can provide better ways for users to connect with other Finch users who can properly reciprocate. Weekly quests for Good Vibes will also be removed in the meantime. (more details)

When you get the new app version, your Tree Town will have an in-app announcement with details if any changes were made to your Tree Town.

Our team has considered these simplifications for a very long time and did not make the decision lightly. We thought of alternate options but believe this is the best way to create new features that we believe can truly help users better support each other.

Everyone here puts a lot of trust in us to continuously invest in improving Finch, and our team takes that responsibility very seriously. This often means we have to take decisive steps to enable us to try new ideas for the bigger picture. Decisions like these are always tough and we hope this context reflects the care and thought we put into this update. We’ve made similarly difficult decisions in the past that folks were able to adjust to and hope to help with the transition. Please know that our team and community staff are here.

As always, it’s only with the support of folks like you that we are here today. We truly appreciate everyone’s patience through this update. 🙇🏻‍♀️

If you would like even more detailed reasoning, please see Can you share even more details why this update was necessary?

Updated Announcement (5/14)