Give It Meaning

Indigen World 0.1.19 changes how cultural video arrives in the app. A reel now comes with a topic, an account of what is happening in it, the name of the person who made it and a declaration that it is theirs to share. Explore is rebuilt around that context, communities become places you can join and run, and Kawuri remembers your conversations.

Making a reel, in three steps

Tap New reel in Explore. The old single form is gone; making a reel now takes three short steps, and you can move back and forth between them without losing anything.

1. Media. Record a video or choose one from your phone. Trim the start and end on a timeline of frames, pick a cover, keep or remove the original sound, and add captions. Reels can be up to three minutes long. If your video is landscape or square, you see exactly how it will sit in Explore and can drag to keep the important part in view.
2. Tell the story. Write a caption, choose a topic such as Dance, Food, Craft or History, and pick one of your communities if it belongs there. Then answer What is happening? Who is taking part, where, the occasion, and why it matters. Finally, say who made the video and confirm you have the right to publish it.
3. Review. See the reel as it will appear in Explore, check the details, and publish.

Why we ask what is happening

A dance filmed at a festival in Paga means something different to someone who was there than to someone watching in another country. Your caption stays short and public; the answer to What is happening? opens in Explore's Context panel for anyone who wants to understand more. The panel labels where each detail comes from, so a viewer can always tell your own words from a reviewed fact, a dictionary entry or an AI explanation.

A new Explore

• Topics across the top: For you, Music, Stories and Traditions.
• Photographs from the published archive now appear alongside video.
• Landscape and square videos are no longer squeezed into a thin strip; they fill as much of the screen as they safely can.
• The buttons and captions step aside while a reel plays and come back when you tap.
• Reels from a community carry a Join button.

Communities you can join and run

Open the new Communities tab to find groups by name, language, place or topic, or start your own. A community can be public, or private so that only approved members see its posts. Owners can write rules, approve people who ask to join, appoint moderators and hand the community over.

The community feed also invites more people in. A Make a post bar sits at the top, posts can be filed as a Question, Language, Culture, Music or Story, Today in Kasem asks you to share a word from home, and New voices suggests people worth following.

Kawuri remembers

Kawuri now keeps your conversations on your phone, per account, and lets you search them. It opens with suggestions instead of an empty box, says when an answer comes from the guide stored on your phone, and only gives a Kasem translation when it finds an exact match in the published dictionary.

Also in this update

• The Membership tab in My Space now opens straight on the plans, with yearly pricing shown by default.
• Contributions drafted with Kawuri's help are marked as such for reviewers.