100.000 furries 🎉

We now have over 100.000 furries registered on BARQ!

OMG! We just surpassed the amazing milestone of 100.000 registered users on BARQ! Thanks everyone for being a part of BARQ and for all the love and support you’ve given us over the last year. It has been an amazing adventure for us all and we are really looking forward to what’s to come.

I, Woutske, want to personally thank everyone in our amazing BARQ team for all the hard work you’ve been doing to make this possible. Without you we would’ve never survived this long.

I also want to thank all the Patreon and Ko-Fi supporters for the support. You help us keep the servers running and you make it possible for us to invest in team collaboration tools. Thank you ❤️

BARQ User Mosaic

Here’s 100.000 users in one mosaic. Can you find yourself? Click here to view the full version

Running a social media platform turned out to be a lot of work 😰. We had sudden user growth, networking issues, content policy that required changing, more networking issues, more policy changes, invasions of spam accounts, more networking issues, and loooooads of other fun surprises. BUT! We managed to survive all of that 💫 And now we are at 100.000 users generating over 1.200.000 API requests per day (~14 requests per second, every second of the day).

The last months we’ve been working to set up an organization structure that will allow us to welcome more people into the team without turning into a chaos. We’re currently listing all roles and positions on our new website, which we will release in a few weeks 😱

We’ve also been struggling with finding a balance between creating new features and maintenance of the existing features. We have so many cool features on the roadmap, but we also have to make sure what we have keeps working.

In 2023 we have planned some cool new features. Our new website will contain a more elaborate roadmap, but we will share a sneak peek here already:

We’ve been working on a big new update of the app. The app has been rewritten from the ground up with way better performance, multi-language support and many UI and UX improvements. We plan to release the first development versions to our supporters and hope to release to the rest of our users soon after.

We’re also going to introduce a map view to BARQ! You can opt-in to show your location on the worldwide map, or you can invite mutuals to share your location with. Especially useful during conventions :3!

We’ve also worked on the chat! The chat will get a major revision with real-time chat, ways to edit and remove your messages, remove chats, see who’s typing and more 😄

We’re also going to do more with events again. You will be able to see events in a calendar view, follow events to stay updated and we will make it possible to set up recurring events (like the London Furmeet and Dortmund furmeet events). This will make it easier to see which of the recurring events your friends are attending.

100.000 users. But what do they look like and what do they do on the app 🤔. Here are some fun statistics.

First of all, at the time of writing we have 99.421 fursonas on BARQ! The most popular species being Wolf (there’s almost 3500 of you), Fox, Dragon and Cat. See the top 25 in the chart below.

Then we have hobbies and interests. We do have a lot of gamers on BARQ: over 16.000 users have this as their hobby. Then we have music, pc gaming and cooking. One day we might do the big BARQ LAN PARTY + Cooking-con 🤔

And where do most of our users live? In these cities 👇