What's new with Lingonaut? 28th February update! (We're still ad-free, still infinite hearts, and still free for everyone forever!) - Beta announcement!
It's us from the Lingonaut Project - the one's creating a platform to teach and not to profit and we're back with some news!
Taken from today's blog post and pasted here for your convenience:
It’s almost two years since our mission began – to build a place for people to learn, share and grow – without their education being drip-fed for revenue, or user retention, without their resources being changed at random as a test, or pestered into buying a subscription to stave off the ads.
We’re just 31 days away from realising that dream and rolling out the beta. And for those who don’t remember – our promises were, in no particular order:
- The same kind of super-polished and fun experience that’s easy to use on any platform that you’re used to.
- Equally free for everyone, no gatekeeping useful language learning tools behind a ‘super’ subscription. (who knew they’d come out with MAX after!)
- A fun and colourful cast of astronomy themed characters to accompany you on your language journey.
- Ad-free, paid for by patrons on Patreon so the learning flow isn’t interrupted.
- Unlimited hearts for everyone from the get-go, no waiting for hours for a re-fill
- The old tree style that we all loved and found much more effective and quicker than the now user-retention centred path system.
- Completely free auxiliary content like legendary levels, challenges, achievements etc with no limit on how many you can do for free.
- Bringing back sentence discussions so people can learn and discuss WHY something is how it is instead of mindlessly memorising the order of words.
- Actual spoken audio sentences and examples, not AI
- Bringing back forums so people can discuss and learn together like they could before.
- Functioning server-side anti-cheat for people who take part in leagues.
And we’re closer than ever to meeting every single one of those targets, along with a few more, but most excitingly:
- A way to transfer Streaks from other apps to Lingonaut so you can pick up where you left off!
- A super powerful course creator Creatonaut that lets volunteers build high quality courses without having to fight the software!
- A community browser that lets anyone design any course to teach whatever they want to!
- Introduced our own open alternative to CEFR called OLPS – The open language proficiency score which we’re going to open up for anyone who wants to make aligned learning materials
It’s high time someone put the learning value before shareholder value and I’m so proud of what we've built.
With that in mind, let’s talk about the beta
The Beta
This is the part where things often go sideways for many projects, so our plan is to take it slow, and to take it cautiously so we can find bugs, issues, stress test our servers and take our time to fix things as best we can without inconveniencing too many people.
To do that, and to thank the various groups who’ve supported and helped us along the way, we’ve decided to roll out in the following waves:
| Date | Wave | Eligible Testers |
|---|---|---|
| 31/03/2025 | 1 | Venusian Tier Patrons (1 key) , Terrestrial/’Super’ Parity Patrons (1 + 1 key for a friend), Max Parity/O.W.L Buster Patrons (1 + 2 keys for friends) |
| 08/04/2025 | 2 | Mercurian Tier Patrons, Translatonauts |
| 18/04/2025 | 3 | First come first served up to 1000 people |
| 28/04/2025 | 4 | First come first served up to 5000 people |
| 05/05/2025 | 5 | Anyone can join |
Each wave depends on the previous wave going smoothly or any issues encountered being fixed. The slow build-up lets us test our infrastructure and make sure everything is working well, and lets us fix problems without being overwhelmed.
We’ll be dming people with keys ourselves, so as long as you meet the above requirements, you don’t need to do anything else.
Thank you so much for your support, without it we wouldn’t be able to get as far as we have. If you’d like to support us but haven’t yet, please take a look! It’ll help keep the lights on, the platform running and server capacity up!
And with that, the month of Lingonaut begins!
The month of Lingonaut
This month, to celebrate liftoff, we’ll be releasing new screenshots, videos, and updates about Lingonaut as well as our hobby in general!
Just a few short days ago, we posted our first Random Language Adventure, diving into the history behind Esperanto, written by team member @yokailang !
We’ll be posting more Random Language Adventures as well as a lot of other cool things on our Youtube channel, Blog, X (Formerly known as Twitter), Reddit & Bluesky. If you don’t already follow us there, make sure you do so you don’t miss out!
Lastly make sure to join our discord, that’s where our updates come out first!
Useful links:
Our website (where you can find everything about us)
Our Bluesky (Where you can follow us to keep up to date)
Our subreddit (self explanatory!)