Radio chat gets hearts and replies
Every radio station on Skydex has a live chat attached to it — one global channel per station, shared by whoever is tuned in, whether they're flying over Terra with the widget open or listening from the station page on radio.skydex.online. It works, people use it, and it has had one structural problem since the day it shipped: it was a wall. Messages scrolled past, and there was no way to respond to one of them. If two people were talking and a third message landed in between, the thread was gone. And if you said something and left, you'd never know whether anyone answered.
Both of those are fixed today.
Hearts
Hover over any message (or tap it on mobile) and you get a small heart. One reaction, deliberately — no emoji picker, no seven-way reaction bar. A radio chat is a lightweight place; the thing you want to say most of the time is "yes, this", and a heart says exactly that. The count sits right on the message, updates live for everyone in the channel, and toggling it off is just a second click. Hearts are tied to your account, so it's one per person per message — no rapid-fire inflation.
Replies
Next to the heart there's a reply button. Hit it and a small bar appears above the input showing who you're answering and a snippet of what they said; send, and your message carries that quote with it. Everyone in the channel sees your line with the original attached, so the conversation keeps its shape even when the channel is busy.
The quote is a snapshot, taken at the moment you reply. That's intentional: chat history only loads the last stretch of messages, and a reply to something from yesterday still has to make sense on its own. Whatever happens to the original — even if it ages out of the visible history — the reply keeps rendering with its context.
Replies are flat, one level deep. This is a radio chat, not a forum; we want "answering you" to work, not nested comment trees.
The bell knows
Here's the part that actually changes behaviour. Radio chat has always been a you-had-to-be-there medium — if someone answered your message ten minutes after you closed the tab, that answer effectively didn't exist for you. Now it lands in your notification bell: a reply to your message shows up with who wrote it, on which station, and what they said; the first heart on one of your messages shows up too. Click through and you're back in that station's chat.
Both kinds are capped so the bell stays useful. A back-and-forth conversation with one person produces one inbox row per day, not one per message — the live chat itself is where the conversation happens; the bell just tells you it's happening. Same for hearts: a message that collects twenty of them notifies you once.
Everything works in both places — the in-game radio widget and the public station pages — because they were always the same channel underneath. Sign in, tune in, and say something; now people can actually answer you.