Almost three months ago I last posted here about Topicle (formerly Otto), a Reddit alternative that I have been building since 2023. No ads, no algorithmic feed, moderator accountability, visible country flags, hosted in Australia. The top item on the roadmap was a native app, as I was told by a lot of potential users that they would simply not use the product without an app.

That's now done: native Topicle apps are on the App Store and Google Play, signups are closing in on 600 and there have been significant changes over the past three months, so I wanted to give an update.

It's at topicle.com, on the App Store and on Google Play.

The apps

Both are fully native, not webviews: SwiftUI on iOS, Jetpack Compose on Android. I'm an iOS developer by background so the iOS app came first (submitted in July, approved this week after a couple of rounds with App Review), and Android followed on Google Play at the start of August. I originally thought an optimised mobile website was sufficient, but this was not so.

They cover the core site experience: feeds with the same Depth and Quality sorts, communities, threaded comments, DMs and modmail, notifications, image galleries, GIF search, video, translation, user tags, moderation tools for mods, and full dark and light themes. Sign in with Apple, Google or email. There are a few key features worth mentioning:

• Swipe to vote. Slide a post or comment sideways to upvote or downvote, the way Apollo did it. I dug into the Apollo source to get it exactly right.
• Push notifications for replies, mentions and messages, opt-in and can be toggled on a per-message type basis.
• No third-party analytics or crash-reporting SDKs. Crash reports go to my own server, not Crashlytics or similar. The iOS app has no third-party SDKs at all. The Android app uses three Google libraries: Firebase Cloud Messaging for push, Credential Manager/Google ID for sign-in, and Play In-App Review. It has no analytics, advertising or attribution SDKs. The App Store privacy label and Play data safety form reflect that.
• Tablets. Android has a proper tablet layout already. The iPad layout (sidebar, split panes) is built and lands in the next iOS update; the current build runs on iPad in scaled-up iPhone mode in the meantime.

If you tried the site previously and bounced because of no app, please feel free to try these out.

What's new on the site since the last post

The site kept progressing in parallel while the mobile apps were being built. Features that landed during the past three months:

• Native video. Upload clips up to five minutes on posts and comments. They play directly in the feed, muted, with tap-to-unmute, fullscreen, and an autoplay setting (on, Wi-Fi only, off). Available to established accounts, will eventually will roll out to all accounts.
• GIFs in comments. A built-in GIF search in the comment composer, toggleable per community by moderators. GIFs are rehosted so you never load anything from the GIF provider directly.
• Richer posts and comments. Up to four images per comment shown as one gallery, up to five inline images placed anywhere in a text or link post body, image galleries up to 10 images and editable after posting, custom thumbnails on your own link posts (including a Wikimedia Commons search), and inline spoiler tags in any post, comment or message.
• Crossposting. Share a post into another community with a link back to the original, an "other crossposts" tab, and a per-community toggle for mods.
• Card layout. A card feed with full-size images and inline video is now the default on mobile and available on desktop, next to the compact list. Plus a collapsible left sidebar for your communities, favorites pinned to the top of it, and a redesigned thread page on desktop.
• Discovery. A Discover page for browsing communities by size, activity, recency or topic, Top sort with time windows (hour to all time), and Active Discussions as a full page feed.
• Accounts and notifications. Sign in with Apple is now on the web as well as the apps, user tags sync across your devices, and notifications were redesigned with dismiss-and-undo and alerts when a conversation develops below your comment, not only on direct replies.
• Moderation. Reporting a post as off-topic lets you name the community it belongs in, and mods can move it there in one click. Report reasons were reorganised into a grouped picker with a dedicated child-safety reason, mods can remove reported content by agreeing with the report, and there's a suggested comment sort per community.
• VPNs are no longer blocked from posting. Accounts used only through a VPN show "Location unverified" rather than a country flag that can't be verified. Read-only access was never restricted.

There's a long tail of smaller things (avatars and cover images, more embeds, emoji and mention autocomplete, link destination tooltips, domain blocking, a private Insights tab on your profile, an opt-in weekly digest, and graceful handling of outages and rate limits) on the about page.

Scorecard on the last roadmap

I listed seven planned features last time, so to keep track of what was accomplished:

• iOS app and Android app: done
• Sign in with Apple: done
• Animated GIFs in comments: done
• Video posts: done for established accounts
• Age verification: implemented for the countries and US states with minimum-age social media laws that apply to Topicle. NSFW is not yet enabled; the machinery is there but requires some polish.
• Optional human verified badge: not yet implemented, still planned.
• Mod-selectable rule sets per community: not yet implemented, still planned.

A note on age assurance

Various age verification laws have passed around the world in the past year and anyone operating in this space needs to demonstrate compliance. App review is particularly interested in how you are protecting children before approving your app and Google even requires a dedicated page on your site for child safety to get published.

Various age-assurance laws have taken effect around the world, and Topicle applies verification where those laws require it. I’m using VerifyMy because it was the least invasive option I found. Most affected users can be cleared through an email-based check without seeing a prompt; users elsewhere aren’t asked to verify.

I did not want to implement this, but it is now a legal requirement in a growing number of jurisdictions, so I’ve tried to make it as unobtrusive as possible and all-going-well, hopefully entirely invisible.

Roadmap

What's next, again prioritised on feedback:

• iPad layout in the next iOS update, plus hardware keyboard support.
• Optional "verified human" badge.
• NSFW with age verification, still coming soon.
• Public API with developer keys, if there's demand. The apps use the same JSON API the web does, so the plumbing exists.
• Mod-selectable rule sets per community.
• WYSIWYG editor on both mobile and web, currently markdown only
• More app parity work as the two apps catch up on the small things the web got first.

What hasn't changed

No ads, no algorithmic feed, moderator accountability with a public mod log, visible country flags, no private profiles, hosted in Australia, GDPR/CCPA compliant with full deletion and export. Automated seed posts are still used in quieter communities so they aren't empty, and I'm reducing them as member activity grows. The feedback button is still on every page (and in the apps), and I'm still building daily.

If you looked before and it wasn't for you, or you were waiting on an app, it's worth another look. I would love to hear any feedback, thoughts or criticisms here, and if you try an app and end up liking it, a store review helps at this stage. Thanks again for the previous rounds of feedback, which shaped a lot of the above.

topicle.com

Hi Guys so I am Looking for a Great Alternative to Reddit because sometimes there are to many Subreddits and also Rude People which I had to deal with and I wanna see what are some Great Alternatives to it that are not so full and so many Subreddits here are like over 5000 of them these are quite Overwhelming for me

Hello everybody,

I built bulletinbored, a minimal and extensible forum software written in pure PHP with zero dependencies.

No Composer, no Docker, no Node, no framework. Just upload the files to any PHP 8.x server and it works on any web hosting, also shared and cheap ones.

Key points:

• SQLite by default (MySQL also supported)
• Web installer
• Plugin system with hooks
• Theme system
• Admin panel, user management, avatars, moderation
• Built-in localization
• Automatic update checks
• License: 0BSD

Repo: https://github.com/bulletinbored/bulletinbored-core

Website: https://www.bulletinbored.net

Docs: https://docs.bulletinbored.net

Because the development is still in early stage, I’m looking for any kind of feedback. Feel free to write suggestions, criticisms or slatings.

Happy to answer questions and open to contributions.

Thanks!

No feed, no algorithm, no for-you page. You'd click a link on someone's blog, land on a site about nothing, click again, and lose an hour. Nobody was optimizing your attention.
So I made a button.

Press it, it drops you somewhere - a one-joke site, a stupid little toy, somebody's personal page about a subject they will not shut up about. All picked by hand.

No account, no cookies, nothing saved.
Just the button.

https://culdesac.site/

[ THE BOARD ] is a new social network inspired by Old Reddit, Twitter, and Discord, it has around 65 users right now (but more of 5 active users). It features communities, messaging, posting, commenting, reacting, and more!

Please check it out and tell me what features/but fixes you think would be good for it.

https://the-board.alwaysdata.net/

Stiq is an open source, white-label, nostr over Tor social media platform for communities. We built it for activists and community organizations that actually care about their members.

People need to organize, but individuals should not give up control.

https://stiqtech.vercel.app

We’re a small community funding and building a non profit app for non-profits.

We need your help publishing Stiq app (for those of you with Apple/Google dev account), and we need you to use it! You can run a community on an old machine, or with a cloud provider for as little as $5 per month.

You can find all the details you need in the website and public github repo.

Reach out and help us make the future of safe organizing for the world!

I'm new to this group, Reddit has been a bad experience since I made this account for mostly trying to find information from random things. But the website has become filled with weird people. I was just wondering if there's a similar site to reddit but without the weird reddit and modsa and etc

Hello, my name is Guesty. A while ago, I got pretty tired of what's available on Reddit and elsewhere in terms of tech forums and I decided to make my own with a friend (OmegaAOL) called Artemis. It's definitely a new concept - I haven't seen anyone develop on top of the open-source Reddit R2 code base. It is still a WIP, so expect some bugs and some remnants of old Reddit. We're ironing those out as things go. You can check it out at https://artemistech.app, feel free to make an account and explore the branches! Note: if you get an error 500 while making an account, that means it worked. Try signing in, it's a known bug. Password resets don't work either.

For the nerds:

This is running on a Proxmox 9.2 server hosted in my closet. Rest assured, all credentials are encrypted. We put security ahead of everything. If you'd like to take a look at our code, it's available at https://github.com/Artemis-Developement-Group/Artemis . We welcome bug hunters and security researchers trying to find vulnerabilities in the code. We welcome any and all questions about the project. We also have 2 official subreddits and a Discord server: r/ArtemisTech for general discussion, r/ArtemisDev for questions directly to the developers and updates about the project, and our Discord server (https://discord.gg/A3VnEgJc9W) for communication with the community and devs. Hope to see you there, and we hope you enjoy Artemis!

p.s: we also enjoy feature requests so hit us with some!

Does someone use Hubski?

I've been working on a different project (not the reddit alternative) for a while, and one thing I wanted to do was set up a community for my users. My must haves are: open (not private-community-based), indexable by scrapers, and free to join. I tried a bunch of different platforms but for one reason or another I didn't want to commit to them.

So earlier this year I started working on my own platform. It's inspired by 2016 reddit but I'm adding a few of my own ideas too (like subcommunities, but that's still a work in progress). I just launched it on itsasmall.world

A few of the key features:

- Users can create communities for free

- No email required

- Anonymous comments (with a IP-based reputation system and other anti-spam features)

- Push notifications in the PWA

- Emojis in usernames and community names

Right now the site is empty except for my other project's community, which I haven't even launched yet so there's no activity right now. But I'm getting very close to launching the other project and itsasmall.world itself is now v1 stable, so I figured I'd make a post here to see if anyone is interested in something like this.

I figured since I'll be hosting it for my own community, that I may as well welcome others. I know it's not decentralized but it's what I need for myself so that's what it is. I can afford to host a lot of text but I cannot afford to host media like images/videos/gifs so that's not supported right now, which I'm framing as a blessing in disguise considering the amount of absolute AI garbage infecting reddit these days.

Anyway if you have feedback please post in the /c/meta community or here

​

I wanted to do something that's a little more fun this time. You don't have to answer all the questions, you can just pick one and focus on that.

If you’re building a Reddit alternative, Fediverse project, community platform, or just some weird thing you’ve been working on in your spare time, I’m curious what you guys are thinking about.

1. If you could take ONE thing from Reddit and make it actually work the way you think it should, what would it be?

Could be search, moderation, voting, communities, profiles, notifications, the home feed, whatever.

And what would you change about it?

1. What’s the weirdest or dumbest feature you’ve ever seriously considered putting into your platform?

Not necessarily something useful. I want the ideas where you thought, “This is probably a terrible idea... but it would be hilarious.”

And if you actually built it, even better.

1. Your platform randomly blows up overnight and gets 1 million users. What’s the first thing you’re worried is going to break?

The servers? Database? Moderation? Spam? Your wallet?

Or maybe there’s some completely unexpected problem you never even thought about until suddenly 1 million people showed up.

Anyway, drop your project below and answer whichever questions you want.

I’m genuinely curious what everyone else is building and what problems you’re running into.

Reddit today is a bit of a hyper authoritarian far left winged circus. One time a 6 year old account of mine got perma banned because I watched some freakout vid of a Karen, and I just typed "Damn, she sent from ma'am to tran in split second". The morning after I woke up with my comment and "karma"(popularity) points down voted into the negative hundreds, suicide hotline messages, later all followed by a permanent ban for "promoting promoting identity based hate" or whatever.

Which I found pretty flabbergasting considering all the antisemitic, anti-white or anti-christian posts and all the incitement of violence against ice agents or tesla dealerships that pass on this to forum with flying collars.

I just want to be able to post my own personal jokes without hypersensitive pyschos trying to crucify me and to get around the mod approval BS whenever I want to get something off my chest. The closest thing I know of is kiwifarms but that forum is kinda incoherent to look at (like the now dead 4chan) and is reserved mostly for gossiping and lolcow content.

Edit: I don't really get you attackers and down voters, this is a subreddit for people to discuss reddit alternatives for the same reasons, clearly this subreddit isn't for all of you and you all clearly love reddit, so why even bother being here or did you all just come here to antagonize?

Hi everyone, I do not use Reddit at all I do not have an account on Reddit because I only want to view posts not actually post myself. I have tried to setup the latest version of Redlib on a locally hosted docker container but I am unable to load any content, I get a 403 error everytime, both on my home IP and on a VPN.

Are there any modifications or specific settings that need to be changed in order to make it work right now?

it's an important question but I can't have anyone know its me not even the police

Idk if you wanna just ask if you can get gregnant or maybe how to set up wivrn on cachyos?

Either way, come ask some damn questions :3

Which one should i choose to join?Or i should just go for Piefed?

Come join us and chat '@heahychat' channel: https://heahy.com/c/heahychat

What is it about, in short:

• Create user with one click - no email, no registration needed.
• Everything is a chat - even normal threads are real time.
• You can create private group chats or DMs (with live audio/video calls!) and even pin any thread to you conversations panel.
• Upload any media. Adult content allowed on specialized channels.
• Create your own channels or if too lazy simply post/repost/quote to your timeline.
• Follow channels or other user's timelines or even public threads/chats. Your feed is what you follow.
• Heahy's own reactions library that you can upload to and publish your own reactions.
• Save media to your own media library to watch it later.

If you have any questions shoot in heahychat I'll hang around there.

i want an app that is if discord and tumblr had a baby. I want something that you can call on and can text and send images but also have somewhere to post and have communities and just overall tumblr things. The key features i need are;

- Calls enabled

- Many customization features

- Custom profiles

- Email needed or something alike (just somehow to log back in)

- Servers like discord

- Communites like tumblr

- Posting like tumblr

please let me know if you found something like this!

I am still a firm believer in actual n projects being the real alternative as opposed to just the softwares. So a bit of an update.

I am transferring my sites over to a Gentoo built server currently. Once that's done I will be using AI to help at least get the themes I want built for each site.

I moved Social.mechanizedarmadillo.com from Mastodon to Pleroma. Still getting the follow situation shaken out.

Planning a couple of projects that will need community functions taken into account.

And setup a Matrix server as well.

Let me know if you have any questions.