deminature

A social media platform trying to solve misinformation, astroturfing and inauthentic posting. I also thought there was a real space for some non-US-based social media, so this is based in Australia. This is owing to all the political instability going on in the US right now and especially stuff like users' identities being subpoenaed for criticising the government. It was a pet peeve of mine seeing threads of comments that are obviously artificially created to push some kind of narrative, and the ability to buy likes and upvotes to shape opinion. Nothing ever seems to get done about it on big platforms, so I wanted to make some small contribution towards fixing it. And there's an element of self-interest here, because I want to be able to read a platform where every comment is authentic.

I've been working on it since 2023 and launched in March this year. Recently, native mobile apps have been launched. It was also an experiment in seeing whether Swift Vapor can be used to build a complex backend and the answer appears to be yes. It's a lot of fun to see how bad actors are joining the site, then building automated mechanisms to counter them, using AI to improve detection, without impacting legitimate users. It's also been a great technical challenge to try to support features that the big players support, like video upload and encoding, image upload, CSAM detection, NSFW detection, LLM-generated text detection and auto-translation using DeepL.

There are also lots of legal compliance challenges now with age verification laws coming in around the world, and ensuring you employ all the correct Apple and Google-specific verification (Declared Age Range, Play Age Signals) in the correct global regions. It's also fascinating to see behind the scenes how tight or not so tight current age verification actually is.

Recently, I've been polishing the iOS version to try to hit the 120 Hz target frame rate while scrolling feeds and finding SwiftUI is much less capable at this than the old UIKit approach. I'm also trying to teach myself marketing and how to keep users engaged. I'm primarily code-oriented and historically haven't had to do any marketing myself, and this is a vertical learning curve. I have gained a great deal of respect for those who have 'figured out' marketing, seeing how difficult it is starting from nothing.

It's also satisfying to take a feature from a user suggestion in the morning to an app release including that feature in the evening. This is a speed of delivery that would be unthinkable in the corporate world, where I previously worked, and it's very gratifying to put a complete feature in a user's hands within 24 hours.

Anyway, it's a very long and tough road and may amount to nothing in the end. But if nothing else, it's been immensely educational and enjoyable. Thanks for reading and feel free to check it out:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.topicle.ap...

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6791489291

There are also technologies new-ish to this kind of site included like every thread is a live thread via websockets, your post and comment scores update in realtime, notifications are realtime, you can DM other users and receive your messages immediately. So it's distinct from the everything is a hard page load world of 10 years ago and blurring into native software in a browser.

What I'm working on right now is a SwiftUI iOS app, because one of the most interesting observations from analytics has been that the internet is 70-80% mobile devices now, contrary to my 10 years out-of-date conception that people were mostly using the internet on desktops. So a mobile app seems non-negotiable to reach most users. I have a PWA already, but early users have repeatedly requested an official App/Play Store presence.

The stack is somewhat unique in that it's built with a Swift/Vapor framework (https://vapor.codes/) backend, with a more standard React Router 7 (SSR) frontend. I picked this framework mostly because I'm historically an iOS dev, but have found it to be very capable in its own right. I later discovered Apple themselves are using Vapor for some web services and have a team devoted to maintaining the server library (SwiftNIO https://github.com/apple/swift-nio) the framework is based on.

Anyway, it's very early still with launch via Reddit itself only 3 months ago. One of the biggest issues is getting it in front of people without appearing spammy and cold-start on a social platform is also brutal, you need users to get users, and round and round it goes. I may do a Show HN in the future if there's any interest in a real experience using Vapor as a production backend.