https://topicle.com/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