u/p4r4d0x

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

Almost two months ago now I posted here about Otto, a Reddit alternative I've been building solo since 2023. No ads, no algorithmic feed, moderator accountability, visible country flags, hosted in Australia. Since then it's picked up 400 signups and 12k visitors from an Australian community launch. I've also renamed it to Topicle and shipped a lot of new functionality, so I wanted to give an update.

It's at topicle.com if you want to take a look. All old otto.talk links still work and redirect.

Why the rename?

The reason is boring but unfortunately a showstopper - trademark clearance. After posting here, I got some useful negative feedback on the name. I did the due diligence I should have done earlier and found that "Otto" had US trademark conflicts in the exact space I'm operating in (NICE class 38, 41, 42, 45). Rather than build on a name that was already effectively claimed, I renamed while the user base was still small and the cost of switching was low.

"Topicle" is a portmanteau of "topic" and "article" which are both discussion platform-related. It is also a play on words - "topical" (relevant, current). The .com was available on the second-hand market from a defunct startup, and the trademark path was open. I incorporated a company (Topicle Pty Ltd) and filed a trademark before doing the cutover.

There's a more detailed explanation at topicle.com/why if you're curious about the reasoning.

What's new since the last post

The most useful thing from the past two months has been real user feedback. After a recommendation from a user on /r/RedditAlternatives, u/Falafels in the previous thread, I posted the site on /r/BuyAussie which ended up being well received, resulted in a wave of signups, and a lot of the changes below came directly from their requests and bug reports. Things like image replies, the comment formatting toolbar, profile bios, and sports auto-flairs all came from specific user requests.

Here are the highlights:

Posting and comments

• Image replies in comments. You can attach an image to any comment, not just top-level posts. Drag and drop or use the toolbar icon. Images open in a lightbox.
• Post title editing. Authors can edit titles within the first 15 minutes. Moderators can retitle posts at any time. Full edit history is visible. One of those things Reddit has never allowed.
• Translation. Non-English post titles are auto-translated, and comments can be translated on demand with a click. Language is detected automatically. Multilingual communities work without everyone needing to speak the same language.
• Spoiler system. Manual spoiler tagging with content masking across all surfaces. For sports communities, spoilers are detected automatically from post content and tagged with the relevant league.
• Formatting toolbar for comments. Bold, italic, links, quotes, and image upload accessible from a toolbar above the comment editor, not just markdown syntax.
• Post drafts with autosave. Drafts save automatically as you type and persist across sessions. Named draft slots so you can work on multiple posts.

Discovery and real-time

• Live updates via WebSockets. While reading a thread or browsing a feed, a banner appears in real time when new posts or comments are available. No manual refresh needed. DMs, notifications, and mod queues all update live too.
• Thread subscriptions. Subscribe to any thread to get notified of new comments, similar to "follow this post" on other platforms.
• RSS feeds. Every community, user profile, and the front page has an RSS feed. Autodiscovery tags are included so your reader picks them up automatically.
• Search improvements. Sub-scoped search (search within a specific community), time-range filtering, and a persistent search bar in the header. Trying to improve on Reddit search here.
• Mentions and hover cards. Type u/username or t/community in a comment and it auto-links. Hover over any username anywhere on the site to see a summary card with their stats, badges, and account age.
• Keyword muting. Define keywords in your settings to hide posts and comments containing those terms. Useful for filtering out topics you don't want to see.

Moderation and data

• Moderator transparency. A dedicated mod log page showing all moderator actions in a community, visible to members. Public community stats page with a graph, growth and activity trends.
• Expanded data export. GDPR data export now runs as a background job and includes all user data categories: posts, comments, votes, messages, notifications, moderation history, and more.

Quality of life

• Interest-based onboarding. New users pick their interests from a visual grid and get subscribed to matching communities automatically, instead of being given a default set. This was necessary because users were complaining the defaults had topics they weren't interested in - US Politics, Formula 1, Tennis. Some users seemed to be mass downvoting US Politics as a form of protest against being subscribed to it.
• DM improvements. Edit and delete sent messages. Opt out of send-on-Enter. Hide deleted messages. Existing thread detection when starting a new conversation.
• Improved mobile experience. Bottom sheets instead of dropdowns for many actions, proper edge-to-edge layout, mobile-optimized navigation, and create button that allows both posts and communities to be made.

There's more on the about page, but these are the changes most relevant to daily use.

Roadmap

Here's what's coming next, prioritized based on user feedback:

• iOS app (in progress, Android to follow). App was highly requested and a hard pre-requisite for some users to join the platform. I thought apps were passe and PWA was sufficient, but not so.
• Sign in with Apple. Somewhat more privacy preserving than Sign in with Google, due to anonymous email relays.
• Optional "verified human" badge. This came up repeatedly as people want to know they're talking to a real person and seemed surprisingly fine with whatever verification means are required to make it happen, even if it was invasive.
• Age verification. Required legally to offer NSFW in a growing number of countries now, and there is quite an appetite for this.
• Animated gifs in comments. Toggleable per-community by moderators, off by default.
• Video posts.
• Mod-selectable rule sets per community (strict, standard, loose) instead of one-size-fits-all rules.

What hasn't changed

The core principles from the original post still apply: no ads, no algorithmic feed, moderator accountability, visible country flags, no private profiles, hosted in Australia, GDPR/CCPA compliant, VPNs blocked for writes. The feedback button is still on every page, and I'm still actively building daily.

If you visited before and were put off by anything, it's worth another look. A lot has changed. I would love to hear any feedback, thoughts or criticisms you have. Thanks for all your previous feedback which has significantly improved the site as a result.

topicle.com

A user in r/RedditAlternatives suggested I post here since Topicle is Australian-made. I also saw a thread here a while back where someone wished for Australian alternatives to big tech and the reply was "I don't know of any social media." So here's one.

I'm a Melbourne-based software dev and I've been building a social discussion platform as an Australian alternative to Reddit. It's at topicle.com.

Built and hosted in Australia with servers in Melbourne. Registered Australian company (Topicle Pty Ltd), self-funded with no VC money. Software is one of the few areas of tech we can genuinely build here without importing parts from Shenzhen, so this is coded, designed, hosted, and run entirely in Australia. Analytics are self-hosted, there's no Google or Facebook tracking, and user data is stored under Australian jurisdiction.

With Reddit now a US public company licensing user data to AI companies and a new appetite for non-US options, it felt like the right time to build something locally that puts users first. A few things that set it apart:

• Moderator accountability - mod actions are logged publicly on every community, every action can be appealed to site admins, and accepted appeals automatically restore removed content. Communities can't be run as fiefdoms.
• No ads, no algorithmic feed - no promoted content or engagement-optimizing algorithm. The default sort ("Depth") promotes articles and discussion over memes and image posts.
• Country flags and no private profiles - flags are displayed next to all posts and comments based on where you're posting from. All user history is public. Makes it much harder for bots and astroturfers to blend in.
• Privacy first - IP addresses are hashed before storage, self-hosted analytics, no third-party trackers, full account deletion and data export. Designed with Australian privacy law in mind.

There's a full feature list at topicle.com/about and the longer story behind why it exists at topicle.com/why.

It's early and the community is still small, but the platform itself is full-featured and actively developed - I'm working on it daily.

If anyone has questions about the site or the tech behind it, happy to answer.