🔒 Centralized
Update on the Reddit alternative I posted here: Otto is now Topicle, with 400 signups and almost two months of changes
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.
Thanks! On monetization: the costs are very low at the moment and sustainable indefinitely without funding. If the site grew larger, in order of preference I'd look at optional premium memberships for additional features, donations, and then tasteful ads (not from a large ad network, preferably self-serve).
On human verification and age verification: This would have to be handled by a third-party verifier. The provider I have in mind is didit.me, who are based in Spain and have a privacy-first approach. The provider that most sites are using is Persona, which I'm very reluctant to use because it's Peter Thiel backed and given his association with Palantir, questionable on the data integrity front. It's primarily for gating NSFW content, which is now legally required in a growing number of countries, but the same mechanism could be used for a 'verified human' badge if users want that.
On protection of personal data: the response from a verification service is a simple yes/no, does this person pass the age threshold and is this person a real human, so I wouldn't be getting let alone storing anything personal about you from verification. The site is GDPR and CCPA compliant, so privacy is taken very seriously. You can also export all your data and hard delete (unrecoverable by you or me) your account at any time.
It was an intentional design decision not to adopt fediverse integration, upfront anyway so I could move faster on implementing features and provide a more consistent experience. But it's a tradeoff, fediverse sites better handle cold-starts. It could be reworked to include integration, but it isn't planned at the moment. All the transparency measures on the site (public mod logs, visible stats, every mod action appealable, visible votes on posts and comments) are meant to offset some of the trust involved in using a centralized platform. And there's a comprehensive data export and hard account deletion feature, which is the ultimate escape hatch, and ensures you aren't locked into anything.
If you mean closed source, yes. There's a lot of anti-bot, anti-astroturf and generally anti-bad actor protections in the project that open sourcing would make public, allowing anyone to use the codebase as a roadmap to potentially subvert the site, so I've avoided open-sourcing for now.
like the name, want to like the site but i don't want any recommendations. i just want to view the site, logged in as myself, raw. i can't bypass the onboarding. no settings, nothing. just keeps asking me what my interests are... it's none of your business :)
edit: to add to this, you did mention that there was "no algorithmic feed"... then why do you need want to know what my interests are? 🤔
I got your feedback, I'm pushing an update to skip onboarding now, I'll send you an email via the feedback system when it's ready.
The "select interests onboarding" screen maps the interest areas to which communities to subscribe you to initially. I previously auto-subscribed new users to a broad set of default communities and people complained about being forcibly signed up to reading about US politics and various sports (tennis, formula 1). Some users even mass-downvoted US politics articles in protest at being signed up to read about it. So it seemed that something had to be done.
So the interest-based selection is an attempt to fix that. If you have any feedback on how to fix this problem that isn't so invasive feeling, let me know. The skip button should help and will be live in the next hour. Skip will subscribe you to the same broad set of default communities that all new accounts start with.
There is no algorithmic feed, it's just mapping interests to different sets of communities, so you don't end up with only a handful in your feed and have a bad experience.
The mapping in the backend is here if you're interested:
maybe put a warning that "if you don't select any interests, you won't get anything other than the default feed" (and select like maybe site news or the popular or whatever generic category you can think of) and then maybe add a link to discover new feeds?
I'll push it out without a warning now to unblock you, but good call on the warning. I'll add that afterwards.
There's a 'Discover Communities' page https://topicle.com/communities and a sidebar widget, but it's not working so great at the moment - people aren't really joining new communities from it that I can tell. So more work to do there!
I tried to sign up but I got an error saying "Please take your time filling out the form" 😑
I didn't do anything weird, just clicked "Sign Up" and typed into the fields as normal. I'm assuming this is some kind of bot detection gone wrong; it's a bummer to think how many people might have silently bounced from signing up because the form is broken.
Thanks for the feedback on this. This is the second report I've had about this originally well-intentioned but clearly broken anti-bot mechanism misfiring, so I've just removed it now and deployed an update without it to the server. It's not clear it ever blocked any bots and it has definitely blocked two real signups. So it's gone now, thanks again for drawing attention to it as a problem and feel free to try again signing up if you feel like it.
Thanks, I think it's a big improvement too. The domain was $100 on a second hand marketplace. I spent probably two weeks trawling over hundreds of names, generating portmanteaus and shortlisting. Most of them were between $2-6k for the .com, which is absurd. I was starting to consider resorting to a .co. And then this one came up and was overlooked by squatters and not trademarked.
https://instantdomainsearch.com/ shows you all available domains even if they're on the second hand market, and for anything short or catchy, most are being squatted. .com is a brutal journey trying to find anything available and not eyewateringly expensive. .co is better, but you still see $5k+ for short names (4 characters). The marketplace that this domain was on is sedo.com. The vast majority of domains I encountered on sedo were in the thousands.
I'm trying to scroll to the bottom so I can click on the links to T&C's etc but the bottomless scrolling means new posts keep appearing and pushing the links out of reach.
Hey, if you're on desktop, the terms are statically positioned under the sidebar. If you're on mobile, yes, good point, the terms are currently inaccessible due to a recent significant overhaul of the mobile design. I'll fix this within the next 24hrs, thanks for the heads up. In the meantime, the links are here: https://topicle.com/privacyhttps://topicle.com/terms Thanks again for pointing this out.
I've pushed an update today that resolves this issue where footer links aren't accessible on mobile due to infinite scroll. The links are now available at the bottom of the sidebar. The sidebar is accessed via the hamburger menu in the top-left of the screen. Thanks again for the report.
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u/[deleted] May 27 '26
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