Олександр КузьменкоStartup
3 September 2026, 12:55
2026-09-03
"People hate all social networks". The developer of the Vmist platform, the Ukrainian analogue of Reddit, talked about 4 years of development, its own AI and gamepad navigation
Ukrainian programmer ElAvat shared new details about the development of Vmist, a Ukrainian social network and analogue of Reddit. Over the four years of work, the project has received support for gamepad and WSAD key controls, its own Gemma-based AI with OSINT tools, as well as protective mechanisms against Russian attacks.
Ukrainian programmer ElAvat shared new details about the development of Vmist, a Ukrainian social network and analogue of Reddit. Over the four years of work, the project has received support for gamepad and WSAD key controls, its own Gemma-based AI with OSINT tools, as well as protective mechanisms against Russian attacks.
The IT professional spoke about the current technical state of the platform and the challenges with its promotion in the Reddit community. According to him, a small team is working on the project, but the key problem now remains attracting an audience in the face of general user fatigue from social networks.
The service’s technical stack is built on Ruby on Rails and React. The infrastructure runs on Kubernetes and includes nine separate microservices responsible for image processing, fact-checking, and other functions. Key features of the platform include an integrated Gemma AI model with OSINT tools, as well as an agent bot capable of bypassing blocking for data collection and analysis.
The developers paid special attention to protection against disinformation and localization. Users can personally filter Russian-language content in their profile settings. In addition, the system has built a honeypot with AI protection that analyzes hostile attacks and automatically sends complaints to hosting providers.
The team is also experimenting with the interface and gamification of navigation.
«The site supports control via WSAD, and the mobile app supports most gamepads. You can enter posts and attachments almost like in Resident Evil, and then exit back to the feed without touching the mouse,» ElAvat noted.
According to the IT expert, he paid significant attention to code micro-optimization. In particular, in 2024, the developer spent two months just rebuilding the comment branch algorithm to reduce the sampling delay time by several tens of milliseconds.
Despite the significant amount of work done, the platform’s creators faced difficulties at the distribution stage.
«When we started, it was roughly clear who needed it. But the situation is changing too quickly — people now hate all social networks. I did 1000%: I created the AI myself, built an entire infrastructure inside, but I don’t really understand how to properly tell people about what we did,» the developer admitted.
Previously, dev.ua already covered the history of the creation of the social network Vmist. ElAvat said that he invested his own savings in the development, which he initially saved to buy an apartment, in order to create a Ukrainian analogue of Reddit with transparent moderation and protection from censorship.
«Zucker has lost all his banks. You complain about it, but you’re not going anywhere.» Ukrainian developer created the social network Vmist with the money he was saving for an apartment. Prospects for the «Ukrainian Reddit»
