Ігор Вишневський That's Life 3 June 2025, 09:00

"Zuckerberg went off the rails. 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"

Paradoxically, information about the emergence of a new Ukrainian social network sometimes not only becomes a sensation, but also gets lost in the information noise. There are several reasons for this: considering that the social network market is very globalized, and its players have already become a kind of «digital empires», no one believes that a new competitor, no matter what technological advantages it may have, will actually be able not only to bite off a «piece of the pie», but even to collect crumbs from the table. Especially if there is no group of investors from the Forbes list behind it. In addition, we have already had more than one attempt to «bring out» one or another Ukrainian social network to the public, but all of them either continue to exist as very local projects with a limited audience, or eventually ceased their activities.

However, this does not scare the developers of the Ukrainian social network Vmist, who have already made their product publicly available and continue to regularly improve it. dev.ua talked to them to understand the purpose, prospects of their product and plans, and most importantly, to answer the question of why they are doing this, although, it would seem, the realities and statistics are against them.

«When people answer why they don’t want to stay on Facebook, there will be another half of the question»

The project’s ideological inspirer, a developer with the pseudonym El Awat, in a conversation with dev.ua asks not to provide his full details: he does not seek publicity at the moment, and also has certain family circumstances in connection with the war. He says that if we turn to well-known analogies, his product is much closer to the American and not very popular in Ukraine Reddit than to Facebook. However, the founder of Vmist calls it the inadequacy and opacity of rules and content moderation on Facebook one of the triggers that pushed him to create a new social network. Although the term social network itself, according to the developer, does not 100% correspond to the idea of Vmist, because it is, rather, a network for content.

«We don’t prioritize people’s personalities, but their content, what they do», — explains El Awat.

According to him, he and his friends and colleagues often discussed the topic of Facebook’s lack of transparency, in particular its constant unsubstantiated «bans» for Ukrainians in connection with the war and the national question. But no one had a clear answer as to where to go with all those dissatisfied with Facebook.

«Zucker has lost all his edge, and you complain about it all the time, but you don’t go anywhere. At some point we freaked out and said: 'Why not try it, because there is time and desire,'» says El Awat, adding that the team spent a year developing the concept. But the Vmist developer clarifies an important nuance: «When people answer the question of why they don’t want to stay on Facebook, there will be another half of the question — why will they come to us?»

Vmist social network developer El Awat, photo from Facebook

As El Awat sees it, the answer to this should be the creation of an «ideal» social network that does not have a number of significant and obvious shortcomings that categorically do not suit users of other digital platforms.

«Facebook exists like a swamp. But there’s no point in trying to bring order there for those who have already fallen in love with this swamp. And this applies to almost any product. Although, it would seem, with their capabilities and current capitalization, they could make all our chips in one month,» says the developer. According to him, he and his team are trying to fix the errors of all existing social networks, and Reddit too. After all, the latter, according to the IT expert, is also significantly slowing down its own development.

341 tasks for the next two years. How the team works and who finances it

El Awat says the team’s pace is now insane, and he funds it from his own funds. It all started simply as «brain exercises,» with everyone doing something for half an hour or an hour in their free time. «But when it started to go out, everyone kind of perked up, the pace started to pick up, until by early 2025 the team was doing one sprint a week with at least 10 updates,» he says.

The developer adds that at some point, everyone on the team started taking things very seriously: planning appeared, they started creating tasks and got notebooks.

«We have 1,500 tickets in Jira, plus my notebook, which has 20 pages written down in small handwriting — what needs to be done in the near future, in the coming months, by summer, by the end of summer, and so on,» the developer comments to Vmist.

According to the developer, the team already has 341 tasks planned in the backlog for the next two years, and six people are currently working on the project. El Awat himself, who is fully responsible for the backend, and another developer spend all their working (and often non-working) time on Vmist, while four more people participate as part-timers.

«All the money that was saved to buy an apartment and almost everything that I earn, about 80% of my earnings, goes to the team. At this pace, it’s been going on for a year and a half,» the founder of Vmist explained, adding that he also manages to donate to the Armed Forces of Ukraine and help friends.

As El Awat says, the current version of the Vmist social network is about 75% in line with his vision of the final product, but it is a constant process of updates and refinements.

«At the beginning, you dream and imagine that you will have a super-complex „killing machine“, like in some fantasy films. And as a result, it turns out that in order to do this, months of wild work are needed, coordination with both the design and the back-end, and on the front-end everything constantly jumps out… And we have taken such a pace,» jokes the founder of Vmist.

«Bandera» AI on board, but no «shadow bans»

dev.ua separately discussed with Vmist developers the content moderation policy, the fight against disinformation, and a number of technical issues. The team has already published the rules for using the platform with 11 points and a number of sub-points, which, in addition to the standard points on prohibited content, child safety, hate speech, copyright, use of AI content, and privacy policy, also separately contain a policy regarding citizens of the aggressor state and anti-Ukrainian propaganda.

Interestingly, for example, access from the territory of the Russian Federation is not automatically blocked, but all user actions from there are subject to storage, analysis and monitoring. It is also immediately indicated that all paid services and monetization functions are not available to users from the territory of Russia.

«At the very beginning, a completely chronological principle was conceived, no shadow bans or anything like that. The most important thing is that it is proprietary software with an open source approach. No hidden actions. Removal is an honest removal. Everyone is responsible for their own actions,» Al Awat comments in a conversation with our publication.

The developers of the social network also took care of how propaganda and fakes will be detected — artificial intelligence is involved here. «It analyzes every picture and every post and gives us criteria according to which we should pay attention to it. It sets a certain «level of danger,» — says the programmer. According to him, in the summer, AI will automatically hide such posts from public feeds, but for now, moderation is carried out manually, because there are currently only about 400 users on the platform.

El Awat jokingly shared that the team is also «training» its «AI-Dushnil.» «It comes and immediately tries to refute the obvious things and provide links where you can read more about it. We trained it on the concept of ‘Lenin invented Ukraine,’» he says. Continuing the joke, we came to the conclusion that the Vmist team is training a nationalist or even «Bandera» artificial intelligence.

Vmist’s developers also say that they have created the most technically advanced comment system, which no competitor has. «Inside there are windows with a count of how many comments are above and at all levels. It takes 70-90 milliseconds to show all this, which is simply amazing for 1,000 comments. This is our pride,» explains El Awat.

According to him, the site is built on Rails + React, and it runs on Kubernetes on DigitalOcean.

As the programmer says, too many projects now take a $29 template and try to «fine-tune» it, but they decide to do everything themselves from scratch.

The big task ahead for the command is to divide all participants «into comfortable, cozy subgroups, within which they can continue to stay.» And after that, the developers plan to focus on attracting a significant audience.

«Our hope is to try at the beginning to get interesting people to come. After all, Ukrainians are like that — give them space for creativity and don’t interfere! For this reason, I’m betting big on the fact that we’ll finish with groups and dividing topics now. And when these people, our audience, settle in, then we can take a breather and just calmly work on features, fix bugs, and they’ll figure it out themselves,» El Awat shares his vision.

«When we were first attacked by Russian bots, I opened a bottle of champagne»

The developer of Vmist said that, despite the fact that the new social network is only at the launch stage, over the past month it has already been «on the radar» of some Russians. «And it turned into a wild hunt. They got a whole bunch of VPSs from an Amsterdam provider. They log in from them, create accounts. This allows them to come into some kind of „gap“ of time, create accounts from the quick mail registration service… And then under the posts they already write about Banderaists, about Nazism in Ukraine and that „we will kill you all there“. When this happened for the first time, I opened a bottle of champagne. Because if this is not a confession, then I don’t even know what is. We celebrated this event,» says El Awat.

Current social network statistics and a screenshot from it

However, the Vmist developer began to monitor the work of this botnet and quickly responded with an appropriate technical solution. «As soon as he starts typing comments — from the moment he opens the window to the moment he clicks 'send' — by that moment he is already 'killed'. The 'send' button tells him that, sorry, I can’t send anymore — you are blocked,» the developer explained.

Now he and his team are technically ready for new attacks. «I can’t wait for them to finally come. Over 4,000 domains had to be banned. Plus, I contacted the Amsterdam provider they’re hosted at and gave them this entire pool of addresses. Maybe I’ll get this VPS to be „cut out“. If so, then I’ll say I did something good,» he shared.

The first top blogger. Although from the social network of the past

Having entered Vmist, the dev.ua journalist noticed Igor Bigdan’s posts there — more than 10 years ago, the blogger had a huge audience on Livejournal (LJ) and was one of the top contributors there, and also held the position of director of LJ-Ukraine. But since the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war, ibigdan has taken a principled position, resigning from this position in 2014. At the beginning of the full-scale war, he stopped blogging on the Livejournal platform altogether. We asked the developers of the social network about Igor Bigdan’s role in the project, and asked him for a comment.

«My friends and acquaintances and I were constantly discussing the concept of the social network, and Igor also took an active part in it. He and I had about five calls lasting several hours, during which, for example, we discussed what we would do with the issue of Russian propaganda. Igor is not a member of our team, but he is very much on the topic, because it hurts him,» commented El Awat.

In turn, Igor Bigdan wrote to us that his vision of the idea and prospects of Vmist arises from an understanding of why the team wanted to create «another social network/blogging platform.» He named at least two reasons.

«The first is functional. Existing platforms have a bunch of shortcomings, both purely technical, such as an outdated „engine“ or interface, and social ones. Facebook has absolutely idiotic moderation, too many ads and stupid recommendations, Twitter has restrictions on the length of text and the number of photos, Instagram is a „vanity fair“ and posts about nothing, Live Journal has Russian censorship, Reddit has a bunch of Russians, LinkedIn is only about work, Youtube and TikTok are limited to one format…», Igor Bigdan listed the shortcomings of existing social networks.

According to him, the authors of Vmist have a picture of «what the result should be,» but at this stage it is still changing — new users are registering, new use cases are created, new feature requests are written, and Vmist reacts by adjusting its development.

Another reason, as Igor Bigdan says, is emotional. «When you are not satisfied with the existing solutions, when you have enough knowledge to create the perfect product, when you have thought it over 100,500 times in your head, when you already dream of it, then you have two options: spend your whole life regretting that you didn’t make it, or take it and make it. No matter how much money and time it costs (spoiler: a little bit), considering that everything is developed from scratch, and under the laconic interface there is an engine from Boeing, with a reserve for the future…», he comments.

All of the above, according to Igor Bigdan, is the motivation why he is currently posting on the Vmist social network, but is absent from all other platforms. «I came to warm myself by this fire, and I hope that I will not be alone,» he metaphorically summarizes.

More social networks, good and different

While working on this text, dev.ua also asked the founders of other recently created Ukrainian social networks for comments. We asked how to find their niche and audience and what prospects such products have, given the monopolization of the market by «digital empires». And also — how to overcome the general skepticism about such products.

Valeria Chobotok/Yegor Komarov. Photos from their social networks

The founder of the social network Pleex, Yegor Komarov, believes that the success of new social networks today largely depends on how deeply and accurately they understand the needs of their target audience. According to him, the social media market is undergoing fundamental changes.

«We see how global platforms are gradually turning into media resources and losing the authenticity and immediacy that once made them popular. That is why the chance for new projects lies not in trying to compete with technological giants by copying their functionality, but in finding their own unique niche — based on national characteristics, interests, or new, previously unpresented functionality,» Yegor Komarov is convinced.

According to the Pleex founder, today we are witnessing the beginning of a quiet collapse of global social networks, and the main reason for this is that the audience is seeking more authentic and local communication spaces, where there is no excessive advertising pressure, where personal contact is maintained and better social connections are formed.

When asked why no Ukrainian social network has become truly popular yet, Yegor Komarov answered that the main reason is that most previous attempts amounted to copying existing formats, usually Facebook or VK, without a real in-depth analysis of the needs of the Ukrainian audience.

«Very often, there was a lack of a unique vision, sufficient investment of time, resources, and perseverance to bring the matter to a stable result. In addition, changing the behavioral habits of the audience that have been formed over decades is always difficult,» he states.

According to Yegor Komarov, not all successful products in the world were so because of a perfectly calculated strategy — many of them became successful simply because their authors believed in their idea and did what their heart was in. «So my main idea: if you have the desire and inspiration to create a new social network — you just have to take it and do it. Because success does not always depend on a flawless plan, but always depends on sincerity, perseverance and the real value that the product offers to people,» he believes.

Valeria Chobotok, co-founder of the social network for expats and travelers svoi, also claims in a comment to dev.ua that when creating her product, she encountered a huge amount of negative feedback and unnecessary comments.

«Our world is full of fakes and lies, and modern media has done this to us. They provoke us to constantly scroll, steal someone’s identity, or simply waste time. Depression and anxiety have become the new norm for the current generation of social media users. That is why it is time for something new. The time for something real,» says Valeria Chobotok.

According to her, current trends show that people want to see each other in real life, as well as build real, deep friendships. «Of course, building a social network is very difficult, because you have to convince and make a person fall in love with the product and make this person tell his friends, and they tell their friends. It is quite difficult to achieve this effect, because the social network market is oversaturated, people are used to receiving everything at once. That is why a new social network should not be similar to any modern social network,» says the co-founder of svoi.

According to Valeria Chobotok, the new social network should focus on the person, not on how to sell this person to its advertisers. But here the question arises of monetization that will be sustainable and will not violate human rights.

«A potential reason why no social network from Ukraine has yet become global may be that many Ukrainian startups first start in Ukraine, whose market is very different from the European and American ones. That is why svoi. immediately started working with the international market and are gradually entering various European markets,» she added.

Valeria Chobotok highlighted her main message: creating a new social network is very difficult, but possible. Actually, we have no objections to this either.

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