Not much to say here, besides that I’m very pleased with the logo and animation and mentioning the design principle of visibility — the app download button is immediately visible and accessible, and the viewer is aware of additional content beneath the fold.

One of the most powerful ways to ensure authenticity is maintained on a social platform is the ability to control your audience. Most users feel the need to present an idealized version of themselves simply because they can’t mentally account for every audience member’s opinions of the post.

As we all know, rejection is a very negative experience — and for good reason; we are pro-social, tribal, collaborative creatures, and in prehistoric times, to be ousted from a tribe would almost certainly mean lower survival odds. The potential for rejection, coupled with Dunbar’s number, leads to a paralysis and reluctance to participate. It’s simply psychological safer to not share your life — and so, we don’t post.

Octopii’s silly-easy audience management, along with private threads, largely solves that issue — allowing its users to finally be their authentic selves on the internet.

Octopii began as a friends-only app, but eventually it became clear we could weave the same authenticity-first paradigm into a public option as well.

For example, public posts allow you reply publicly or privately, as well as offering the ability to invite friends to those private threads. It serves as a bridge between two friend groups — a first of it its kind feature.

It’s such an awesomely powerful way to share your part of the world but engage with the audience on a more intimate and authentic level. A prime example might be making a post about your favorite tabletop game, and then being able to privately organize a game night between your friends and the poster’s friends — just make a private comment and add your friends to the thread. They’ll be notified and everyone will be talking in private!

Private threads were core to Octopii’s authenticity-first design ethos.

Social media has always operated around an extroverted model — inviting dozens or hundreds of people to all participate in the same comment section. It seemed to me someone should implement a private comment feature for broadcast / post-based social media — another never-before-tried feature.

But what about group conversations? Well, that’s where “Add to Thread” comes into play — if you’re the post author, you are able to invite any of your friends to any comment thread. If you’re a commenter, you can request to have others added to the thread — the post author then approves or denies those additions. After an approval is made, a notification is sent, and if accepted they will be navigated to the thread and be able to participate in the conversation. As far as I can tell, this is another first-of-its-kind feature for post-based social media.

I believe this is another first-of-its-kind feature — users often feel paralyzed because they know their activity will be broadcasted to all other mutual friends. It shines a spotlight on your friendships and introduces cogintive load and stress.

Broadcasting your activity is of course an engagement mechanism, but I hypothesized being able to limit your activity exposure would indeed lead to more engagement.

I had plans to make the mode more accessible (rather than in the profile settings) — a button available on the screen at all times.

IRL Badges were another first-of-its-kind feature — intended to communicate to the user when they can wholly trust a photo or video. Users want authenticity, but they also need means to know what is indeed authentic.

These days AI can be used to generate incredibly realistic media, to such an extent it could be used for misinformation. I felt a simple solution was to apply an IRL badge to any image/video captured with the app — we know it’s not filtered, and we know it’s exactly what the camera sensor detected, so let’s communicate that to the user! It’s an incredibly simple but powerful feature, and based on the posts on Octopii in the Seattle area — it’s a fan favorite.

Bots are a major problem on social media, accounting, by advertisers counts, 51-73% of all social media traffic — even higher in election cycles.

The easiest solution? Make all accounts require a carrier-validated phone number. That coupled with location-based posts/comments on public forums would cut down on bots dramatically. It’s easy to make a new email address — not so easy to get a new phone number. And it’s certainly not easy to fake your location with a phone, even if you have a VPN.

Ultimately we also planned much more advanced metrics and telemetry to pick up on bot accounts, but judging from the first 100 Octopii users, it worked.