Critiqal
A minimalist social network built around real activity.
No algorithms. No ads. No noise.
What it is
Critiqal is a small, quiet social network for developers and athletes. You connect GitHub and Strava, your real activity becomes your feed, and friends follow what you actually do — not what an algorithm decides to show.
The product is a Telegram Mini App. There is no native iOS or Android app yet; the Mini App is the intentional, temporary delivery mechanism while the product is still small. It runs full-screen inside Telegram and behaves like a native client, without the overhead of app store review cycles.
Environments
| Environment | URL | Telegram bot |
|---|---|---|
| Production | critiqal.xyz | @critiqa1_bot |
| Development | dev.critiqal.xyz | @critiqal_dev_bot |
Production is the live network. Development is a separate, fully isolated copy — its own database, its own bot, its own data — used to validate changes before they reach production. Open the relevant bot in Telegram and launch the Mini App from there.
What works today
- Email and password accounts with HttpOnly cookie sessions
- Profiles, follow and unfollow, chronological feed
- Posts with text and photos, reactions, single-level comment replies
- Notifications for new followers and reactions
- Strava integration: OAuth connect, automatic posts from activities, weekly summary on the profile
- Telegram Mini App shell: native-feeling navigation, theme bridging, haptics, full-screen mode
- Stale-while-revalidate caching for feed and profiles
What is coming
- A native GitHub integration alongside Strava: posts from commits, merged pull requests, and new repositories
$CRIT, the network's own token: earned automatically for real activity, spent on profile perks- Fast, low-cost on-chain transactions so balances can be claimed and moved without friction
- Direct messages between users — targeted for summer, possibly sooner
The token and messaging layers are designed but not yet shipped. The roadmap in docs/Features.md describes them in detail.
Stack
- Backend: Java 21 + Quarkus 3, PostgreSQL 16, Redis-backed sessions
- Frontend: SvelteKit 2 + Svelte 5 + TypeScript
- Media: Cloudflare R2
- Integrations: Strava API, Telegram Mini App
- Infrastructure: Docker Compose, Nginx, Cloudflare Tunnel, GitHub Actions
Documentation
- docs/Overview.md — what the product is and how it is shaped
- docs/Engineering.md — repository layout, architecture, and where new code goes
- docs/Features.md — current features and the roadmap
- docs/deploy.md — deployment and infrastructure runbook
