The things worth asking.

No. Not the person building it, not a support person, not someone who buys the company later. Your photos and messages are locked to your account before they ever leave your phone, and nobody here holds the key. That's not a promise about our good behaviour — it's how the app is put together, so there's nothing to trust me on.

Your account lives on your phone, so a lost phone means a lost account — unless you set up a recovery phrase when you sign up. Write it down. We can't reset it for you, because being able to reset it would mean being able to open it. It's the one genuinely annoying trade in the whole app, and you'll be told plainly at signup rather than in a help article.

No. Your feed is the people you follow, newest first, and when you reach the end it stops. Nothing is ranked, boosted or hidden to keep you scrolling. We'll suggest people you might want to follow — usually friends of people you already follow — but that never changes what's already in your feed.

There's also a Latest under Discover: every public post, newest first, no machine picking. It isn't your home feed, and it never becomes it. Ranking by "what you'd like" is impossible here anyway — to rank posts, something has to read them, and your posts are locked on your phone.

Right now it doesn't. It takes no advertising and has no investors, so it runs on people who want it to exist. Running costs are genuinely small — about R49 a month for a million posts — so this isn't a business that needs to squeeze you to survive.

Not by handing us your Instagram password. Nobody should ever ask for that, and an app that does has told you what it is. Instagram also has no way for another app to read your account — they closed that door in 2024.

So the route is your own data: request your export from Instagram (Accounts Center → Your information and permissions → Export your information), pick Followers and following plus Posts, and hand the file to Glim on your phone. Captions, photos and the people you followed come across. Old posts land in a private archive you post from, and the people you followed arrive as a list you tick — we never follow anyone for you.

It isn't in the first build. It's the first thing after it.

Yes, and it stays free for everything that matters: posting, following, messages. If video ever arrives it might come with a paid option for people who store a lot of it, because video is expensive in a way photos aren't. No feature you need will ever go behind a wall.

You can block anyone instantly, and blocking is total — they disappear from your feed, your messages and your search. Reports are read by a human, because there is no machine reading your content here.

Finding you takes one of three things: someone already knows your username, someone follows a person you follow, or you've left yourself in the browsable list — and that list is one switch, off means off. Anyone who finds you only ever sees what you post publicly. Anything you post to followers stays with them.

Yes. Anyone who can see something can photograph their own screen. No app on earth can stop that, and any app claiming otherwise is lying to you. What Glim does is keep the audience small and known, so the question is "would this person screenshot me" rather than "will a stranger".

It's being built now — the app first, then the website you're reading becomes the real one. There's no date I'd trust yet. If you want to know when it lands, leave an address on the list and you'll hear it from me before it's anywhere else.

One person in South Africa, with a lot of help. No company behind it yet, no office, no funding round — everything spent on it so far has come out of my own pocket. That's also why updates take a while: it's built in the hours around a job, not by a team on a deadline.