UPDATESep 13, 2026building india

Devalay: social, with soul

Mainstream social platforms are built for trends, ads and viral noise. Devalay does everything a social app should — feed, stories, messages, a marketplace — while refusing violent and obscene content at the door, and making room for culture, temples and festivals instead of outrage. Live on Android, iOS and the web.

Why it exists

Most popular social apps today are built for the Western world, owned by foreign corporations, and tuned for superficial content and comparison. The feed rewards whatever provokes, and what provokes is rarely what you would want your parents, or your children, to scroll through.

Devalay is meant to be a calm, rooted place to share your life and celebrate what you love — without the noise, the hate or the doomscroll. Not a temple app and not a niche forum: a complete social platform whose standards are part of the product rather than an afterthought.

What it does

The social core — posts with text, images and video, likes, saves, reposts and comments; Glimpses, which last 24 hours; direct messages with requests from people you do not follow; hashtags, sharing and follows.
Culture you can find — temples, deities, festivals, events, pujas and aartis, contributed by users and approved by a person before they go up. 420 temples are in the public catalogue today.
Commerce — a marketplace with seller storefronts and checkout, temple donations, and puja service orders.
For creators — an analytics dashboard, and notifications that arrive in real time.

How the door is kept shut

A standard is only real if something enforces it. On Devalay:

Abusive text is refused when it is written — in posts, comments, replies, messages, profiles, hashtags and captions. The filter reads Devanagari as well as English, and catches the usual evasions: stretched letters and symbols standing in for them.
Every image is scanned at upload for nudity, violence, gore, self-harm and hate symbols, and an image that cannot be checked is not accepted. Video is scanned frame by frame after upload.
Three separate reports take a post down for review; a single report hides a comment.

Obscene and violent is the easy part. "Negative" and "stupid" are harder, because no classifier judges them well and a clumsy one would silence the wrong people. A content-quality score is designed, and deliberately not switched on until there is enough real activity to make it fair.

Where it stands — September 2026

Live on Android (1.1.19, 30 August), iOS (1.1.17, 29 August) and devalay.org.
An operations console with a moderation queue, an audit log, and a password re-check before anything irreversible.
Next: broadening the marketplace beyond puja services, closing the remaining moderation gaps, and the quality score once the data can carry it.

What has been hard

Off-the-shelf moderation was trained on somebody else's culture. It flagged a temple interior as "weapons" — because a trishul, a gada and a chakra are, to a generic model, weapons — and a Shivling as blood and gore. Most photographs of deities are large, high-resolution files, and for a while every one of them was silently refused as unsafe simply for being too big to scan. Blocking abuse in Hindi without catching devotional phrases took its own careful test suite. None of this is exotic; it is what it takes to hold a standard for a culture the tools were not built for.