🔥 invited you to Glimt
Glimt
A calm alternative to Snapchat. For the people you love.
You take a glimt, it goes to the people you chose, and then it gets to disappear. No feed, no algorithm, no strangers.
Glimt is free, and stays free. Here is how it stays that way.
Glimt in twenty seconds
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1
You take a glimt
With the camera inside the app. No old pictures from the camera roll. A glimt is something happening now.
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2
It goes to the people you chose
A friend, a bål, or just yourself, all in one send. Three seconds to undo. On bad signal the app keeps trying, for a whole week if it has to.
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3
Then it disappears
Unless you keep it. A glimt opens once, but nothing counts down: it stays on screen until you tap it away, so you have time to show it to whoever is sitting next to you.
Safety
Safe for children and teenagers
Glimt has nowhere for a stranger to meet your child. That is not a setting you have to go and find, it is the way the app is built.
"There is no way for a predator to reach a child they don't already know."
From the child safety policy
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Only the people you said yes to
A glimt can reach you two ways: from a friend you accepted, or from someone at a bål you accepted an invitation to join. Both take a yes from you.
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No feed, no discovery
Nobody can browse their way to your child, get them recommended or stumble across them. People are found by exact username, or through an invite link they sent themselves. Both take a yes.
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13 and up
You have to give your date of birth. If you are younger, the account is never created.
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Report, and something happens straight away
Anything can be reported inside the app, and I look at it within 24 hours. If three different people report an account, it can no longer post anything. Automatically, without waiting for me.
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Blocking that holds
A block works in both directions and is enforced in the database, not just hidden in the app.
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Lock it, and delete it
You can lock the app with Face ID or a fingerprint, and you can delete your whole account yourself, from Settings.
One thing is not finished: automatic blurring of nudity works only on iPhone with iOS 17 or later, and only with Apple's Sensitive Content Warning switched on. Android comes later.
Bål
One campfire, once a week
A bål is where the glimt from the same people gather. With one friend it makes itself. To gather more, you make one, give it a name and invite the people closest to you. In a bål with several people you pick a day of the week, and on that day everyone shares a vekeglimt, a small glimpse of the week that was.
Every week there is a theme, the same one for every bål in the world. "Something that made you smile." "Your view right now." You do not have to follow it, and you do not have to share. The fire keeps burning either way.
A vekeglimt can be five things, all equally good
Once a week you pick the shape yourself:
- Film a short video
- Photo a single picture
- Words a few sentences
- Voice say it out loud
- Draw with your finger
The last two are there on purpose. A shy thirteen-year-old, or a grandmother who would rather not film herself, should be able to take part without showing their face.
An ordinary glimt is always the camera. You answer one with an emoji or a short word, or you swipe up and send a glimt back.
No streaks, no leaderboard
You lose nothing by skipping a week. At a bål you see who reacted with what, but nothing is ever counted or ranked.
The only number that adds up is how many glimt you and one friend have shared. It is drawn as a polar bear that changes a little at 5, 30, 150 and 750, and it belongs to that one friendship, not to a list of everyone.
The fire lights up whoever is sitting at it
While you are inside a bål with several people, the others can see you are there. Step out and you are gone. Nothing is written down, no "active 5 minutes ago", no green dot. And you cannot watch others without them seeing you.
Record a vekeglimt with your voice and the words get written down
Someone who hears poorly, or not at all, gets the words. Whoever records fetches the Norwegian model once, 55 MB, and after that the text is simply there when the vekeglimt arrives, sealed together with the audio. You can fix a line before you share.
It happens on the phone itself, with NB-Whisper from the National Library of Norway, trained on 22,000 hours of Norwegian. Norwegian works on both iPhone and Android, English on iPhone. Nothing leaves the phone to be understood, whichever language you speak.
Camera
A real film look, not a filter
Phone cameras have become too clean. Glimt has three film simulations I derived from my own RAW and JPEG pairs out of a Fujifilm X100VI: Fjord, bright and airy. Glør, warm and golden. Kol, black and white. Two more sit in Settings, Mose and Lin, read off Fuji recipes rather than measured against my own frames.
What you see on screen is exactly what lands in the file. On iPhone and Android, on stills and on every single frame of a video. If you do not want any of it, switch the whole analog look off and shoot clean.
Privacy
Yours, not ours
Your glimt, the text you write on them and your vekeglimt are end-to-end encrypted, sealed on your phone before they are sent. X25519 and XSalsa20-Poly1305. I cannot open them. One exception: if someone reports a glimt, their phone sends me an opened copy so I can see what was reported. That is the only way in, and it goes through a person choosing to report.
And you do not lose them
Encryption usually means everything is gone once the phone is gone. Not here. Pick a password and your glimt follow you to the next phone. Or do nothing at all: iCloud Keychain and Google Block Store carry the key over for you.
If a friend gets a new phone, the app says so
When someone switches phone, you are told their key is new, so you can check that it really is them. Signal does the same. Snapchat and BeReal do not.
Keep a glimt and it becomes yours
There is no Glimt cloud. The glimt lands in a "Glimt" album in your own phone's photos, and gets backed up wherever the rest of your pictures already live, not with me.
If somebody else sent it, they are told you kept it, exactly like a screenshot. Your own you can save in peace.
No tracking, no ads, in Europe
Not a single analytics or advertising tool in the project. Not turned off, not there. Everything is in Europe: the database in the Nordics on Supabase, the pictures with Cloudflare in the EU. Built in Norway.
Reactions and the short word replies are stored as ordinary text, everything else is sealed. It is in the privacy policy too.
Who is behind it
A sound engineer who changed fields
My name is Pål. I have worked with music and sound, with getting things to feel right in the ear, and now I am doing the same with technology. I am in my second year of front-end development, I am from Vinje in Telemark and I live in Oslo. Glimt is not a company. It is me, one evening at a time.
I started because I got tired of it. My feed held more ads and more people I do not know than friends and family I actually care about. We have never been more "connected", and never more alone. This is not social media any more. It is something else wearing the name.
What came along was not the eye, but the habit: calibrating against something real instead of trusting how it looks in the moment. That is why the camera here is not a filter laid on top, but film simulations I worked out from real photographs, one calibration at a time. Same job as mixing a track: you do not notice what was done, you only notice that it feels right.
That is also why I dare to promise nobody is buying you here: there is no one else to answer to. The app is in Norwegian and English, and follows the language on your phone. If the phone is set to anything else, you get English.
If you are wondering about something, or want to tell me something is broken, write to paal@dynni.no. I read all of it myself. More about me.
Pricing
What it costs
Glimt is free. The camera, the film simulations, sending, the bål, the vekeglimt, the encryption, and keeping a glimt you love. All of it, for everyone. And it stays that way.
Glimt+ never happened. It was meant to be a small paid extra, but the only thing that would have been in it was keeping a glimt someone sent you. That was not worth locking. So it is open to everyone, and you do not have to do anything for it.
If Glimt ever makes money, it will be because someone pays for the app, not because someone pays for you.
Bålvakt
A fire needs someone to keep it
Glimt costs money to run. Servers, the cut Apple and Google take, a domain. No advertiser is going to pay for that, and nobody should pay with themselves. So it is me, and whoever wants to help.
One day there may be a Bålvakt: the person who watches the fire so it does not go out. None of it is built, there is no price and no date, and I am not promising it will happen. If it does, it arrives as an offer to help, never as a gate in front of anything.
I take nothing from anyone to make room for it. Everything that makes Glimt Glimt is free, and stays free, even if nobody ever becomes a bålvakt.
Bålvakt does not exist yet, and there is nothing to buy today. It is here because you should know the plan before you put your life in an app.
Common questions
Who can see my child's glimt?
Only the people your child said yes to: friends they accepted, and the people at a bål your child accepted an invitation to join. Nobody else, not me either.
Can strangers get in touch?
No. Someone has to know your exact username, and you have to say yes, either to the friend request or to an invitation into a bål.
What happens to the pictures?
Most of them disappear once they have been seen. If someone keeps one, it is saved on their own phone, and the sender is told, exactly like a screenshot.
What age is Glimt for?
13 and up. You have to give your date of birth, and if you are younger the account is never created.
What if the phone is lost?
Pick a password in the app and your glimt come back on a new phone. Do nothing at all, and iCloud Keychain or Google Block Store carries the key over on its own.
What does it cost?
Nothing. The whole app is free, and stays free. There is nothing to buy in Glimt, and no plan to lock anything behind a price.
Join from the start
The iOS beta is open now. If you are on Android, or you would rather wait a bit, put yourself on the list.
Join the iOS beta
Everything in Glimt is free, including what used to be planned as Glimt+. I'll send one email when Glimt opens, and nothing else. That I promise.
