We Built a Site That Asks: Am I The Only One?

#webdev #social #startup #showerthoughts

You know that feeling when you catch yourself doing something slightly weird — like rearranging
the items in your fridge by colour, or rehearsing entire arguments that will never happen —
and you quietly wonder: "Am I the only one who does this?"

That question haunts all of us. And we got tired of Googling it.

So we built Am I The Only One?.

What is it?

Am I The Only One? is a brutally simple anonymous social platform:

Post your question — "Am I the only one who..."
The world votes — "YES, same! 🙋" or "Just me 🤷"
See the real-time percentage of people who feel exactly the same

No followers. No likes. No social pressure. Just raw, honest data from the collective human experience.

Why anonymous?

Because the questions worth asking are the ones you're too embarrassed to Google.

Things like:

...still checks the fridge every 10 minutes hoping food appeared?
...has a full internal monologue narrated by David Attenborough?
...has decided they're "a night owl" purely to avoid morning responsibilities?

With a username attached, you'd never ask. Anonymous, and suddenly you post it, 847 people vote,
and 73% say YES — and you feel inexplicably, deeply relieved.

The tech stack

We kept it deliberately simple to move fast:

PHP 8.3 — server-rendered, no framework overhead
MariaDB 10.11 — relational data, fast vote aggregation
Tailwind CSS — dark glass-morphism UI
Apache + Let's Encrypt — deployed on AWS Ubuntu 24.04

No SPAs. No React. Just fast, server-rendered PHP that loads in under 200ms globally.

The vote system uses IP + User-Agent fingerprinting for anonymous users, so you can vote without
creating an account — which matters a lot for conversion.

Content moderation

We built a two-tier filter:

Profanity filter — word-boundary regex matching on 30+ terms
Illegal content filter — phrase matching for harmful categories

All posts go through this before hitting the database. Clean content, no moderation backlog.

Try it

Go post something embarrassing at https://www.amitheonlyone.co.uk.

Find out whether you're actually the only one who laughs at their own jokes before telling them
(spoiler: you're definitely not).

Built with PHP, sleep deprivation, and the constant question: am I the only developer who still
deploys via SCP?

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