Building RepostViewer: A Focused Web Tool for Public TikTok Reposts and Comments

I have been building RepostViewer, a small web tool focused on a narrow question: how can someone inspect publicly available TikTok reposts and comments without turning a quick lookup into a complicated workflow?
Start with a specific task
People arrive with different questions. One person wants to see recent public reposts associated with a TikTok profile. Another wants to read comments on a public video. These are related activities, but they need different inputs. The repost tool starts with a public username; the comment tool starts with a public TikTok video URL.
Keeping those paths separate makes the interface easier to understand. A visitor should know what to paste, what to expect, and why a result may be unavailable.
Make the first interaction simple
For basic browsing, the intended experience does not require signing in to TikTok. The page presents a direct input and returns the public information the upstream service can provide. The comment interface displays available comment text, authors, timestamps, likes, and reply counts when those fields are present. Additional comments are fetched only when a visitor chooses to load more.
There is a useful engineering lesson here: pagination is a product decision as much as an API decision. Loading everything by default increases latency and upstream requests. An explicit “Load More” action makes the cost and waiting time proportional to what a visitor actually wants to read.
Treat public data boundaries as part of the product
A public-data viewer should not imply that it can access private accounts, hidden posts, deleted material, or every historical repost. Availability changes, and some results may be incomplete. RepostViewer is designed around these limitations rather than promising unrestricted access.
The implementation also keeps upstream API credentials on the server. Video URLs are validated before being resolved, including checks around short-link redirects. Those are not flashy features, but they matter whenever a tool accepts user-provided URLs.
Build only what the workflow needs
The application uses Next.js and TypeScript, with server-side routes for data access. The focus has been on a clear result view, understandable errors, responsive layouts, and search-friendly explanatory pages. I deliberately left out unrelated features such as video downloads, account monitoring, and bulk automation.
The next step is learning from real usage: which lookups people try, whether they use pagination, and what information they actually need. That evidence should drive future features rather than a long speculative roadmap.
If you work on focused utilities, I would be interested in how you decide what not to build.
Project: https://repostviewer.com
RepostViewer is an independent tool and is not affiliated with TikTok or ByteDance.