Safire
An open source end to end encrypted social media platform for GenZ which prioritizes privacy and user safety.
Stack Used
— Next.js
— Postgres
— Prisma
— Chakra UI
— Cloudinary
— Vercel
What is this Project?
Every social media which exists today is entirely mis-using their users' data by showing you annoying ads or selling your data for money. So I decided to build my own social media which will be privacy and security oriented, and also end-to-end encrypted for chats and private posts!
I have plans to make it an inclusive social media, which, I believe will keep toxicity and spam away from my app. I want to make this social media, to be atleast 90% spam-free and 100% secure.
Why I built it:
I'm building this only for a few specific reasons, one is that I want to try competing with Twitter and to see if that's really possible? I've seen a lot of new social medias like Twitter have appeared in the past but they also disappeared really fast.
As I can see now, Twitter doesn't have any competition at all and competing with someone as big as Twitter is seriously not going to happen and is a bad idea. But I wouldn't care too much about failing, this is where my second reason comes in, this would be my biggest project so far and I'm definitely going to get a ton of experience while building it.
I also want to make this platform end-to-end encrypted because I don't think Twitter's chat / private posts are encrypted at all. So, this is all worth trying and in the end I'm definitely going to earn a lot of experience!
How I built it:
I decided to go entirely serverless, so I'm using Next.js for the front-end and the API routes. I think this would be the first social media platform with technically no servers at all! While most of my API is already ready, the front-end is what is currently a WIP. I'll definitely use Chakra UI for the front-end because it gives a huge boost in building.
Talking about the backend, Postgres is what I'm using as my database and to connect my code to my database, Prisma is the one that does that job. I love Prisma! Also to store images and media content, I decided to go with Cloudinary because it also provides you with image optimisations out of the box.
Talking about the process of end-to-end encryption, I'll be following the same process by how Whatsapp and Signal have done it - Asymmetric Encryption. At the beginning, implementing this is my app was a big pain and totally confusing, but I feel like I've learnt a lot in the process. Finally, Safire is still a work-in-progress and I expect to release it soon!