Designing the future of social media
I developed a social media application called Revolt from scratch. While it started as a passion project, soon I wanted to bring something that mainstream social media were lacking. That goes beyond Revolt's unique features.
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The problem
In the current age of corporate censorship, it is difficult to express truly world changing ideas. As a result, humanity as a whole is being held back. User privacy and security are constantly being given up for profit. Corporate agendas are always placed before the user's interests. While it is free to sign up for these platforms, the lives of the users ultimately become the price.
Revolt attempts to mitigate these issues by giving the control back to the users. It is built on the MERN stack, where the frontend handled with React and the backend server is handled with Node JS, Express and MongoDB for database. The future plan involves incorporating End-to-End encrypted messaging with Web 3.0 and blockchain backend to ensure user privacy and decentralization.
The messaging system
Revolt supports 3 different modes of messaging, namely, server messaging with multiple rooms/channels, group messaging with up to 10 users, and private messaging. Each message is uniquely identified with a Snowflake ID (chronologially sortable) and the reference ID of the channel it belongs to. The data modelling of the messages this way is inspired by Discord to ensure efficient and cost effective scalability in the future.
The social network system
In addition to the fully fleshed out messaging system for maximum collaboration, Revolt also allows the users to share their personal ideas and discover others. Users can like, comment, follow other users. This way the users can have a personal space while also having access to a wider range of social networks than what the servers provide.
UI/UX design
The CSS and animations are handled using Material UI for React. This proved to be time efficient as the very first version of the MVP was built in a month. Material UI provides a suit of essential React UI components which are customizable and flexible.
Future features
As one of my latest projects, this is under continuous development. In order to achieve the vision of this project, the priority upcoming features are End-to-End encryption and decentralization. The platform will also be experimented with various video content formats, specifically, short form, live streams, and long form videos in that order.
Project outcomes
The most powerful aspect of the platform is the ability to connect to people in the most interactive way possible with the features of Twitter and Discord in one place. Unlike other social media, however, this platform is committed to preserve the most basic human rights, namely, privacy and the freedom of speech.