I've been building a social app on top of WebTorrent instead of centralized cloud storage.
The basic idea: its BASED... but on bubbles. :)
No feed. You're in a series of small, private "bubbles" (think Discord servers, but for any context — family, work, hobby). Basically its set up like a venn diagram with every user at the middle of their own ecosystem. You have your own bubble and you can make new bubbles and join other bubbles. The idea is if you seed your own content you are providing it to others. If your feed is boring, post stuff you like to see or join up with interesting friends! Just post stuff you like. Noone is going to baby sit your feed with an algo. I figure we all have these devices and internet and phones what if we just pooled together and actually truly shared content and hopefully your mom won't shadowban you lol.
Content is served via WebTorrent. Every viewer becomes a seeder. The more people in a bubble, the faster it gets. There is a cdn fallback (Pinata).
If no peer has a file, we fetch from IPFS, then cache locally (or cache from webtorrent directly which is the goal).
Livestreams work by chunking video into 8-second segments, torrenting each chunk, and reassembling client-side. There's a slight delay, but it works. I boost the chunks from heroku, and i have a webtorrent tracker and graphql subscriptions to keep everyone in the loop as to where the chunks are. Its ephemeral lol. Getting iphone's managed media source to cooperate was interesting. There is no camera preview if you go 'live' (there is a delay because webtorrent takes time to set up). This is 'proof' of concept. I almost had the preview set up last week but Deepseek took me on a crazy ass detour i still love it though, and if Deepseek couldn't figure something out i'd hit up Gemini, it could solve some tricky stuff quickly.
Affiliate links are built into the profile. If you have a CJ.com account, you can drop your ad URL into your profile and it runs as a platform ad. The idea is to give regular people a shot at ad revenue.
Stack: React Native + Expo, Apollo GraphQL, MongoDB, WebTorrent, hosted on Heroku + Vercel. No AWS.
It's invite-only, so you'll never end up with strangers in your bubble unless you open invites from strangers.. ahem...
Here's an invite to the bubble I set up for here https://bubblebased.com/join/BC7F8C3B820B13FE
Bubbles can be as big or small as you want them you print out the invitation for as many or as few people as you want. I am going to be working on a public super highway of sorts for this thing and cache all over the place lol but for now this is it. Webtorrent gets BETTER with scale so its something to look forward to. For now its small quiet social media. Why not.
I'm about a month out from where I want it, but feedback is welcome. Known issues: Safari rotation on livestream is janky and fragile, chat sometimes needs a refresh, cache eviction still being tuned. The main issue I have is testing webtorrents all by myself :( So if you want to break this thing feel free there is a bunch of UI stuff I am working on but its getting there. frontend is here https://github.com/bcebel/minnowfrontend backend is here https://github.com/bcebel/MINNOWSPACEbackend