Decentgram

Inspiration

When I was building a DIDComm-based mobile app, I wondered how to share images over the DIDComm protocol. At the same time, I thought it would be nice to have a more decentralized way of publishing and sharing photos. Something like Instagram, but without the surveillance and where users still have control over their photos. That brought me to the idea of Decentgram.

What it does

Decentgram allows you to upload photos to the Decentralized Web Node and share them with other users via DIDs.

How we built it

We built a simple web app with Next.js and Web5 SDK, which we connected to our own instance of DWN.

Challenges we ran into

There was a bug in Web5 SDK that disallowed access to blob record data from other DWN. We created a patch based on the PR https://github.com/TBD54566975/web5-js/pull/345/files.
We were getting 502 Bad Gateway in some cases when accessing the TBD-hosted DWN instance. We solved it by deploying our own DWN instance.
It seems it's not possible to update a record when you want to add a recipient. We solved it by creating a new record and removing the old one. Similarly, it's not possible to add more recipients. We're perhaps missing something, and both of those cases should be solved with a different approach.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to make the photo sharing work by restricting access to the sender's DWN for specific DIDs and without sending the image to the recipient's DWN, which was the main goal of our project.
We deployed our own instance of DWN.