Inspiration
The current situation has left most of us alone and by ourselves and, as social creatures, it was bound to take a toll on our mental health. Social networking sites have increased traffic anytime of the day as people spend most of their time at home. However, social media isn't exactly healthy--it exacerbates a person's tendency to compare themselves with others. So we built Lunaria: a healthier social network.
What It Does
Our goal at Lunaria is to build a project that not only connects people but also finds a way to help address the mental health crisis. To do that, we have to keep in mind what makes social media mentally taxing in the first place. With Lunaria, posts will be short and also exist only for a short amount of time. After all, passing conversations happen in the moment. No one wants their cringe posts at 13 haunt them at 21.
How We Built It
As a beginner team with very little Web-Development experience, we decided to challenge ourselves by learning a new language (JavaScript) and semantic UI to build a web app.
Challenges We Ran Into
The main challenge we ran into was the time constraint. As a beginner team, maybe building a social media platform was too complex as a first time project. We spent a lot of time debugging our code and trying to make it work.
Our second challenge is trying to deploy or app on Heroku. Having moved the project from deployment from repl.it to local, we had to download the libraries again in the PC, which took us longer than we expected. And that resulted to more debugging.
Accomplishments That We're Proud Of
We are proud to build our own social media web app using a language that is new to us in this short time span. We learned to make a website from scratch with Node.js, piecing together things we've learned online.
What We Learned
We learned how challenging it can be to jump into a project while learning a new language. We also managed to try collaborating on repl.it which made it easier to check on each other's progress and quickly debug each other's code.
What's Next for Lunaria
Lumaria is currently at it's infancy, only offering basic services such as linking, commenting and posting messages. There is no feature of getting timed posts yet. We plan to incorporate a feature that allows you to change the colors of your app depending on your mood and maybe expand it with some natural language processing to detect when a user is posting concerning messages.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.