PeaReal

Inspiration

Privacy should not be a premium feature in social apps. We wanted to build something fun like daily social sharing, but without giving up control of personal data.
PeaReal was inspired by a simple idea: real moments with real friends, protected by design.

What it does

PeaReal is a private, BeReal-style social app where people share one authentic photo per day in invite-only groups.

1. Users receive a daily trigger at a random time.
2. They post one photo from that moment.
3. After posting, they can view friends’ posts in the same round.
4. Content is shared in a peer-to-peer environment with encrypted media and private group access.

How we built it

BeRealPeer is built as an Electron desktop app with mobile web access through WebSockets.

Stack

1. Frontend: HTML, CSS, JavaScript (Electron renderer + mobile web UI)
2. Backend: Node.js (Electron main process)
3. Networking: Holepunch ecosystem (P2P primitives)
4. Security: encrypted payload flow using modern cryptography
5. Sync/API: WebSocket channel for status, rooms, feed, reactions, and comments

System design

1. Room-based social graph with invite codes.
2. Daily feed round logic and post submission flow.
3. Encrypted image transport and controlled feed unlock behavior.
4. Real-time interactions: comments, reactions, and presence updates.

Challenges we ran into

1. Learning P2P architecture from scratch was the hardest part.
2. Understanding peer discovery, connectivity, and reliability in real conditions took significant experimentation.
3. Designing encryption and key handling without breaking usability was difficult.
4. Coordinating real-time feed updates across desktop and mobile clients required careful state management.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

1. We built a working end-to-end prototype with daily posting, groups, reactions, and comments.
2. We successfully moved from an initial encrypted messaging experiment to a complete social sharing experience.
3. We integrated privacy-first ideas into core product behavior instead of adding them later.

What we learned

1. P2P systems require a different mindset than centralized apps.
2. Security is not only cryptography; it is also UX, error handling, and defaults.
3. Real-time product features depend heavily on clean state transitions and resilient sync loops.
4. Team velocity improved once we aligned architecture decisions with user flows first.

What’s next for PeaReal

1. Improve onboarding so non-technical users can join rooms instantly.
2. Add stronger trust and moderation controls for group admins.
3. Enhance reliability under poor networks and intermittent peers.
4. Expand notifications and round mechanics for better daily engagement.
5. Run usability tests and iterate toward a production-ready privacy-first social app.

Built With

• autopass
• css
• electron
• git
• html
• hyperbee
• hypercore
• javascript
• node.js
• p2p
• pear
• websocket