Sonder

Inspiration

Often college confession sites hosted through Facebook or Twitter are controlled by a middleman, hindering perhaps honest conversations in order preserve anonymity. We decided to use Blockstack and the idea of blockchain to preserve anonymity and privacy of users who want to share their honest stories while creating a positive space for dialogue.

What it does

Sonder is a web application that allows users to log in with a Blockstack ID and post stories, thoughts, or any positive experiences they want to share with the world anonymously. Users can read posts from strangers across the world and hopefully come to the realization that everyone around them leads such complex lives. All posts are anonymous and cannot be deleted on our decentralized platform.

How we built it

The backend was built with Blockstack and Radix to use blockchain to maintain user anonymity and eliminate one controlling moderator. The front end was built with React using the Rebass library.

Challenges we ran into

Three out of our four members were not familiar with blockchain technology and none of us have used Blockstack before, so we were excited but challenged with this steep learning curve. We originally planned to deploy the app using Heroku but ran into issues while deploying. However, the app runs locally, and we took a video to demonstrate the functionality of our website.