Disclaimer: the following is a recent medium article. it is being posted in full on Reddit to compare feedback and engagement of Reddit users with long-form articles.

Decentralization can mean a lot of things because it can be open to interpretation. In this article, we would like to talk about what decentralization means to us and how we are approaching our definition of decentralized. We are working on a typical chat app, but our approach is unique and may push the boundaries of what it means for something to be self-hosted.
Our decentralized chat application is built as a Progressive Web Apps (PWA) and leverages modern web technologies to deliver a user experience comparable to native apps. Unlike traditional centralized chat apps, our chat app is designed to operate independently of central servers, ensuring that user data remains private and secure. This article will delve into the various components and architectural decisions that make our app truly decentralized.

The Decentralized Chat App

An overview of how our chat application leverages Progressive Web App (PWA) technology to provide a seamless user experience across different devices and platforms.
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Data Storage and Networking

A typical app relies heavily on data storage and networking capabilities. In our decentralized chat application, we’ve implemented advanced solutions to handle these aspects efficiently and securely.

Data Storage

In our app, we use IndexedDB to store data directly in the browser’s storage. While browsers provide multiple options for storing information, ranging from cookies to local storage, IndexedDB offers a more advanced and robust solution.
Capacity: IndexedDB can store significantly larger amounts of data compared to cookies or local storage. Structure: It allows for complex data structures, including collections of files and blobs. Performance: IndexedDB operates asynchronously, meaning it won’t block the main thread of your application, leading to better performance for data-heavy applications.
Using IndexedDB, we ensure that user data is stored locally on their devices, providing both privacy and independence from central servers.

Networking

For networking, our app uses PeerJS-server as a connection broker to establish WebRTC connections between peers.
Direct Peer-to-Peer: WebRTC, provided by the browser, enables real-time communication between peers. This allows two users to connect directly and exchange data with minimal latency. Efficient Routing: Once a connection is established, data is sent via the shortest possible network route, enhancing speed and efficiency. Multiple Connections: Browsers can handle multiple WebRTC connections simultaneously, though the number of connections can vary depending on the device and network capabilities.
PeerJS-server helps in the initial connection setup by acting as a signaling server. It facilitates the exchange of connection information between peers, enabling them to establish a direct WebRTC connection.
By leveraging IndexedDB for data storage and WebRTC with PeerJS-server for networking, our chat application achieves a high level of decentralization, ensuring user data remains private and connections are efficient and reliable. These components form the backbone of our approach, pushing the boundaries of what it means for an app to be truly self-hosted and decentralized
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Static Distribution and Deployment

Our app is essentially a bundle of static files, which makes it highly portable and easy to distribute. We leverage AWS services such as S3 and CloudFormation to deploy our app, ensuring it is distributed efficiently over a Content Delivery Network (CDN) across AWS servers.

AWS S3 and CloudFormation

AWS S3: We host our app on AWS S3, a scalable storage service that allows us to serve static files reliably. S3 ensures that our app is always available and can handle large numbers of requests without performance degradation. CloudFormation: By using AWS CloudFormation, we automate the deployment process, managing our infrastructure as code. This makes it easy to replicate and manage our app’s deployment environment.
Hosting on S3 and using CloudFormation means our app benefits from AWS’s global CDN. This ensures that our static files are cached and served from servers closest to our users, reducing latency and improving load times.

Offline Availability and Self-Hosting

We go a step further by providing users with the option to download a zip file of the app directly from within the app. This ensures that users can run the app locally without relying on our servers.
Direct from Index.html: Unlike some other apps, our app is a pure JavaScript implementation, designed to run directly from the index.html file. Users can simply open this file in their browser and start using the app without needing a server. Docker Option: For users who prefer or require a server setup, we offer a Docker configuration. This allows the app to be run in a containerized environment, providing flexibility and ease of deployment for different use cases.

Unminified Code for Transparency

We believe in transparency and accessibility. Therefore, we run the app as unminified code. This has several advantages:
Ease of Download: Users can download the entire app using simple browser commands like Ctrl/Cmd+S. Transparency: By providing unminified code, we ensure that users can inspect and understand the code they are running. This fosters trust and allows for easier customization and debugging.
By distributing our app as static files and offering multiple ways to run it, we ensure that users have maximum flexibility and control. Whether using AWS’s robust infrastructure or running the app locally, our approach embodies the principles of decentralization and user empowerment.

Webpack 5 Module Federation

Our app leverages Webpack 5’s Module Federation feature to implement a microfrontend architecture. This approach allows us to modularize our application, making it easier to maintain, develop, and scale. You can explore our open-source implementation here: https://github.com/positive-intentions/frontend-base.

Current Implementation

We have used Webpack 5 Module Federation to build the chat application, which you can find here: https://github.com/positive-intentions/chat. Additionally, we have created a federated module for cryptography that can be imported at runtime, available here: https://github.com/positive-intentions/cryptography. Our current setup is straightforward, allowing us to dynamically load different parts of the application as needed. This modular approach provides flexibility and efficiency in how we develop and deploy our app.

Future Enhancements

We plan to further decompose the application into separate microfrontends, each responsible for a specific aspect of the app. This will not only simplify maintenance but also enhance documentation and development processes for individual components.
Planned Modules:
1. UI Components: A collection of reusable UI components that can be shared across different parts of the application, promoting consistency and reducing duplication. 2. P2P Framework: The core framework for peer-to-peer networking, facilitating real-time communication between users. 3. State Management: This module will manage the application’s state, ensuring efficient data handling and synchronization across different components and peers. 4. Permission Manager: A dedicated module for managing user permissions and access control, enhancing security and user management.
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Individual Storybooks and Module Exports

Each module will have its own Storybook and module export, providing a dedicated space for documentation, testing, and showcasing individual components. This approach will:
Enhance Documentation: Each module will be well-documented, making it easier for developers to understand and use them. Simplify Maintenance: By isolating modules, we can update and maintain them independently, reducing the risk of breaking changes affecting the entire app. Promote Reusability: Well-defined modules can be reused across different projects, promoting a modular and efficient development approach.
By embracing Webpack 5 Module Federation and breaking down our app into distinct microfrontends, we aim to create a more robust, scalable, and maintainable architecture. This approach not only benefits our development process but also enhances the overall user experience by ensuring that each component is well-crafted and easily accessible.

Redundancy and Reliability

In the past, we have encountered difficulties when deploying our app to AWS due to various technical issues. Given that our app functions as a self-hosted static application, we have started exploring alternative hosting options, such as GitHub Pages. You can view our deployment on GitHub Pages here: https://positive-intentions.github.io/chat.

GitHub Pages Deployment

Our microfrontend architecture allows us to deploy each module independently. This capability has enabled us to host copies of the app on GitHub Pages for each repository. While this approach is unconventional and can lead to redundant copies of the app, we believe it is a valuable exercise in exploring module federation redundancy.
Accessibility: Hosting on GitHub Pages makes the app easily accessible to users and developers. Simplicity: GitHub Pages offers a straightforward deployment process, reducing the complexity often associated with other hosting solutions. Cost-Effective: GitHub Pages is free, making it an economical choice for hosting static sites.

Redundancy and Interoperability

We aim to make our app interoperable across different hosting sources. By leveraging Webpack 5 Module Federation, we can ensure that the app works seamlessly whether it is served from AWS or GitHub Pages. This redundancy enhances the app’s reliability and availability.
Module Federation Redundancy: We are investigating ways to make modules interoperable between different sources, ensuring that the app remains functional even if one source becomes unavailable. Interoperable Deployment: Our goal is to allow the app to fetch and integrate modules from both AWS and GitHub Pages dynamically.
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Future Plans

To further enhance our deployment strategy, we plan to use a infrastructure as code tool, to deploy the app across multiple cloud service providers. This approach will increase the resilience of our deployment, ensuring the app remains online and functional even if one provider experiences downtime.
Multi-Cloud Deployment: We can deploy the app to various cloud service providers, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. This will distribute the app’s load and reduce the risk of a single point of failure. Scalability: This will enable us to scale the app easily across different providers, ensuring it can handle increased traffic without performance issues. Cost Management: Static file hosting is relatively a cheap option for hosting a webapp, we can optimize costs and ensure that the app remains affordable to maintain.
By exploring these new hosting options and implementing a robust deployment strategy, we aim to make our decentralized chat app more resilient, scalable, and cost-effective. Our efforts in redundancy and interoperability will ensure that the app continues to function seamlessly, providing a reliable user experience regardless of the hosting source.

Multi-Device Architecture

As our app continues to develop, we are excited to introduce the concept of a decentralized profile that can be shared across multiple devices. This feature is designed for individuals who want to use the same profile on all their devices, providing a seamless and integrated multi-platform chat experience, much like any modern chat application.

Decentralized Profile

A decentralized profile allows users to maintain a consistent identity and settings across different devices. This means that whether you are using a smartphone, tablet, or desktop, your profile can remain synchronized and up-to-date.
Profile Synchronization: Users can access their chat history, contacts, and settings on any device by synchronizing their decentralized profile. Data Consistency: Changes made on one device are automatically reflected on others, ensuring a consistent experience.

Multi-Platform Chat Experience

Implementing a decentralized profile enables us to offer a robust multi-platform chat experience. Users can switch between devices without losing their chat continuity or settings, enhancing the overall user experience.
Convenience: Users can start a conversation on one device and continue it on another without any interruptions. Flexibility: The app adapts to various devices, providing a user-friendly interface and experience on each platform.
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Decentralized File Storage

In addition to profile synchronization, we are exploring the potential of decentralized file storage. This feature would allow users to move large files between devices quickly, easily and securely.
Cross-Device Sharing: Users can share files between their devices effortlessly, whether they are transferring a document from their laptop to their phone or vice versa. Collaborative Work: Teams can collaborate more effectively by sharing encrypted files directly through the app, regardless of the devices they are using.
By introducing a decentralized profile and exploring decentralized file storage, we aim to enhance our app’s functionality and user experience. These features will provide users with the convenience and flexibility expected from a modern chat application while maintaining the principles of decentralization and security.

Decentralized Peer Discovery

Decentralized peer discovery is a critical component of our app’s architecture. By leveraging innovative technologies such as QR codes, NFC, and BLE, we facilitate seamless connections between peers without relying on a central authority.

QR Codes

QR codes provide a straightforward method for establishing peer connections. Users can generate a QR code that contains their connection details, which other users can scan to initiate a peer-to-peer connection.
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Ease of Use: Users can quickly and easily share connection details. Security: QR codes can be generated dynamically, reducing the risk of interception.

NFC (Near Field Communication)

NFC allows devices to establish connections simply by being in close proximity. This technology is particularly useful for quick and secure peer discovery.
Speed: Connections are established almost instantly. Convenience: Users can connect devices by simply bringing them close together, making it ideal for spontaneous interactions.

BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy)

BLE enables devices to discover and communicate with each other over short distances with minimal power consumption. This makes it a suitable option for maintaining constant peer-to-peer connections.
Energy Efficiency: BLE conserves battery life, making it ideal for mobile devices. Range: BLE provides a reliable connection over a short range, perfect for personal or localized networking.

Combining Technologies for Enhanced Discovery

By integrating QR codes, NFC, and BLE, we create a robust and versatile peer discovery mechanism. Users can choose the most convenient method for their situation, ensuring that connections are both seamless and secure.
Hybrid Approach: Users can combine different methods for an optimal connection experience. For instance, initial discovery via QR code followed by connection via BLE for sustained communication. Adaptability: The app adapts to the available technologies on the user’s device, providing the best possible peer discovery experience.
These innovative approaches to peer discovery, coupled with our decentralized microfrontend architecture, form the backbone of our commitment to enhancing decentralization, scalability, and user experience. By continually exploring and implementing cutting-edge technologies, we ensure our app remains at the forefront of decentralized communication solutions
These sections outline the key aspects of our decentralized microfrontend architecture and provide a roadmap for our ongoing and future efforts to enhance decentralization, scalability, and user experience.

Conclusion

Our journey towards building a decentralized chat application has been driven by a desire to push the boundaries of what it means for an app to be truly self-hosted and independent of central servers. By leveraging modern web technologies such as Progressive Web Apps, IndexedDB, WebRTC, and Webpack 5 Module Federation, we have created a robust and scalable architecture that emphasizes privacy, security, and user empowerment.
We have explored innovative hosting solutions like GitHub Pages and plan to implement multi-cloud deployments to enhance resilience and scalability. Our vision for a multi-device architecture, incorporating decentralized profiles and encrypted file storage, aims to provide a seamless, cross-platform user experience. Additionally, our commitment to decentralized peer discovery using QR codes, NFC, and BLE ensures that users can connect easily and securely without relying on centralized authorities.
As we continue to develop and refine our app, we remain dedicated to the principles of decentralization, transparency, and user control. We invite you to join us on this journey, explore our open-source repositories, and contribute to the ongoing evolution of our decentralized chat application. Together, we can redefine what it means to communicate in a decentralized world.
Thank you for taking the time to read about our project. We look forward to your feedback and collaboration as we continue to innovate and improve our decentralized chat application.

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et’s be real — the traditional academic approach to picking up new languages is about as engaging as a Glaswegian reciting the phone book. Aimless vocabulary drills, impenetrable grammar tomes, and zero incentive beyond some future hypothetical of sounding moderately less linguistically inept. We have already said more than once that Voccent is an innovative language learning platform that will help you improve your language skills with interest.
It’s no wonder so many once-ambitious polyglot journeys sputter out in pooling apathy before even departing the atmosphere of ignorance. The human mind simply wasn’t bioengineered to grind away at arbitrary code unlocks with no discernible reward pathways.
But fortunately, an unlikely alliance of gamers, educators, and coding savants have been quietly revolutionizing language acquisition by hacky-sacking it directly into the behavioral dopamine loops evolution hard-wired us to obsess over. We’re talking immersive, addictively gamified linguistic apps and platforms expressly designed to trip your cognitive biases for relentless self-optimization.
At their core, the best of these ludic polyglot programs leverage the same neurological feedback systems that suckered us into crushing candy for decades on end. They’ve simply re-skinned the variable reward treadmills with linguistic skill trees, jaunty progress visualizations, and intermittent knowledge “power-ups” to reinforce your frantic chase toward that elusive mental level cap.
Take charmingly aggressive offers from various language companies. Featuring fun mascots playing a vocabulary test, peppered with acoustic obstacles, or fun celebrations of achievement, the viral set calcifies new vocabulary while stimulating your increased hyperfocus between problem sets. It’s like your cerebral cortex is too busy collecting endorphins to realize it’s grinding reps behind the scenes.
The secret lies in how such apps go beyond traditional rigid curriculums, instead offering strategic glimpses of advanced linguistic powers via deliciously randomized loot tables you’ll compulsively chase by any means necessary. Imagine joining a grand linguistic raid but instead of elves and ogres, your character skills revolve around marketplace higglering and mastering that demonic rolled R.
Before you know it, you’re recruiting real-life guild mates for competitive language sprints, habitually topping their scorecards in exchange for petty one-upmanship and bragging rights. And just like that, you’ve become the hardened completionist junkie destined to transcend native fluency.
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Naturally, many of these lexical lootboxes do incorporate classic holdovers from the pre-console eras — repetition-focused flashcard challenges, basic adventure-style storytelling for contextual vocab absorption, even speech recognition for pronunciation training. But through the gamified UI varnishes, they now double as energy refills and damage buffs along your quest toward polyglotnexia.
Others apps take their XP grind down a more meta-linguistic route — using rich mnemonic devices, regional accents, and immersive memory palaces as level-gated unlocks. Imagine getting anime-style waifu’d verbal inflections as plump narrative scenery rewards.
Or another one app refract language learning through angled prisms of literaturie and music. You ascend polyglot temples by savvily decoding bespoke texts and lyrical phrasings, with every comprehension checkpoint unlocking perks from verbified armor upgrades to elocutionary superweapons.
Naturally progress is auto-tracked in swanky in-app guildhalls alongside spectral analysis breakdowns fit for a NASA symposium. Because what fun is acquiring fluencies if you can’t inspect the granular interactive heatmaps and scatter plots memorializing your heroic self-actualizaiton efforts?
At their core, these gameful language ecosystems recognize our primate cerebellums are essentially purpose-built to metabolize skill trees en route to glory rather than more cold pragmatism. Why frustrate ourselves with dull pedagogical minimalism when we’re all intrinsically motivated by whimsical journey maps charting toward fluency paragon-hood?
So whether your linguistic fantasies revolve around slanging sci-fi woards as an argot-accruing ronin or ascending through empaladored halls reciting polysyntheic soliloquys, have no fear — the interactive #LangRenaissance institutions have you covered. Because developing cognitive superpowers is meaningless unless there’s a 12-step arc of lore, derring-do, and glottal anthropomorphic drama fueling your self-transcendence.
So how about it, you aspiring polyglot plutes and pruners of parlance? Does any one of these gameful acquisition angles supremely resonate with your motivational resonance receptors? Have any groundbreaking platforms or prismatic ludological prisms for accelerating language aquisition been tragically under-represented here? Are there any high-concept gamified curricula you’d love to see ecosystem developers spin up from your own synaptic fever dreams?
By all means, shower us with your most fantastical output proposals so we can manifest the optimal massively multiplayer linguistic metaverse! And to those polyglots who’ve already maxed out their immersive RPG disciplines, feel free to regale us with tales of your most glorious grinding epics and the meta-cognitative integrations that augmented your neuromuscular fluency beyond mortal limits!
Read in out blog about The Evolution of Digital Language Learning