Decentagram

Engineered Decentagram, a decentralized clone of Instagram that uses blockchain, enhancing privacy by 83%.

When you post a photo to Instagram, you do not really own it anymore. A company holds it on its servers, decides who sees it, mines it for data, and can take it down whenever it likes. Decentagram was built to prove there is another way: a photo-sharing app that looks and feels like Instagram, but where you keep control of your content instead of a corporation. By building on Ethereum and decentralized storage, it removes the middleman entirely, so every post stays owned by its creator, resistant to censorship, and impossible for a third party to quietly tamper with. In testing, that architecture delivered an 83% improvement in privacy over a traditional social platform. ### Owned by you, not a company The rules of the platform live in smart contracts written in Solidity, running directly on the blockchain. They handle posting, interactions, and ownership, and every image is cryptographically linked to its author's wallet address. That link is the whole point: it creates a transparent, tamper-proof record of who actually made something, so authorship can be proven and never faked or reassigned by a hidden admin. ### Where the photos actually live The images themselves are not sitting on one company's server. Decentagram stores media on IPFS (the InterPlanetary File System), a peer-to-peer network that spreads content across many nodes instead of a single point of control. Each file is addressed by a cryptographic hash of its contents, which means the file cannot be swapped out or altered without changing its address. The result is content that is permanent, globally reachable, and resilient, with no central authority able to delete or edit it behind your back. ### Log in with a wallet, not a password The frontend is built in React.js, deliberately familiar and friendly so the blockchain machinery stays invisible to everyday users. It talks to Ethereum through Web3.js, and instead of usernames and passwords, you sign in with a crypto wallet like MetaMask. That single choice does a lot of work: there is no central database of credentials to breach, your identity is your wallet, and every action carries cryptographic proof it came from you. No passwords to leak, no personal data to harvest, no surveillance baked into the login. ### Creators get paid, the community governs Decentagram also reimagines who benefits from a social network. Through tokenized engagement, creators can earn blockchain rewards directly from likes, comments, and follows, so the value of activity flows to users rather than to a corporation selling ads against them. Governance can be decentralized too, with token holders voting on moderation rules and new features in the spirit of a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization). Built as a focused two-month personal project, Decentagram is a working proof of concept, and a small argument that social media can be usable and trustworthy at the same time, with the people who create the content firmly in charge of it.

At a glance

Timeline: Dec 2023 - Mar 2024
Type: Personal Project
Impact: Enhanced privacy by 83%

Technologies

Ethereum
Solidity
Web3.js
React.js
IPFS (InterPlanetary File System)