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Mini Donkey is a platform-independent encryption app
Mini Donkey is an app that encrypts and hides messages using AES encryption and steganography.
Since Mini Donkey itself is not a service, it works with all social media apps that support sending images.
Motivations
It all started when a couple of friends complained that they couldn’t send important messages to friends and families without being under surveillance due to regional restrictions.
Unfortunately, privacy-preserving services aren’t available in those regions for obvious reasons.
I thought “wow, that’s not cool”, especially in 2020 where social media has become an essential part of our lives.
After researching a few privacy-preserving messaging apps, I found:
- They are easily blocked because they still rely on services/internet access.
- They present heavy vendor-lockin and it’s hard to convince others to move away from popular social media platforms.
Due to the two issues above, few people end up using those apps and, as a result, privacy is wildly exposed.
Is it possible to properly address the issues above? What if there is an app that:
- Works completely offline.
- Attaches to any popular social media platform.
The answer I worked out was Mini Donkey and let me use two diagrams to demonstrate the main idea:
I know you might be thinking “that’s a lot of effort to send a message”. I totally agree, but, in fact, only 1% of our communication (e.g. my password is XXX) needs this kind of encryption, so use it only as a secret weapon.
Mini Donkey focus on privacy and nothing else
To make sure Mini Donkey fulfills its purpose to protect privacy, I built it to be:
- Open-source so that everyone can audit and improve it.
- Ads-free to reduce distractions and focus on the mission.
- Works 100% offline to avoid censorship.
- Works on as many social media platforms as possible.
Achieving the goals isn’t easy, so I will need help from the community:
What can you get by contributing?
The things to get out of contributing to Mini Donkey includes but definitely not limited to:
- Add an interesting production-grade cross-platform app to your resume.
- Help secure privacy for people who need it.
- Level up your Flutter skills.
- Level up your Android/iOS dev skills.
- Level up your GitHub Actions skills.
- Level up your JavaScript skills.
- Level up your Fastlane skills.
- Hands-on project management experience.
- Hands-on open-source contributing experience.
- Know the open-source project workflow better.
- Many more…
What technologies are used?
The Mini Donkey tech stack:
- App: Flutter/Dart
- App platform-specific integrations: Swift/Kotlin/Objective-C/JavaScript
- App automation: Fastlane/Ruby
- CI/CD: GitHub Actions
- Documentation: Vue.js/VuePress/JavaScript
What are some ways to contribute?
The ways to contribute include but, again, definitely not limited to:
- Implement a feature
- Fix a bug
- Refactor code
- Propose a feature
- Report a bug
- Add clarifying comments
- Add documentation
- Improve CI/CD workflows
- Fix typos
- Brainstorm ideas
- Triage issues
- Clean up issues
- And, of course, many more…
How to get involved?
To get involved in the project, please follow the steps (for more details, see the contribution guideline in the repository):
- Pick an issue (if the one you want to work on doesn’t exist, feel free to open one).
- Comment on the issue with a plan to claim ownership.
- Work on it.
- Open a pull request and make sure tests are passing.
- Request a review.
- Resolve the suggestions from the reviewer.
- Wait for a bit. The pull request will merge within a day.
- Have a cup of coffee. Hooray! You just contribute to the project!
Thanks for reading and happy hacking! ;)
If you like the idea of the Mini Donkey project, please make sure to:
- Give the Mini Donkey repository a star.
- Follow the Mini Donkey publication.
References
Mini Donkey project home:
Mini Donkey repository:
