Dificulties with development of anonymous location bsed chat App

About a year ago on a long bus ride, my friend and I brainstormed ideas for our future personal projects. My friend mentioned something about a chat app that would be regionally locked—an app where you could chat with random people near you. Something like Omegle but LOCAL. I was immediately interested.

At that time, I couldn’t even imagine what it would take to actually create something like this. But somehow, I didn’t care. I actually didn’t care even enough to research what apps already did something similar and if the project had any potential for a fanbase. I just wanted to create!

At first, I figured that for an app of this scale, I would need a very powerful main server or to be able to run everything serverless. I had a lot of ideas about using some variation of P2P chains or circle topology for message sending and receiving, but my knowledge of these things was severely limited. Therefore, after discovering that Oracle gives out free servers, the answer was clear.

The initial idea was to store all the messages in files named appropriately so that each file name would track back to the real world in 100 by 100 meter blocks.

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