Didthis (archived)

Didthis was an experimental project of the Mozilla Innovation Studio. Its aim was to provide a useful hobby project journaling and sharing tool, and a social platform for hobbyists to share and celebrate their works in progress, as well as their knowledge and resources.

This repository has been made open source as part of sunsetting Didthis, which was announced on Oct 15th, 2025 and took place on Nov 15th 2025. Read more here.

It contains the code for the Didthis web application. The iOS mobile application is also included in the integrations/mobile-app folder, and principally is a webview around this web application using Expo and React Native.

This code is provided as-is for posterity and good will, and is not actively maintained.

What follows is a brief overview of the application architecture for anyone interested in this codebase.

Application architecture

Didthis was a React.js (client side) and Next.js (server side) web application, written in Typescript, running on GCP infrastructure. It used Firebase and Apple Sign In for authentication, and Postgres for the database (using knex.js for migrations and queries). It was deployed principally via Google Cloud Run in Docker containers, using Github actions and Terraform (infrastructure as code).

In addition to the client and application server are a Discord bot, which integrated Didthis to our Discord and allowed users to post content there automatically, and an exports job system, and the iOS app.

Didthis communicated with third party services for the following purposes:

• Firebase, for authentication
• Apple Sign In, for authentication
• Discord, for the Discord bot
• Amplitude, for product analytics
• Zyte, for fetching link previews

The "boilerplate" infrastructure

The GCP infratructure was largely managed using a project we refer to internally as the "boilerplate", which is a separate template that provides the Terraform for GCP infrastructure, and most of the Github action workflows. You may see references to this "boilerplate" and this repository generally includes most of that content.

However, the boilerplate did rely on separate repositories which are not included, especially for VPC setup and DNS configurations. This repository instead contains dangling references to those resources.

Furthermore, the Github actions expect a setup that is no longer complete and depended on an environment, including variables and secrets, that are no longer present. For example, Firebase credentials, GCP provisioning credentials, a prod and nonprod GCP project pair, repository contributor permissions, Github issues for deployment approval workflows, the VPC and DNS per above, and so on.

You will see history referring to branches named releases/prod and releases/nonprod, which were the branches that triggered these deployment workflows.

License

Didthis is provided under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. You can find the full text of the license in the LICENSE file in this repository.

Authors

Didthis was developed by the Mozilla Innovation Studio with principal contributions from a number of individuals:

• Stephen Hood, product manager
• Josh Whiting, engineer
• Les Orchard, engineer
• Amy Chiu, designer
• Kate Taylor, designer and engineer