Problem #0: how to make money to pay for all that tech.
Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
11–20 of 351 posts
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#12Can speak to the DB side of things:
Redis in front of an RDBMS scaled well for me at https://glue.im/noah
Timlines/activity are built from the RDBMS and served from Redis as a cache. New posts are added to the cache directly as well so only needs to rebuild if you lose the entire cache which only happens if we need to restart the server. Also not storing full posts in Redis, just IDs, pulling via primary key from DB is very fast.
That same setup was used for a previous app that had a few million user base (don’t remember the concurrent user numbers though) and it ran well with a clear path to scale it up.
More thoughts: build a mobile friendly web app first, you’re gonna need some sort of back-end to run the iOS app anyways and tweaking a web app UI is much quicker than resubmitting iOS builds to the App Store.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#13Everyone, please stop thinking about HOW you want to build a twitter alternative. No one cares. I have tried to build one, I failed even though our tech was superb.
If you really want to build a twitter alternative think about how you would DISTRIBUTE it. How would you get a critical mass on the platform so that is viable, i.e. interesting enough for users to stick around.
Which existing social networks (not media ones, real ones) would you try to capture first? Facebook and Tinder both did the Uni campus strategy quite successfully. Slack did the Bay Area startups strategy. What’s your strategy?
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#14If this was aiming for the scale of twitter replacement, the realistic answer is: read as much as possible from what was published about the current twitter architecture and try to replicate that while avoiding things they used in the past. If you're thinking in terms of a specific database rather than queues that write into partitions distributed around the world, you've probably already lost. Maybe think really har…
I'd bet between, whatsapp, messenger, instagram chat, meta probably deals with the most volume of short messages, likely more than slack / discord / telegram,but hard to know
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#15If this was aiming for the scale of twitter replacement, the realistic answer is: read as much as possible from what was published about the current twitter architecture and try to replicate that while avoiding things they used in the past. If you're thinking in terms of a specific database rather than queues that write into partitions distributed around the world, you've probably already lost. Maybe think really har…
>Apart from youtube comments, I don't think there's anything the scale of twitter for short messages at the moment. discord, telegram?
The complexity in twitter is that you have one channel per user, so you want to scale the "personnalized timeline". Whereas telegram/discord have clear channels.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#16I already built the alternative. Check out the video on the front page for an intro.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#17Everyone, please stop thinking about HOW you want to build a twitter alternative. No one cares. I have tried to build one, I failed even though our tech was superb. If you really want to build a twitter alternative think about how you would DISTRIBUTE it. How would you get a critical mass on the platform so that is viable, i.e. interesting enough for users to stick around. Which existing social networks (not media on…
I think how is still an interesting question.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#18Everyone, please stop thinking about HOW you want to build a twitter alternative. No one cares. I have tried to build one, I failed even though our tech was superb. If you really want to build a twitter alternative think about how you would DISTRIBUTE it. How would you get a critical mass on the platform so that is viable, i.e. interesting enough for users to stick around. Which existing social networks (not media on…
Maybe also think about WHY you want a twitter alternative.
Communicating via short untargeted messages was always going to be a shitshow, why not let Elon Musk run it if he so desperately wants to?
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#19Everyone, please stop thinking about HOW you want to build a twitter alternative. No one cares. I have tried to build one, I failed even though our tech was superb. If you really want to build a twitter alternative think about how you would DISTRIBUTE it. How would you get a critical mass on the platform so that is viable, i.e. interesting enough for users to stick around. Which existing social networks (not media on…
I think how is still an interesting question.
Interesting yes. But mainly a waste of time.
Re: Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
#20Everyone, please stop thinking about HOW you want to build a twitter alternative. No one cares. I have tried to build one, I failed even though our tech was superb. If you really want to build a twitter alternative think about how you would DISTRIBUTE it. How would you get a critical mass on the platform so that is viable, i.e. interesting enough for users to stick around. Which existing social networks (not media on…
Yes, every software problem is a marketing problem.