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Ask HN: If you had to build a clone of Facebook, what tools would you use? Why?

• byoung2 12y ago
  A lot of the tools Facebook uses now are out of necessity because of the massive number of active users. Do I have to build something to support billions of users from day one? Or do I just have to support all of the functionality but just a handful of users? The two scenarios would require vastly different approaches.
  • abestic9 12y ago
    Well said. If I had to scale for tens of millions of users, 80% of which log in at least once per day, I would be focusing my effort on the most EFFICIENT technologies (watts per request). If there's capital, I'd look at what Facebook has done already and give it my own twist. I'd purchase the property and hardware up front and get to work building the platform, forking existing code where needed. If we're talking about 10,000 users, then I'm going to pick a technology that gives me a lot more flexibility. In fact, I would probably just extend an off-the-shelf PHP/MySQL package with an nginx EC2 instance to save myself the effort of building from scratch, because I wouldn't have to.
  • 27182818284 12y ago
    Echoing this, I particularly hate when I see coding schools advertise that one of their 3-week graduates "created a Facebook clone" because really they created a clone of Facebook when it was 3-weeks old. Of course, when you speak with them and talk about, say, Facebook's contributions to the algorithms that handle version control in Mercurial, they had no idea about how complex things are at the 1 billion MAU scale.
• contingencies 12y ago
  I like your question... it's a shame it hasn't garnered more response. Fundamentally, by removing the time consideration the question becomes very unrealistic, but I'll bite anyway. First, you'd have to establish some purpose beyond cloning. Cloning to free the world of a centralized facebook and the surveillance burden that goes with it? Let's run with that. Design-wise, we're looking for adoption. The easiest identifiers to use are email addresses and phone numbers, though neither are particularly secure we can play on the fact that many people have both to offer two factor authentication of public keys while supporting the only-has-one use case with snail mail or alternate communications path (eg. in person key digest validation) recommendations. OK, so now we've got half a basis for some decentralized exchange that supports mass adoption. Next up is sell. How to make this more interesting to the average punter than Facebook, while maintaining global appeal and not having to take on the burden of content creation ourselves? Perhaps with strong support for the content classes people are time and time again proven to care about: drugs, porn and p2p media. This doesn't necessarily have to break any laws, but it probably will in some self-labelling-as-democracy-exporter draconian regime, so we have to include this factor in the design. Luckily, decentralization will be a big help. Finally, we would want to incentivize people to market outside of the network to pull in new friends. This could be done by developing some unique physical use cases like phone-to-phone ad-hoc wifi based sharing and public use local storage drop wifi boxes around major cities. The total hardware weight of such a clone would not be as big as Facebook, simply because of its distributed nature. In fact, it would be far smaller. The search would be different, and would only affect people who chose to register in a central registry. This could even be developed by a third party (or better: multiple third parties, seeded by giving away a proof of concept open source codebase) in order to enhance diversity and thereby strengthen the infrastructure against authoritarian takedowns. Well, just some ideas. Less tech-stack oriented because connecting to fewer peers would probably remove most of the scaling problems. I think that mobile platforms generally demand a certain tech stack, and of course web stacks have been done to death here...