So much talk about Twitter alternatives in recent days, including people migrating to Mastodon and even Jack Dorsey announcing his new decentralized social media platform. I was thinking, if I was to build a new micro-blogging aka Twitter alternative, what technological choices would I make to get it quickly off the ground but allow for scale? What database technology or approach would you go for? Would you build a (mobile first) web application first or would you start straight away with a native iOS/Android app (maybe Flutter)? Would you go for a centralised or decentralized approach? If the latter, how would you decentralize it without sacrificing the “public town square” effect that Twitter currently has but is clearly lacking with the fragmentation of Mastodon? To answer my own question, I would probably build a centralized platform like Twitter is now, probably opt for a fast NoSQL database like Google’s Firestore in Datastore mode and to keep things simple I would probably even make sure that tweets would get automatically deleted after some years as I don’t think it’s needed to build a forever growing database of people’s thoughts in that moment that persists for decades to come. Micro-blogging always felt to me as a thing right now, a thought in this moment but that thought could be different in a few days, months and definitely a few years, so why store it forever. Feels like I could save a huge operational cost and prevent abuse by not keeping tweets for beyond their relevancy. What are your thoughts?
Story Published at: November 1, 2022 at 11:09AM
Story Published at: November 1, 2022 at 11:09AM