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TOPIC #246Advanced 10 min read

Design a Social Media Platform (Instagram / Twitter)

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Core Architecture Summary

Unify social media primitives: User follow graph (Graph DB / B-Tree), photo upload presigned pipeline, Redis home timeline feed, and follower counters.

Key Glossary Concepts in this TopicAll Glossary Terms

01.1. Functional & Non-Functional Requirements

A full-featured Social Media Platform (Instagram / Twitter) synthesizes multiple core distributed systems: media ingestion, social graph indexing, timeline generation, viral activity counters, and explore recommendations.

Functional Requirements

  1. User Profiles & Follow Graph: Follow/unfollow users, list followers and following accounts.
  2. Post Creation & Media Upload: Upload photos/videos with captions, hashtags, and mentions.
  3. Home Timeline Feed: Serve a reverse-chronological and ranked stream of posts from followed users.
  4. Social Interactions: Like, comment, retweet/repost, and bookmark posts.
  5. Explore & Search: Discover trending hashtags and recommended content.

Non-Functional Requirements

  • Massive Ingress & Read Scale: 1 billion daily active users (DAU), 100 million new posts/day, and 10 billion timeline views/day.
  • Sub-50ms Feed Response: p99 feed rendering latency < 50 ms.
  • Viral Like Resilience: Handle viral celebrity posts receiving 100,000+ likes/second without database row lock contention.

Instagram / Twitter Comprehensive Microservice Architecture 📸

PRO Architecture Blueprint

Instagram / Twitter Comprehensive Microservice Architecture 📸

Decoupled media ingestion, social graph relationships, Redis Sorted Set timeline feeds, and buffered write-back like counters.

Instagram / Twitter Comprehensive Microservice Architecture 📸
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