Ask HN: What tools and architecture would help build a self-hosted Facebook?

4 points by FourSigma 8y ago ↗ HN

For example, the LAMP stack is sufficient to self-host blogs (Wordpress). What stack and architecture would be needed to recreate the basic functionality of Facebook (posts, photos, videos, and messages)?

2 comments

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tastyham 8y ago ↗

There was a big project call Diaspora to do exactly this several years ago and it fell apart.

detaro 8y ago ↗

The technical stack matters very little: you can do the necessary things with almost any webdev stack.

IMHO, federation is important if you want to replace Facebook and not just build a small-scale hub (which is a totally valuable thing to do too!), and for that you're going to need common protocols. Mastodon gets a lot of it right for making a Twitter-like, but there is no reason you couldn't build a Facebook-like on the same protocols (ActivityPub) too.