Social Networking App

The Challenge

The client needed a real-time social experience that stayed fast as the community grew.

Our Solution

We built a cross-platform app with a real-time feed, chat, push notifications, and a scalable backend with content moderation.

How we approach this kind of build

Feed generation is the defining architectural decision. Building a feed on read is simple but degrades as follow graphs grow; precomputing it on write is fast to read but expensive for users with large followings. We use a hybrid — precompute for typical accounts, compute on read for high-fanout ones — which keeps latency flat as the community scales.

Messaging runs over persistent WebSocket connections with an offline queue, so messages sent while a user is unreachable are delivered on reconnect in order. Push notifications are deliberately conservative: a social app that notifies too eagerly trains users to disable notifications entirely, after which re-engagement becomes very hard to recover.

Moderation tooling is not optional and is far cheaper to build before launch than after the first incident. Reporting flows, a review queue, escalation, and the ability to act quickly on an account or a piece of content are core features. Automated filtering handles obvious cases; anything ambiguous goes to a human, because false positives on moderation cost community trust.