Introduction to Newsfeed System [backup]

What is a newsfeed?

A newsfeed of any social media platform—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram— is a list of stories generated by entitiesAn entity could be a page, group, friends, and followers of a user. that a user follows. It contains text, images, videos, and other activities such as likes, comments, shares, advertisements, etc. This list is continuously updated and presented to the relevant users on the user’s home page. Similarly, a newsfeed system also displays the newsfeed to users from friends, followers, groups, and other pages, including a user’s own posts.

A newsfeed is essential for social media platforms’ users because it keeps them informed about the latest industry developments, current affairs, and relevant information. It also provides them additional reasons to return to, visit, and connect with a platform on a regular basis. Billions of users use such platforms; the challenging task is how to provide a personalized newsfeed in real-time while keeping the system scalable and highly available.

This chapter will discuss the high-level and detailed design of a newsfeed system (for a social platform like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.). To limit the scope of the problem, we will focus on the following functional and non-functional requirements.