Social Media

Managing “Massive Scale” means handling billions of users and trillions of relationships. In this module, we transition from simple utilities to complex interpersonal systems like Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.

Module Contents

1. Design Instagram News Feed

Learn about the Push vs Pull models for feed generation and how to handle the “Celebrity Problem” using a hybrid approach.

2. Design Twitter Timeline

Detailed dive into the Fan-out on Write strategy and the importance of in-memory caches (Redis) for low-latency timelines.

3. Design Facebook Messenger

Learn principles of real-time bidirectional communication using WebSockets and how to scale chat state across multiple data centers.

4. Detailed News Feed Architecture

A broad view of the entire feed pipeline, from ranking and filtering to deduplication using Bloom Filters.

5. Design TikTok’s Short Video Feed [NEW]

Explore how recommendation-driven feeds differ from follower-based ones. Learn about Personalization Loops, Video Transcoding Pipelines, and Edge Prefetching.

Module Chapters