An example prompt for a social network

Build a community feed for amateur astronomers. It needs: profiles and identity, follow graph, posts, replies and reposts, media upload and image cdn, home timeline (hybrid fan-out) and engagement counters without hot rows. Rule that must always hold: precompute timeline_entries by a queued, resumable, batched job for authors under FANOUT_CELEBRITY_THRESHOLD followers; for celebrities skip the write and merge their recent posts into the reader's page at read time from a capped set of followed celebrities. Leave out for now: no algorithmic 'For you' ranking, live video or audio rooms in phase 1 and no count(*) over likes, follows or posts on the request path.

Replace the first sentence with your own idea. The list of needs stays useful whatever the niche, because it comes from what a social network has to do.

• Build a private neighbourhood updates feed. Start with profiles and identity and follow graph, and add posts, replies and reposts once those work.
• Build a book club network with reading threads. People should be able to safe photo upload, resized variants and fast delivery of images.

Forge AI picks a reference architecture from how you describe the app. These phrases point to a social network: twitter, x clone, facebook, threads, mastodon, bluesky, reddit and social network.

• Hybrid fan-out: push for normal accounts, pull for celebrities.
• Sharded, batched engagement counters.
• Keyset (cursor) pagination everywhere.
• SSE plus polling fallback in phase 1, websocket tier later.

This is a reference design for the category, not a promise that every item is generated today. Built-ins such as email, background jobs, file uploads and search are coming soon, so anything here that needs them is something you add yourself for now.

• Dedicated websocket tier with pub/sub: SSE + LISTEN/NOTIFY covers phase 1 DMs and live updates.
• Dedicated search engine (OpenSearch/Typesense): Postgres FTS and trigram are sufficient and keep the stack small.
• Read replicas for timeline and profile reads: the primary handles phase-1 load.
• Dedicated cache or in-memory store for hot timelines: edge cache + indexed reads meet phase-1 budgets.

How detailed should a prompt for a social network be?

Name the users, the main objects, one rule that must always hold and one thing to leave out. The plan fills in the rest, and you can change it before generation.

Which words tell Forge64 this is a social network?

Phrases such as twitter, x clone, facebook and threads point to this category.

Can I change the app after the first build?

Yes. Describe the change in plain English and Forge AI edits the app; the quality gate checks the code again.

• How to build a social network
• Social network architecture
• Social network security checklist
• Social network scaling checklist
• Often combined: marketplace
• Often combined: content site
• All app types