Developing a social network on your own. Where to begin?

Let's look at the current situation of social networks from the very beginning. But, first, we need to understand whether there is any gap between modern Big Tech, into which you can plunge the dagger of the new social network and move them from their positions.

It's been several months since Donald Trump's loud statement about the imminent launch of a new social network. Has something changed since then? In fact, no. The application is still unavailable for download, although rumors say that the social network is available to supporters of the ex-president in testing mode. Truth Social’s situation can teach us a lot if we leave sarcasm. Firstly, this story shows how desperately it may be necessary to participate in online social interaction. The lifetime ban on Trump's accounts after the riots on Capitol Hill in early 2021 seemed to return it in times before the invention of the Internet. And even having his own media empire does not help him compete with political opponents. Secondly, as it turned out, creating your social network is not an easy task, even for a media corporation. If a short launch time of Truth Social were the only task of developers, they could use any of the dozens of Drag & Drop platforms. But the developers have chosen a more challenging way. Thirdly, the developers have finally announced that they have been selected as the platform for this social network. It turned out to be Mastodon microblogging software open source. This fact is very curious, as the rules for placing content in the Mastodon federative network are set individually by each owner of the connected server. Let's hope that the rules of the new social network will be equal for Republicans and Democrats. The format of posts on the Mastodon network resembles Trump's so beloved Twitter, with slight differences in the allowed length of the post (500 instead of 280 characters) and the name of the post itself (toot instead of tweet). Thus, the first exciting conclusion can be made: creating a social network may, in some cases, be necessary at the risk of social exclusion.

Of course, Trump Social is not the only troublemaker. Over the past year, the relief of social networks has changed again. Old social networks continue to lead, but new players have appeared that have attracted the attention of the picky public. The Clubhouse chat room app suddenly became popular for objective reasons caused by restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. An unknown podcast application in 2019 suddenly turned into a headliner. By early 2022, the TikTok video platform had finally reached a billion MAU (active users per month) and now directly threatens Instagram.

So how to develop a social network yourself? We postponed this question because the answer is ambiguous. On the one hand, Facebook and Twitter didn't have many competitors initially. The displacement of MySpace was made possible by the great miscalculations of its management in assessing its exclusivity. The abundance of advertising, slow platform modification, and significant lags in opening pages forced users to seek an alternative. The alternative in the face of Facebook was not long in coming, although it required much effort from its creators. It should be noted that efforts were both in terms of building a simple and intuitive interface and in terms of raising capital. At first, Facebook did not offer advertising at all.

Today, a more difficult task than creating a product is to find out which product to offer and explain why your social network is unique and worth it for users to spend the most scarce treasure, their time on it.

The biggest problem for potential startup founders is to find out how to find their users among those who already use dominant networks - Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and others.

Meta manages a few of the world's leading platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Facebook had a total of more than 1.93 billion DAU (daily active users) in the third quarter of 2021; a much smaller Twitter service reports 206 million DAU. Any new startup, by definition, will start with even fewer and face an additional obstacle to convince people to change the habit of using familiar applications. Moreover, given that people spend more than 2 hours 45 minutes a day on social networks, you will have little time to convince them to use your new application.

All new startups ask themselves this question. What audience are you trying to reach? What's the unresolved problem? How can this innovation reduce costs or provide a richer experience? What niche do you serve, and can it create the involvement necessary to succeed? The Clubhouse app prepared its answer and restricted access. Investors and founders of famous technology companies in Silicon Valley got the first invitations, and an aura of elitism appeared immediately. The rest of the network members tried their best to join this network to feel this taste of fame.

However, your good idea and support from influencers and investors do not necessarily lead to commercial success. It will take much detailed work to accurately determine the niche and target audience of the created social network. Market research and idea testing can take a lot of time and effort. It's much easier when the task of a social network is to support offline business. Modern technologies for automatic analysis and comparison of people from different regions by DNA fragments have formed new social networks, such as MyHeritage from Israel. In addition to satisfying people's curiosity about their ethnic origin, these services can help find relatives. And although DNA databases are still small (MyHeritage itself speaks of 5.6 million samples), the prospect of uniting people in such networks seems promising.

Another aspect of developing your social network is the technical possibility.

From a technical point of view, there are almost no problems today. Unlike the early 2000s, today, powerful tools have been created to create a social network of any scale. And yet, early social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter enjoyed a clear advantage: they were among the few in the undeveloped market, which facilitated the acquisition of new users and the creation of audiences, even based on imperfect technologies.

Today, circumstances have turned over. Advances in technology have made it relatively easy to create a website and implement basic social functionality. But the dominance and influence of prominent social media companies make it challenging to break into the market and take a stable position.

Anyone who has used the social media application in recent years knows what features to expect from the service. Messages, comments, a way to express approval or other reactions, the ability to add photos and videos - all these have become standard functions.

With the help of modern Drag-and-Drop software, you can create a primitive copy of Facebook for less than $20,000. Keep in mind that the main costs, in this case, will be shifted from the payment of engineers to the maintenance of the Drag-and-Drop platform itself. A more straightforward social media platform with a small audience can cost even cheaper with monthly or annual payments. But those who seek to get complex features on a more productive platform will have to pay much more.

So, if your strategic plans are verified, and you have already decided which social network you will build, it's time to specify the technical aspects of development. All tools are available, and you only need to choose the most suitable ones. There are three different approaches. The first involves an almost instant inexpensive deployment of a simple social network with essential functions on the SaaS platform. Such services can help to create a tiny social network for a limited number of friends and like-minded people, outwardly similar to Facebook. However, you immediately deprive yourself of all rights to the content, lose to establish content placement rules, and agree to the complete absence of unique features. If you are ready to accept all these restrictions, look over the Internet and choose the service that best suits your needs.

The next option may be to use open-source solutions. Many scripts promise the possibility of building a social network. For example, the popular WordPress and BuddyPress tandem will allow you to create your social network as a rightful owner. But you will still experience functionality limitations because any function already implemented in a mass solution is not unique by default. It will be necessary to find a team of developers who will undertake much work to create unique add-ons. Such work may last indefinitely, and its result may be unsatisfactory for you. There is a straightforward explanation for this fact, the universal web engine of such scripts is designed to serve versatile websites and not to ensure the sustainable operation of the social network. You can object, do the developers of Donald Trump's Truth Social network do not know this and chose Mastodon wrongly? I think this is not a mistake but a verified calculation.

Conversely, Mastodon is a federative social network that provides good sustainability. In addition, the functionality of Mastodon repeats Twitter, which is quite enough to work as a news mouthpiece. But even Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), with its vast capabilities, only promises to launch a social network in February 2022, four months after the development announcement. This fact gives us one clever lesson, open-source solutions are not free and require time and money to refine.

The third option for creating a social network is to use a custom platform. What does that mean? It's no secret that each popular social network uses its own set of frameworks and technologies for the best implementation of specific functionality. All technologies are well known and are not something secret. But a technologies composition and their interaction, called a stack, are already intellectual property. None of them wants to create a new strong competitor in the market, so you will not find detailed public information on how Facebook or Twitter works. Therefore, planning to buy such a stack would be a wonderful but fantastic idea. As a result, you have to look for a developer who can create a social network platform from scratch. You can find such a company, but in this case, you will have to take several risks associated with the high cost and a long development period. Depending on the complexity, the development of a new platform can take several years. It is difficult to predict in advance what may happen during this time. Someone else will launch a similar social network faster than you, or the progress of new technologies will make the idea itself irrelevant. And then you will find yourself alone with a difficult question, what to do with the unique platform you have developed, the development of which has cost a fortune?

If all three options have such significant drawbacks, does it mean you can't create a social network yourself? Fortunately, there is an opportunity to overcome the strict limitations of SaaS-based development, the inefficiency of open-source software, and the risks of custom development. X Networks has been creating complex and high-load projects for more than 20 years. During this time, they made and launched its Qwerty Network Social Engine (QSNE) platform to develop and deploy high-load social networks and web portals. The QSNE is not a DIY constructor-set for building a social network. This platform is a proprietary technology stack that X Networks engineers use to create a custom social network. Please note that they make a modern social network, not a platform from scratch. In practice, this means quick access to the technological advantages of Big Tech and reducing the risk of not starting the project for the reasons mentioned earlier.

What opportunities does the use of the QSNE platform open when creating a social network? An extensive list describes only standard features, but each is implemented at the highest level and allows you to customize your social network project at the most achievable level. Pay attention to the issue of scaling the social network. At the start, when the audience is still small, it makes no sense to overpay for reserving ample space on servers to store content and use unnecessary computing resources. The QSNE platform allows you to flexibly manage technical resources as the project grows, thus releasing funds to promote the project. It's great that your social network will not require moving QSNE to another platform, even when it becomes as popular as Facebook.

• Built-in support for all world languages ​​and correction tools for translators, automatic user language detection with the possibility of subsequent customization, translations of publications and user comments, as well as other content, into readers languages;
• The built-in billing system can operate more than a hundred different currencies, virtual and national, cross-rates calculation, taking into account exchange processing centers and the rates of various central banks, provides the functionality of the payment system;
• X Networks file cloud can store and configure file access for users. We provide storage and access capabilities similar to Google Drive + the ability to exchange files, attach them to publications or other objects. This is extremely important because social networks and complex portals are content generators;
• Billing and payment control systems integrated with notification services;
• Artificial intelligence Qwerty AI (flexible capabilities, technical user support, intelligent ranking of publications);
• News aggregation from authoritative sources (for each project, we define a list of "authorities");
• Possibilities of a marketplace, automation of sales and logistics, as well as internal transaction arbitration - we can develop your project into an analog of AliExpress;
• Smart contracts, «safe transactions, » internal arbitration service;
• A robust internal mail server provides sending messages and mailing automation that checks the correctness of addresses as well as overflowing mailboxes;
• Protection systems against DDoS ​​and other types of attacks with automatic notification of providers (by the way, X Networks owns the testddos.com service for testing websites’ load resistance);
• Modules for interacting with SMS and phone services;
• Protecting accounts from hacking, logging permissions, and two-factor authentication. The QSNE security system is one of the critical blocks of the platform;
• The ability to manage subscriptions to users and communities;
• Aggressive data caching (similar to Facebook);
• Flexible privacy settings for users and their publications;
• Powerful multi-threaded search engine;
• Creation of communities (open and closed pages, as well as professional and "by subscription");
• Internal messenger (instant messaging system), integrated with QAIM, with the capabilities of artificial intelligence;
• The antivirus scan of published content (SDK over 20 antiviruses), intelligent pre-moderation;
• End-to-end tagging of any content and data in the flow of information;
• Shortening link service system;
• Protection against bots and parsing (verification of user actions);
• SMM tools;

Let's sum up where to start developing a social network. First, to create a strategy for your social network, namely to answer the questions "What niche should a new social network fill? Who are its users? Will it be able to generate income or contribute to political influence?" When you have resolved these issues, contact X Networks for advice on how long it will take to implement your idea and how much it will cost. The cost of creating and maintaining a social network is an essential question, and X Networks has a unique offer. They may co-finance the project if they find your idea incendiary.