Ask HN: I need to roll-out a Twitter clone fast

3 points·bikamonki··6 comments

2-3M users plus I need to host it in-house. What is my best bet?

If you plan to roll your own, check out the stream framework: https://github.com/tschellenbach/Stream-Framework

Define "fast". If you need it today, buy a "canned" twitter script. If it's ~1 month, hire a bunch of developers.

Don't expect it to be near as good as twitter with any "fast" turnaround.

Any of us that could help you sure as shit wouldn't do so for free. What's the situation, exactly? How'd you fall into this?

I just read the news today about Russia's ban on Linkedin on the grounds of protecting its citizens' personal data. A similar law is about to pass in my country Ecuador which forbids personal data to be stored outside the national territory. We have presidential elections in 15 weeks and I suspect the goal of this law is to block social networks during elections (so far the only media outlets not controlled by the Revolution). Call me paranoic but on the last street protests I saw how ISPs blocked Twitter images and videos (I was logged in using my local broadband and also through RDP I logged in from a US-based VPS).

I do not aim to compete with Twitter but hopefully have a plan B ready. Obviously something descentralized would be better to avoid domain/IP blocks or DDOS (blockchain or webtorrent maybe?)

Take a look at Twister http://twister.net.co/

Thanks for the link! Twister looks like a really good solution for many other use cases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com