Ask HN: Do you recommend React and Firebase for a social network project?

For the frontend use whatever you are familiar with as that will keep your velocity higher and your tech debt lower at first. If you use a new framework, you'll slow yourself down and pile on preventable tech debt because you'll do stuff that isn't quite correct in the new framework until you master it.

As for backend. Firebase is easy to use and quick to get started with. That said, it can get expensive pretty fast and I am not a fan of the lock-in it comes with it. I fully admit I prefer AWS over Google, although we use both today. However, even with AWS I avoid DynamoDB and vendor specific tooling that I couldn't run on a box myself. I'll use RDS for Postgres but that's because I can always move that to my own servers if the need arose. If I was using Dynamo that'd be tough. I'll use their API compliant tooling like MQ or their Mongo compatible document store if I wanted, because again I can move databases without changing code.

I suggest you to go for a more stable UI (React changes too much, IMHO) and a backend that you own.

And I'd like to stress out the Infrastructure as Code as much as possible, so you can always keep track of WHERE and HOW runs WHAT.

I'd go for GraalVM or Laravel and Postgres as backend, as others have already suggested

I would recommend ArangoDB. See my post here: https://medium.com/@mikestaub22/slack-lunch-club-part-3-7-ba...

I'd recommend Angular instead

why not VueJS, Postgres, Go/PHP/Java?