System designMediumsd-g557

Subject Social feedLevel Entry–Mid~30 minCommon in Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Design a basic activity feed for a small social app (think a few thousand users). Each user follows some others, and their home feed shows recent posts from the people they follow, newest first. Posting is far less frequent than reading the feed. Describe your data model and how you build a user's feed.

What a strong answer looks like

Clarify scale and constraints first. Propose a clean component breakdown, then go deep on the hard parts — data model, bottlenecks, consistency, failure modes — and name the trade-offs you are making.

Learn the concepts

Narrate your design

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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.