Drupal as Social Media

Drupal has been called The Swiss Army knife website development. It is the most advanced open source platform available.  Civil social media includes most all existing Drupal components in one application.

Frederic G. Marand Core contributor since 2005. D7 core maintainer (XML-RPC), D8 contributor

https://www.quora.com/Can-you-build-a-relatively-complex-social-network-... https://www.quora.com/Can-you-build-a-relatively-complex-social-network-...

It can be done. For example we built the Le Figaro social network in 2009–2010, which had some publicity in the Drupal community at the time, including a visit from Dries. This handles multi-million users and pieces of content and still serves most pages to authenticated users far below 1 second. This does not mean it was easy to scale : at some point, we had to switch part of the data storage from MySQL to MongoDB, after much hesitation and two prototypes, one on SQL, the other one on NoSQL. Just using Commons is not a scalable solution, by the way.

Some features in social networks are a poor match for just a plain Drupal, for instance real-time chat : the one-hit-per-page runtime model for standard PHP (which Drupal requires) does not fare well with the constant-on needs of a chat client, so it is hard to scale above a few hundred active users. For a much larger population (> 10k live users) at another client we had to resort to a separate node.js chat base coupled with Drupal authentication. It could also very well have been based on a reactive PHP implementation like PHPdaemon, ReactPHP, or Icicle, but these were more of an unquantified risk than node.js.

Now, the fact that is can be done does not mean any site builder, even experimented, can do it. One thing these projects have in common is a lot of custom coding, so launching this while not being a developer of any sort, as you say, might well be a wild goose chase.