Built 2020–2022Short-video social platform

Short video,live and paid.

A short-video social network: a personalised feed, reusable sounds, duets and trending hashtags, messaging — and live streams where viewers pay to join the host on stage.

Client: Consumer social · India
Role: Backend & platform engineer
Surfaces: Creator app · Live streaming · Admin · Media pipeline

The brief

The goal was a homegrown short-video platform with the full creative toolkit people expect — sounds, duets, effects — and a way for creators to earn directly from their audience.

The difficult parts were all realtime: a feed that feels personal, events that stay consistent across many servers, and money that moves while a live stream is happening.

Creator platform

Upload, sounds, duets and reacts, stickers, AR masks, effects and frames.

Feed & discovery

A personalised For You feed, trending sounds and hashtags, and search.

Live & earnings

Live streams, paid co-hosting and pinned paid comments, with creator wallets and payouts.

Admin

Moderation, verification, categories, broadcasts and reporting.

System map

How it fitstogether.

Every surface talks to one platform core. This is the shape of the system as it runs in production.

The hard parts

What made ithard — and how.

The problems that don't show up in a screenshot, but decide whether a product survives real users.

Realtime that scales past one server

The problem

A message sent on one server has to reach users connected to another — and only the right users.

The approach

Service events are published on dedicated channels and replayed on every server, with conversation events filtered to their participants.

Pub/subWebSockets

Paying to join a live stream

The problem

A viewer pays, the host earns and the viewer goes live — any step can fail.

The approach

Payment, wallet credit and a fresh broadcaster token are chained, with reversals and refunds when a step fails, and dropped connections close any sessions they left open.

PaymentsLive videoRefunds

Every upload becomes a sound

The problem

Reusable sounds are the heart of short video, but most uploads don't pick one.

The approach

Uploads are transcoded and served through signed CDN URLs, and when no sound is chosen the original audio is extracted and registered as a new reusable sound.

Media pipelineAudio extraction

A feed that's personal and private

The problem

Recommendations must respect blocks, private accounts and what you've already watched.

The approach

The feed matches interests and language, excludes blocked users and watched videos, shows private accounts only to followers, and trending is computed over a rolling day.

RecommendationsPrivacy

Inside the system

Everythingit does.

01For You feed with personal suggestions

02Reusable sounds and trending audio

03Duets, reacts, stickers, AR masks and effects

04Hashtags with rolling trending

05Private accounts and follow requests

06Direct messaging with unread counts

07Paid live co-hosting and paid comments

08Creator wallets and payout requests

09Six ways to sign in, plus verification

Built with

Backend

Node.js · FeathersJS · MongoDB · Redis pub/sub · Socket.io

Media

Video transcoding · Audio extraction · Signed CDN delivery

Live & money

Live video tokens · Razorpay · Wallets

Platform

Push · Fuzzy search · CI/CD

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