I have been using Webflow on and off for multiple years and am currently working on an MVP of a (future) application that would incorporate several features found in a social media platform like TikTok or Instagram.
i.e
user registration
user dashboards
a page where certain users can publish, update or delete dynamic items (videos and text)
an explore page with an infinite scroll of videos like Tik-Tok has (for the moment, sorted by categories, not AI)
a saved page where users could see content they saved
a followed page where users could see the content of the people they are following
As such, I wondered if it would be possible to create all of the above (and perhaps a few more features found in Instagram/Tik Tok) using Webflow. P.S I also found this template I could use to start: Build A Social Media Platform In Webflow | Social Media Template - Webflow (thanks, Julian and Memberstack!)
I know very well that this is not scalable, and we would need to transition to an actual IOS/Android application; however, I would like to first gauge the interest/traction by investing a minimal amount of time into development (as I have built quite a lot things using Webflow) before doing any next steps.
I would ginormously appreciate any comments, thoughts, feedback, and ideas about this new adventure that I want to start with Webflow
Thank you for pointing me into this direction! I took a look into Wized and it seems to be a really cool solution that could be used for quickly building a “social media web app”! Not sure how to use Xano but from my understanding it would be a DB option I would need to use - will have to learn something new then!
Devlinks seem to be a “code” approach, and since I am not a dev, I guess I would want to stick with something no-code! Either way, thank you for your advice, and I will keep Webflow DevLinks in mind if I need to scale the app and would be working with someone entirely technical!
We have actually made a free template on building a social media platform using nothing but Webflow, Make.com, and Memberstack - here’s a link to it!
That being said, your question was about TikTok - and videos are where it gets tricky.
My recommendation would be to start with a platform that either doesn’t have videos to start, or users upload videos to other platforms like youTube and then add them to your site.
As already mentioned by some people in the thread, you’d probably need to combine several tools. However, if you want to stick with no-code solutions and have an all-in-one tool, you might want to try out Bubble. If it’s supposed to be a mobile app only, you could also try Flutterflow, however it’s a bit less advanced and more limited.
I thought about potentially starting with this template and creating an explore page using something similar to this A guide to infinite scroll in Webflow | Webflow Blog, but I am sure there is a lot of testing to do! However, I re-read that infinite scroll tutorial diagonally, and I see no apparent problems with doing that this way. The only thing that quickly jumps to mind is how to tailor that content to every user (i.e., if you saw a video, you will not see it again)…
Can you elaborate on what you mean by: “videos are where it gets tricky”?
Since videos would be at the web app’s core, it would be the most important thing to integrate!
I already tried Bubble, and after the smoothness and intuitiveness of Webflow, Bubble seems to be a pretty limited option.
I have also checked out FlutterFlow, and it seems EXACTLY like Webflow but for mobile apps! I will definitely explore it, as the idea is to build a quick MVP, and if we could use a similar amount of time to build an app instead of a web app (because that is the end goal), it would be absolutely fantastic!
I played a bit with FlutterFlow, and although the concept (i.e. Webflow for making mobile apps) is great, and it seems they are working hard to make the platform better, it is obvious to me now that Webflow is much more polished and would enable me to create something quick to validate a hypothesis much faster… I watched the video about your template, and it seems I could make it work for our purposes - the only question is, would it be possible to change the upload “image” concept to upload “video”…? It seems that Google Drive is utilized to fetch the images and I would assume it would be possible to do so with a video.
I’m afraid I haven’t every built a site with user uploaded videos If I were trying to build one, I would start with a thorough search of the forums to see if anyone else has figured it out… I’m not seeing anything yet
If I were trying to build one, I would start with a thorough search of the forums to see if anyone else has figured it out… I’m not seeing anything yet