Build a Social Media Event Bus: React to Posts, Comments, and Follows in Real-Time

The article describes how to build an event bus system that polls social media APIs and converts changes into events, allowing downstream systems to subscribe and react to new posts, comments, and follower changes.

Details

The article describes a system that solves the problem of not having webhooks or real-time notifications from social media platforms. It involves setting up pollers that regularly check for changes in social media profiles, posts, and comments, and then pushing those changes into an event bus. The event bus then routes the events to various handlers, such as Discord bots, email senders, and database loggers. This allows for a decoupled architecture where the polling, event detection, and event handling are all separate components. The technical stack includes Node.js, SQLite for state tracking, and either the built-in EventEmitter or Redis Pub/Sub for the event bus. The article walks through the setup and implementation of the state store and event bus components.