Followers/following database structure

Question

My website has a followers/following system (like Twitter\'s). My dilemma is creating the database structure to handle who\'s following who.

What I came up with was crea

Answer 1

That's the worst way to do it. It's against normalization. Have 2 seperate tables. Users and User_Followers. Users will store user information. User_Followers will be like this:

id | user_id | follower_id
1  | 20      | 45
2  | 20      | 53
3  | 32      | 20

User_Id and Follower_Id's will be foreign keys referring the Id column in the Users table.