Building paintball social media site. Node, Express, Socket.io, React

I want to create the world's best paintball social media site using the MERN stack. Starting with these features: - Secure registration (JWT, time expires, email validation) - Log in/log out - User -- Profile Page (large picture background: upload, crop) -- Personal "stories" (similar to the wall) -- Messaging (only text, not audio/video) - Group (in my case, teams) -- Profile Page (large picture background: upload, crop) -- Personal "stories" (similar to the wall) -- Messaging (only text, not audio/video. ) So not to bore you with lots of technical details. Duplicating Facebook is great with me (header, footer, left nav, right scrolling content). No, in the end, it will not look the same, just makes it easier than giving you font families, pixel sizes and . Backend will be Node, express (unless you can convince me of another javascript option) Frontend should be React (again, unless you can convince me not to) Database (I'm old school SQL, so tell me why MERN. All data will be accessed via API. No direct calls from the frontend) This is the first phase of the project. I'll need to add a lot more functionality in the near future.