For social network directories, the strongest matches are mastodon/mastodon (Mastodon is a self-hosted, decentralized social networking platform that), tootsuite/mastodon (Mastodon is a flagship federated social networking platform that) and lemmynet/lemmy (Lemmy is a self-hosted, federated discussion platform that uses). pixelfed/pixelfed and misskey-dev/misskey round out the shortlist. Each is ranked by relevance to your query, popularity and recent activity.
Explore the best open-source social network platforms. Compare top GitHub repositories by activity and features to find the best fit for your project.
Mastodon is a self-hosted, decentralized social networking platform that functions as a microblogging application. It enables independent server instances to communicate and exchange social data through the standardized ActivityPub protocol, allowing users to participate in a global, interoperable network. The platform distinguishes itself through its federated architecture, which grants administrators full control over their community instances. This includes comprehensive tools for user moderation, account management, and the enforcement of community guidelines. The system is designed to ha
Mastodon is a self-hosted, decentralized social networking platform that natively supports federation via ActivityPub, user profiles, activity feeds, and robust moderation tools, making it a flagship example of this category.
Mastodon is a decentralized microblogging platform and federated social network. It allows users to publish short text updates, media, and links to a chronological feed across a distributed architecture that removes reliance on a single central authority. The software enables the creation of self-hosted social servers, giving administrators local control over user accounts and content. These independent instances synchronize user profiles and interactions across a global network of servers using the ActivityPub protocol for cross-platform social networking. The platform includes community co
Mastodon is a flagship federated social networking platform that provides all the core features requested, including ActivityPub-based federation, user profiles, activity feeds, and robust content moderation tools.
Lemmy is a self-hosted, federated discussion platform that enables the operation of independent, decentralized social networking servers. By implementing the ActivityPub protocol, it allows autonomous instances to exchange content, synchronize user interactions, and participate in a global, distributed network without centralized control. The platform distinguishes itself through a decoupled architecture that separates the backend API from the frontend, facilitating the development of custom interfaces while maintaining unified user handles and cross-platform communication. It provides granul
Lemmy is a self-hosted, federated discussion platform that uses the ActivityPub protocol to enable decentralized social networking, providing all the core features like user profiles, activity feeds, and content moderation required for building community-driven networks.
Pixelfed is a decentralized, self-hosted photo sharing platform and social network. It uses the ActivityPub protocol to enable federation, allowing independent server instances to share user profiles, media, and posts across a distributed network. The platform distinguishes itself with a focus on media portability and processing, featuring tools for importing content from Instagram and utilizing client-side WebGL for image filter processing. It employs a driver-based storage abstraction to manage media across local disks or S3-compatible cloud object storage. The system includes capabilities
Pixelfed is a decentralized social networking platform that natively supports ActivityPub federation, user profiles, activity feeds, and content moderation, making it a comprehensive solution for building federated communities.
Misskey is a self-hosted, decentralized microblogging platform and federated social media server. It functions as a distributed content management system that allows users to communicate across multiple independent and interconnected server instances using the ActivityPub protocol. The platform distinguishes itself with a dynamic application engine that allows for the creation of interactive applications and custom page layouts using a scripting language. It also features a specialized markup language for rich text rendering, enabling the use of animations and custom styles for consistent con
Misskey is a comprehensive, self-hosted social networking platform that natively supports ActivityPub federation, user profiles, activity feeds, and robust content moderation tools, making it a flagship example for building federated communities.
Diaspora is a federated social networking platform that allows users to run and manage self-hosted community servers, known as pods. It operates as a distributed network where independent server nodes exchange content and users using open protocols and standardized communication schemas. The platform is distinguished by its focus on decentralized identity management and privacy-preserving communication. It includes a privacy-focused media proxy that routes external assets through a local server to protect user identity and supports cross-instance account migration, allowing users to move thei
Diaspora is a mature, self-hostable social networking platform that natively supports federation, user profiles, activity feeds, and content moderation, making it a comprehensive solution for building decentralized communities.
Wanderer is a self-hosted trail database and federated social network for storing GPS tracks and hiking routes. It functions as a GPX route manager and geographic route planner that allows users to catalog outdoor explorations in a private database. The system utilizes the ActivityPub protocol to enable decentralized federation, allowing users to follow others and share activities across independent server instances. This social layer includes collaborative route exchange, engagement management for likes and comments, and granular content visibility controls. The platform provides tools for
Wanderer is a federated social networking platform specifically tailored for outdoor enthusiasts to share GPS tracks and hiking routes, providing the core social features like ActivityPub federation, user profiles, and activity feeds within a niche community context.
Friendica Communications Platform
Friendica is a self-hosted social networking platform that natively supports federation via the ActivityPub protocol and includes all the core features like user profiles, activity feeds, and media sharing.
Pleroma is a lightweight, federated social networking server that natively supports the ActivityPub protocol, providing the core features of user profiles, activity feeds, and media sharing required for building a community.
NodeBB is a real-time, self-hosted community forum platform built on Node.js. It is designed to support scalable discussion environments by utilizing a document-oriented database for content storage and an in-memory engine for high-speed data retrieval and session management. The platform provides a comprehensive administrative interface for managing user groups, forum settings, and system health. What distinguishes the platform is its native support for federated social networking via the ActivityPub protocol, allowing forums to exchange content, synchronize discussions, and interact with de
NodeBB is a self-hosted forum platform that provides essential social features like user profiles, activity feeds, and content moderation, and it includes native support for ActivityPub to enable federation with other social networks.
PeerTube is a decentralized, open-source video hosting platform that enables users to operate independent, interoperable servers. By utilizing the ActivityPub protocol, it connects these servers into a global, federated network where users can follow channels, discover content, and interact across different instances. The platform is designed to function as a self-hosted video content management system, providing a community-driven alternative to centralized media services. What distinguishes PeerTube is its hybrid approach to content delivery and infrastructure management. It integrates peer
PeerTube is a decentralized, federated video-sharing platform that provides core social features like user channels, activity feeds, and content moderation, making it a specialized social networking platform focused on media content.
This project is a social blogging application built with Flask. It provides a platform for user account management, following relationships, and chronological post streams, supported by a PostgreSQL relational database. The application features a multilingual web interface with localized content and date formatting. It is designed as a dockerized web application, utilizing containerization for consistent deployment across different environments. The system integrates a variety of core capabilities, including full-text search with provider abstraction, an asynchronous task worker for backgrou
This is a functional social blogging application that provides core social features like user profiles and activity feeds, though it lacks the federation support required for a modern decentralized social network.
Reddit is a social news aggregator designed for hosting community-driven discussions and content sharing through threaded conversations and user-submitted links. It functions as a platform for managing large volumes of user-generated content, providing a structured interface for programmatic access to site data and core application functionality. The platform utilizes a REST API to expose site data and user interactions to external clients. To maintain performance across large datasets, it employs an external full-text search engine that offloads indexing and query processing from the primary
This repository provides the core codebase for a community-driven social platform featuring user profiles, activity feeds, and content moderation, though it lacks native support for modern decentralized federation protocols.
HumHub is an open-source enterprise social networking framework designed to facilitate internal communication and team collaboration within private organizational networks. It provides a modular architecture that allows organizations to build secure, self-hosted digital workspaces where users can manage profiles, share content, and organize projects through dedicated collaborative spaces. The platform distinguishes itself through a highly extensible plugin system and a granular role-based access control model. By utilizing an event-driven hook system and a modular architecture, developers can
HumHub is a self-hosted social networking platform that provides essential features like user profiles, activity feeds, and content moderation, though it is primarily designed for private organizational collaboration rather than public federated social networking.
Writefreely is an open-source, multi-tenant publishing server and blogging engine. It provides a decentralized system for hosting minimalist blogs, utilizing the ActivityPub protocol to federate content and identities across different servers and social networks. The platform focuses on a distraction-free writing experience by removing social metrics and providing an auto-saving editor. It allows a single user account to manage multiple distinct blogs and pen names, maintaining separate writing personas within one installation. The system includes tools for content organization through hasht
WriteFreely is a federated blogging platform that uses the ActivityPub protocol to enable decentralized social networking, though it is more focused on long-form writing than a traditional social media feed.
This platform is a social network application designed for managing community book exchanges and personal digital libraries. It provides a structured environment for users to organize book collections, coordinate the borrowing and returning of items, and manage approval workflows for shared resources. The system is built as a RESTful backend that integrates user account management with secure, token-based authentication. It utilizes email-driven identity verification to secure access and maintains persistent state through a relational database, ensuring that user profiles and library assets r
This is a social networking platform specifically designed for book exchange, providing core features like user profiles and content feeds, though it lacks the federation support found in broader social networking suites.
This project provides a comprehensive implementation of the AT Protocol, serving as a framework for building decentralized social networking applications. It enables the creation of distributed data repositories where users maintain cryptographic ownership of their identity and content, allowing for portable accounts that can be migrated between independent servers without central authority intervention. The platform distinguishes itself by decoupling content hosting from discovery through modular algorithmic curation. Users can select third-party services to filter and organize their feeds,
This repository provides the core infrastructure and client-side implementation for the AT Protocol, enabling the creation of federated social networking communities with user profiles, activity feeds, and moderation tools.
Simple free to use laravel social network.
This is a standalone social networking platform built with Laravel that provides core features like user profiles and activity feeds, though it lacks the federation support found in more advanced community-focused alternatives.
Social reading and reviewing, decentralized with ActivityPub
BookWyrm is a decentralized social networking platform specifically for book tracking and reviews that uses the ActivityPub protocol to enable federation with other social networks.
| Repository | Stars | Sprache | Lizenz | Letzter Push |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| mastodon/mastodon | 50.1K | Ruby | AGPL-3.0 | |
| tootsuite/mastodon | 50.1K | Ruby | AGPL-3.0 | |
| lemmynet/lemmy | 14.5K | Rust | AGPL-3.0 | |
| pixelfed/pixelfed | 7K | PHP | AGPL-3.0 | |
| misskey-dev/misskey | 11.2K | TypeScript | AGPL-3.0 | |
| diaspora/diaspora | 13.7K | Ruby | AGPL-3.0 | |
| open-wanderer/wanderer | 3.7K | Go | AGPL-3.0 | |
| friendica/friendica | 1.7K | PHP | AGPL-3.0 | |
| pleroma/pleroma | 0 | — | — | — |
| nodebb/nodebb | 15.1K | JavaScript | GPL-3.0 |