Mastodon VS Discourse

Compare Mastodon vs Discourse and see what are their differences.

CodeRabbit: AI Code Reviews for Developers
Revolutionize your code reviews with AI. CodeRabbit offers PR summaries, code walkthroughs, 1-click suggestions, and AST-based analysis. Boost productivity and code quality across all major languages with each PR.
coderabbit.ai
featured
Nutrient – The #1 PDF SDK Library, trusted by 10K+ developers
Other PDF SDKs promise a lot - then break. Laggy scrolling, poor mobile UX, tons of bugs, and lack of support cost you endless frustrations. Nutrient’s SDK handles billion-page workloads - so you don’t have to debug PDFs. Used by ~1 billion end users in more than 150 different countries.
www.nutrient.io
featured
Mastodon Discourse
1,244 205
47,725 43,189
0.7% 1.1%
10.0 10.0
4 days ago 4 days ago
Ruby Ruby
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 GNU General Public License v3.0 only
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Mastodon

Posts with mentions or reviews of Mastodon. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-01-21.
  • Bluesky OAuth2 Client, with Vanilla JavaScript
    7 projects | dev.to | 21 Jan 2025
    NOTE: Again... What the hell is a "PDS Server"? Well... Click here. For those using Mastodon is just like an "instance".
  • Accounts Vulnerable Due to Google's OAuth Flaw
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Jan 2025
    > A unique user ID that doesn’t change over time.

    This is already in the spec for OpenID Connect: https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-core-1_0.html#Subjec...

    And it's already recommended to rely on it and not the email to prevent issues such as: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/security/advisories/GHS...

  • Gazzetta, an RSS Reader for Mastodon
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Dec 2024
    Mastodon offers RSS feeds for users (e.g. https://mastodon.social/@primatologyxyz/with_replies.rss), but efforts to extend native RSS support seem to have gone stale (e.g. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/21500).

    However, there are RSS bridges like RSSHub (https://docs.rsshub.app/routes/social-media#mastodon) and OpenRSS (https://openrss.org/blog/mastodon-rss-feeds) that offer RSS feeds for the "Explore" and "Hashtag" sections for local instances.

  • PeerTube mobile app: discover videos while caring for your attention
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Dec 2024
    Do they not have trumpets where you live? Did "tooting one's own horn" imply breaking wind during the annual performance review? Far and away the most common use of "toot" is playing a note on a horn.

    At one point, Gargron, the main guy behind Mastodon, even mentioned using a trumpet as the basis of Mastodon's logo branding: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/962

    "Toot" also has the double entendre. In all my life, I've never heard anyone outside a playground use it to describe flatulence. In my personal experience, it's almost always been about the musical notes. I'm not in a band or otherwise around musicians more than the average person, either.

  • Mastodon's weaknesses and how to fix them
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Nov 2024
    So basically I couldn’t change it to lowercase on their interface, but when deleted I could not register it again.

    And that in a nutshell is my experience with everything Mastodon :)

    After years the issue is still open and makes the first impression of a lot of users pretty bad.

    https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/20487

  • Thoughts on Bluesky
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Nov 2024
    I'm kind of being doom'n'gloom, but unfortunately, this always seems to happen, and folks who previously disavowed Twitter/X when Elon took over still stuck around for 2 years.

    I don't believe the whole "I don't know what server to pick" complaint about Mastodon, because the mainsite literally has a huge button that says "Join mastodon.social"[1]

    [1] https://joinmastodon.org/

  • Bluesky is currently gaining more than 1M users a day
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Nov 2024
    Highly recommend folks check out Mastodon as well - fully decentralized, no ads, no algo, no corporate control.

    It is continuing to grow steadily and has tons of activity compared to a few years ago.

    https://joinmastodon.org/

  • 25 Project Ideas from Beginner to Advanced with Open Source Contributions
    32 projects | dev.to | 13 Nov 2024
    View on GitHub
  • ERROR: index row size 3056 exceeds btree version 4 maximum 2704 for index
    1 project | dev.to | 20 Sep 2024
    Modern SQL databases store documents in JSON or JSONB, and you may want to index large attributes. SQL databases can also do text searches without the need for another database. For example, here is an issue encountered in Mattermost on PostgreSQL that will not happen when migrating to YugabyteDB.
  • Support Post Migration on Mastodon
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Sep 2024

Discourse

Posts with mentions or reviews of Discourse. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-12-26.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Mastodon and Discourse you can also consider the following projects:

diaspora* - A privacy-aware, distributed, open source social network.

Orange Forum - A light-weight forum

Friendica - Friendica Communications Platform

Forem - The best Rails 3 and Rails 4 forum engine. Ever.

Misskey - 🌎 A completely free and open interplanetary microblogging platform 🚀

phpBB - phpBB Development: phpBB is a popular open-source bulletin board written in PHP. This repository also contains the history of version 2.

Lemmy - 🐀 A link aggregator and forum for the fediverse

Flarum - Simple forum software for building great communities.

GNU social - GNU social is social communication software for both public and private communications.

nodeBB - Node.js based forum software built for the modern web

HumHub - HumHub is an Open Source Enterprise Social Network. Easy to install, intuitive to use and extendable with countless freely available modules.

BuddyPress - BuddyPress DEVELOPMENT repo. This repository is just a mirror of the development SVN at https://buddypress.svn.wordpress.org/. Please include a link to a pre-existing ticket on https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ with every pull request.

CodeRabbit: AI Code Reviews for Developers
Revolutionize your code reviews with AI. CodeRabbit offers PR summaries, code walkthroughs, 1-click suggestions, and AST-based analysis. Boost productivity and code quality across all major languages with each PR.
coderabbit.ai
featured
Nutrient – The #1 PDF SDK Library, trusted by 10K+ developers
Other PDF SDKs promise a lot - then break. Laggy scrolling, poor mobile UX, tons of bugs, and lack of support cost you endless frustrations. Nutrient’s SDK handles billion-page workloads - so you don’t have to debug PDFs. Used by ~1 billion end users in more than 150 different countries.
www.nutrient.io
featured

Did you know that Ruby is
the 12th most popular programming language
based on number of references?