Mastodon VS Misskey

Compare Mastodon vs Misskey and see what are their differences.

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Mastodon Misskey
1224 15
45,705 9,389
1.1% 3.9%
10.0 10.0
about 9 hours ago about 6 hours ago
Ruby TypeScript
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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 2024-03-15.

Misskey

Posts with mentions or reviews of Misskey. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-04-17.
  • Now, you can embed Mastodon posts in Medium stories
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Apr 2023
    on Misskey: https://github.com/misskey-dev/misskey/issues/9504

    There is a lot of resistance to the idea. The browser UX for registering protocols is not particularly intuitive. The protocol should not be named after Mastodon because they are defensive of their trademark, and it wouldn't be accurate since the user identifier could be followed from any ActivityPub compatible software.

    If you look at the newer comments on the Mastodon github thread I posted you can see web+ap:// recommended, or apub://

    I think there just needs to be enough collective will to make this happen. Likely another project will need to take the lead because Mastodon team has decided the browser UX is too much of a barrier. Maybe glitch-soc can do a proof of concept.

  • Tumblr-like blogging/microblogging
    5 projects | /r/selfhosted | 14 Feb 2023
  • Misskey: An Interplanetary Microblogging Platform
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Jan 2023
  • Facebook Censored Me for Mentioning Open-Source Social Network Mastodon
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Sep 2021
    * in case of a mute, it could also be not wanting their federated timeline to be flooded with primarily mastodon.social posts

    Lack of federation between these instances and mastodon.social could be a reason not to pick mastodon.social. (Similar situation applies to mastodon.online btw, which is a spin-off server of m.s.)

    Another reason to pick a different instance could be not wanting to use mainline Mastodon software. For example because you want to run your own instance on limited hardware (Mastodon can get a bit resource intensive), don't like Ruby, miss certain features, don't like the front-end (though alternative external front-ends to Mastodon do exist), or some other reason.

    Personally I am on an instance that runs [Mastodon Glitch Edition, also known as Glitch-Soc](https://glitch-soc.github.io/docs/), which is a compatible fork of Mastodon which implements a bunch of nice features such as increased post character count (Mastodon defaults to 500 characters per post, Glitch-Soc supports increasing this in the server settings), Markdown support (though only instances that also support HTML-formatted posts will see your formatting; mainline Mastodon servers will serve a stripped down version of your post instead), and improved support for filters / content warnings / toot collapsing, optional warnings when posting uncaptioned media, and other additional features.

    Another alternative Mastodon fork is [Hometown](https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown) which focuses more on the local timeline (showing posts only from your own instance) with the addition of local-only posts, to nurture a tighter knit community.

    Aside from Mastodon there are other implementations of ActivityPub which can still federate with Mastodon instances, such as [Misskey](https://github.com/misskey-dev/misskey), [diaspora*](https://diasporafoundation.org/) (which AFAIK inspired Google Plus back in the day), [Hubzilla](https://hubzilla.org//page/hubzilla/hubzilla-project), [Peertube](https://joinpeertube.org/) (focused on peer-to-peer video distribution), [Friendica](https://friendi.ca/), [Pleroma](https://pleroma.social/), [Socialhome](https://socialhome.network/), [GoToSocial](https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial), [Pixelfed](https://pixelfed.org/) (which started as a sort of federated Instagram alternative) and more. [Fediverse.party](https://fediverse.party/) is a nice way to discover various protocols that make up the bigger Fediverse.

  • Aave Plans To Build “Twitter on Ethereum”
    2 projects | /r/ethereum | 19 Jul 2021
    We already have working decentralized social media. Just take systems based on Activity Pub and have a Federation of servers and communities. Plenty of mature systems like Pleroma, Mastodon, write.as, Misskey to choose from.

What are some alternatives?

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

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

Lemmy - 🐀 A link aggregator and forum for the fediverse

Friendica - Friendica Communications Platform

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

nostr - a truly censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter that has a chance of working

PixelFed - Photo Sharing. For Everyone.

nitter - Alternative Twitter front-end

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

Reddit

Discourse - A platform for community discussion. Free, open, simple.

Hubzilla

hive - Fast. Scalable. Powerful. The Blockchain for Web3