Mastodon VS nostr

Compare Mastodon vs nostr and see what are their differences.

nostr

a truly censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter that has a chance of working (by nostr-protocol)
Stream - Scalable APIs for Chat, Feeds, Moderation, & Video.
Stream helps developers build engaging apps that scale to millions with performant and flexible Chat, Feeds, Moderation, and Video APIs and SDKs powered by a global edge network and enterprise-grade infrastructure.
getstream.io
featured
InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads
InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
www.influxdata.com
featured
Mastodon nostr
1,248 77
48,524 10,697
0.4% 0.6%
10.0 4.6
5 days ago 11 days ago
Ruby Rust
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 Public Domain
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 2025-02-21.
  • Mastodon v4.4.0-Beta.2
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Jun 2025
  • New Mastodon ToS IP clause cannot be revoked, not even by deleting content
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Jun 2025
  • Bluesky's Quest to Build Nontoxic Social Media
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Apr 2025
  • Any social platforms not focused on algorithms?
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Feb 2025
  • 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/

nostr

Posts with mentions or reviews of nostr. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-01-18.

What are some alternatives?

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

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

simplex-chat - SimpleX - the first messaging network operating without user identifiers of any kind - 100% private by design! iOS, Android and desktop apps 📱!

Friendica - Friendica Communications Platform

ipfs - Peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol

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

matrix-spec - The Matrix protocol specification

Stream - Scalable APIs for Chat, Feeds, Moderation, & Video.
Stream helps developers build engaging apps that scale to millions with performant and flexible Chat, Feeds, Moderation, and Video APIs and SDKs powered by a global edge network and enterprise-grade infrastructure.
getstream.io
featured
InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads
InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
www.influxdata.com
featured

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