Top 6 PHP Federation Projects

Nextcloud

607 25,494 10.0 PHP

☁️ Nextcloud server, a safe home for all your data

Project mention: Happy 20th Anniversary, Gmail. I'm Sorry I'm Leaving You | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-04-15

It really is hard to leave Gmail when all of your data has been conveniently stored therein. This is one of Google's retention strategies and it is indeed brilliant.
That said, there's a vast number of self-hosted alternatives like Stalwart Mail (email) [1], Immich (images) [2], NextCloud (Google Docs) [3], etc.
[1] https://stalwa.rt
[2] https://immich.app
[3] https://nextcloud.com/

PixelFed

158 5,400 9.9 PHP

Photo Sharing. For Everyone.

Project mention: Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2024) | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-01-02

Currently contributing to Pixelfed project to gain experience: https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/pulls?q=is%3Aclosed+is%...

WorkOS

workos.com sponsored

The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
Friendica

60 1,371 0.0 PHP

Friendica Communications Platform

Project mention: Facebook Groups alternatives? | /r/selfhosted | 2023-12-07

You might want to look into some of the Facebook-like open-source social networking programs like Friendica, Hubzilla, Libervia, or GNU Social

kbin

74 750 9.8 PHP

A reddit-like content aggregator and micro-blogging platform for the fediverse.

Project mention: Ask HN: Which Lemmy communities and instances are you visiting daily? | news.ycombinator.com | 2023-07-31

One will notice the regrettable duplication in that list, and it's (AFAIK) a massive unsolved problem in the Fediverse. My mental model is that Lemmy is exactly like signing up to mailing lists but where one can also upvote and downvote posts (err, some instances don't allow downvotes, so there's that). That means that folks who want the most coverage for their submission will post it to every one of the duplicated mailing lists, which results in their own message-id along with their own threaded replies and upvote/downvote scores. Some folks have proposed using the link-url and subject for deduplicating them, but I believe it's just a proposal from the client side and the servers will do no such thing (although running your own instance hypothetically would allow for such customization)
There's also https://kbin.pub which is its own ActivityPub implementation and behaves a little different from Lemmy, I'm sure with good and bad parts. IIRC there's some federation drama between Kbin and some Lemmy instances, and (AFAIK) Kbin does not have any mobile apps whereas there are currently several which speak the Lemmy API. I'd credit it with "first mover effect" more than one being objectively better than the other
I do hope Lemmy catches on and siphons users off of Reddit because the rug-pull from Reddit was a trust-breaking middle finger, IMHO. I wished the same thing for Mastodon, too, but I think the inertia is just too strong with X

social

4 486 8.5 PHP

🎉 Social can be used for work, or to connect to the fediverse!

Project mention: Could you set up like your own personal fediverse instance | /r/fediverse | 2023-06-05

Fill your boots

friendica-addons

1 115 9.3 PHP

Addons for Friendica. This is a mirror of the repository at git.friendi.ca

Project mention: Friendica is a great Swiss army knife for the Fediverse that can also double as a Reddit alternative | /r/RedditAlternatives | 2023-07-03

Servers can also install various addons which add extra functionality. From various protocols (you can even crosspost to Tumblr!) to things like a language filter or collapsing posts if they contain certain words - there's a lot of functionality in them.

NOTE: The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars. The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or since we started tracking (Dec 2020). The latest post mention was on 2024-04-15.