Fediverse

Top 23 Fediverse Open-Source Projects

  • Mastodon

    Your self-hosted, globally interconnected microblogging community

    Project mention: Open source at Fastly is getting opener | dev.to | 2024-03-15

    Through the Fast Forward program, we give free services and support to open source projects and the nonprofits that support them. We support many of the world’s top programming languages (like Python, Rust, Ruby, and the wonderful Scratch), foundational technologies (cURL, the Linux kernel, Kubernetes, OpenStreetMap), and projects that make the internet better and more fun for everyone (Inkscape, Mastodon, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Terms of Service; Didn’t Read).

  • Lemmy

    🐀 A link aggregator and forum for the fediverse

    Project mention: Reddit must share IP addresses of piracy-discussing users, film studios say | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-01-14

    Lemmy is like Reddit and here because it has threaded comment discussions.

    It's also federated, so you can pick a server you like and have discussions with users from various servers together.

    https://join-lemmy.org/

    Some Reddit apps switched to supporting Lemmy instead when they were kicked off the API.

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  • Misskey

    🌎 An interplanetary microblogging platform 🚀

  • PixelFed

    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%...

  • gotosocial

    Fast, fun, small ActivityPub server.

    Project mention: Official Lemmy instance to migrate off reddit | /r/rust | 2023-06-05

    Honestly if a server allows free login, then it shouldn't matter how the donations are spent, the admins are probably at a loss anyway. I've seen large phpBB forums run on donations for a long time, so maybe federated socials can work too. One unfortunate thing I've noticed from running a single-user GoToSocial instance is that it consumes a lot of storage, I'm getting 8Gb just from myself and the instances I follow. This could be brought down with more agressive cache settings, but it still shows that people using these new social media still have habits from Twitter or Reddit, where bandwidth and storage is paid for by advertisers, and don't realize how many gigabytes they're casually moving around. I really hope this won't be the downfall of the Fediverse.

  • Tusky

    An Android client for the microblogging server Mastodon

    Project mention: ⟳ 4 apps added, 32 updated at f-droid.org | /r/FDroidUpdates | 2023-12-08

    Tusky (version 24.0): A multi account client for the social network Mastodon

  • Friendica

    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

  • WorkOS

    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.

  • pinafore

    Alternative web client for Mastodon (UNMAINTAINED)

  • awesome-lemmy-instances

    Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

    Project mention: OpenSubtitles is not open anymore | news.ycombinator.com | 2023-11-16
  • GuideToMastodon

    An increasingly less-brief guide to Mastodon

    Project mention: Great job, Twitter | /r/comics | 2023-05-31

    PS: Misc. other resources - Mastodon 101, An Increasingly Less-Brief Guide to Mastodon, Mastodon Official Help Guide, Some Tips & Tricks, How to grow your presence, More Tips & Tricks, and probably most useful .... on Reddit there's /r/Mastodon

  • kbin

    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

  • masto.js

    🐘 Universal Mastodon API client for JavaScript

  • social

    🎉 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

  • Tuba

    Browse the Fediverse

    Project mention: Why are reblog/favourite numbers different between platforms? | /r/Mastodon | 2023-07-03
  • aardwolf

    Powering connected social communities with open software.

  • Kaiteki

    The comfy SNS client for everything, everywhere

  • awesome-fediverse

    A curated, collaborative list of awesome Fediverse resources

    Project mention: Lemmy now has over 2M users across 915 instances | news.ycombinator.com | 2023-06-30

    It's always the same comment: X is different from A, therefore X is not a good replacement for A.

    The whole point of federation is to avoid the problems we're seeing with Facebook, with Instagram, with Reddit, with Twitter: control over your internet content. Not having a mega-corp bent on maximizing profits and using you as a milking cow, but instead have a say and have actual power in how communities are built and managed. It is 100% expected that Lemmy or KBin is different from Reddit. You say that's not a good user experience, but I challenge that assertion: I say it's not a bad UX, but it's a different UX, and you don't want to change. Well, if you don't want to change, stay on Reddit, that's not a problem. But if you're going to investigate what the fediverse is, please learn what it's about, how it's built. Don't expect to find the same old world you know, that's on purpose !

    > It makes no sense to me at all

    You're on HN, a forum where members pride themselves in being intelligent enough to dig around, learn by themselves, be different, hack around. You haven't made efforts understanding how the fediverse works, or why it's different, and your conclusion is _not_ that you should investigate, but that you should complain that it's too different. I don't understand this reasoning.

    I think an issue in the mentality in this forum is that people mostly expect products, ie a package that is made by an entity and that is served to users. The package is expected to be complete, shiny, wonderful, the entity is expected to do whatever it takes to convince users. It's an asymmetry that is completely opposite to the whole concept of being a hacker, which is supposed to be the H of HN.

    Here's a good post explaining what the fediverse is about: https://medium.com/@VirtualAdept/a-friendly-introduction-to-...

    And here are a few links and resources if you want to go deeper: https://github.com/emilebosch/awesome-fediverse

  • wordpress-activitypub

    ActivityPub for WordPress

    Project mention: wordpress-activitypub 2.0.0 | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-01-09
  • bridgy-fed

    🌉 A bridge between decentralized social network protocols

    Project mention: Opt-out is a terrible default and should be reconsidered | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-02-22
  • Smithereen

    Federated, ActivityPub-compatible social network server with friends, walls, and groups.

    Project mention: Why is no one making a new version of old Facebook? | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-02-20

    They do, or rather not old Facebook, but old VK: https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen

    As a bonus it's an ActivityPub enabled application, so any specific instance of it requires less work to get the network effect going. :)

  • macstodon

    A basic Mastodon client for Classic Mac OS

    Project mention: Macstodon: A Basic Mastodon Client for Classic Mac OS | news.ycombinator.com | 2023-05-17
  • kitsune

    🦊 (fast) ActivityPub-federated microblogging (by kitsune-soc)

    Project mention: Kitsune v0.0.1-pre.3 - lightweight ActivityPub server | /r/rust | 2023-08-29
  • mastodon-simplified-federation

    Simplifies following and interacting with remote users on other Mastodon instances.

    Project mention: Reddit permanently bans account of user advocating Lemmy migration | news.ycombinator.com | 2023-06-06

    For #2 this exists: https://github.com/rugk/mastodon-simplified-federation

  • SaaSHub

    SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

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 2024-03-15.

Fediverse related posts

Index

What are some of the best open-source Fediverse projects? This list will help you:

Project Stars
1 Mastodon 45,874
2 Lemmy 12,784
3 Misskey 9,468
4 PixelFed 5,400
5 gotosocial 3,424
6 Tusky 2,383
7 Friendica 1,369
8 pinafore 1,022
9 awesome-lemmy-instances 937
10 GuideToMastodon 906
11 kbin 750
12 masto.js 703
13 social 486
14 Tuba 474
15 aardwolf 470
16 Kaiteki 467
17 awesome-fediverse 451
18 wordpress-activitypub 446
19 bridgy-fed 410
20 Smithereen 342
21 macstodon 274
22 kitsune 270
23 mastodon-simplified-federation 249
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
www.saashub.com