Best Self-hosted Federated Social Networks tools in 2026

Mastodon is an open-source, ActivityPub-compatible social network server for microblogging, offering federated timelines, moderation tools, media support, and APIs.

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Threads+7

PeerTube is a decentralized, ActivityPub-federated video hosting platform with live streaming, P2P WebRTC delivery, and customizable community-run instances.

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YouTube+8

Lemmy is a federated, self-hostable link aggregator and forum platform for creating Reddit-like communities with voting, comments, moderation tools, and ActivityPub feder...

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Reddit+3

Open-source federated social network built around independently run pods, privacy via Aspects, and standard social features; implemented in Ruby on Rails.

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Mastodon (mastodon.social)+6

Misskey is an open-source federated microblogging platform using ActivityPub, enabling communities to run their own social server and interact across the fediverse.

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Misskey+6

Pixelfed is a free, open-source, ActivityPub-based photo sharing social network that federates with the Fediverse for decentralized social media.

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Instagram+7

WriteFreely is a clean, Markdown-based publishing platform for creating minimalist blogs and communities, with ActivityPub federation and low-resource Go deployment.

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Micro.blog+10

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation for running federated, secure real-time chat and collaboration on your own infrastructure.

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Element Matrix (Hosted)+19

Self-hosted trail catalog to plan routes, upload GPX/GPS tracks, add metadata, and search, filter, and share trails with optional federation.

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Ride with GPS+2

BookWyrm is a federated social network to track reading, write reviews, share quotes, and discover books with communities via ActivityPub federation.

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Goodreads+5

Peergos is a peer-to-peer encrypted file storage and private social platform with fine-grained access control, capability links, and a web UI for secure sharing.

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Proton Drive+12

Movim is a federated social platform and web-based XMPP client for blogging, chat, communities, and real-time messaging with a responsive cross‑platform interface.

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Element Matrix (Hosted)+15

Ech0 is a lightweight open-source, self-hosted federated publishing platform (ActivityPub) with a Vue-based UI, SQLite storage, Docker deployment and built-in Markdown ed...

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Micro.blog+13

Friendica is a decentralized, federated social network server that connects to the Fediverse, offering posts, profiles, events, photos, and strong privacy controls.

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Mastodon (mastodon.social)+8

Open source link-in-bio platform for creating a single landing page of links, with social features like a feed, discovery, questions, and likes.

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Campsite.bio+1

Open Source Social Network (OSSN) is PHP-based social networking software to build your own community site with profiles, newsfeed, groups, chat, photos, and admin tools.

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Threads+1

Hyphanet (formerly Freenet) is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant communication and publishing using an encrypted, decentralized data store and plugin-based...

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Mastodon (mastodon.social)+8

Self-hosted, federated catalog and social tracker for books, movies, TV, music, podcasts, games, and performances with ratings, reviews, lists, and ActivityPub.

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BookWyrm+7

Postmarks is a self-hosted, single-user bookmark manager that publishes and federates bookmarks over ActivityPub with Mastodon-compatible platforms.

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Pinboard+10

Adds ActivityPub federation to Nextcloud so users can post, follow, and interact with the fediverse while keeping content on their Nextcloud instance.

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Mastodon (mastodon.social)+7

Headless federated microblogging server for single users that implements ActivityPub and Mastodon-compatible REST APIs for use with Mastodon clients.

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Mastodon (mastodon.social)+5

Lightweight single-user ActivityPub server using SQLite; supports rich text, Markdown, images, polls, threading, translations and MCP.

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Mastodon (mastodon.social)+5

Mbin is a federated content aggregator offering voting, discussion and microblogging via ActivityPub. A community-focused fork of kbin, built with PHP and Symfony.

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Reddit+19

Federated, open-source short-video platform for communities and creators with ActivityPub federation, API access, and creator-focused features.

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PeerTube+1

A TypeScript Node.js crossposter that synchronizes Twitter tweets to Mastodon and Bluesky; distributed as a Docker image. Project is archived.

Hatsu is a self-hosted ActivityPub bridge that automates federation for static sites by mapping site users and posts to Fediverse actors, handling follows, posts, and rep...

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Mastodon (mastodon.social)+4

Lightweight federated social network served over the Gemini protocol; implements ActivityPub, stores data in a single SQLite file, and is written in Go.

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Mastodon (mastodon.social)+6

Single-user self-hosted federated bookmark manager written in Go, using a single SQLite file, with ActivityPub support, web archiving, RSS and tagging.

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Raindrop.io+13

A single-binary, low-resource Matrix homeserver in Rust; simple setup, RocksDB (default) or SQLite backends, built with axum and Ruma.

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Element Matrix (Hosted)+19

Akkoma is an Elixir/Phoenix fork of Pleroma implementing ActivityPub, with Misskey-flavored markdown, custom emoji reactions, multiple frontends and performance improveme...

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Pleroma+5