Mastodon
Run your own social network node that talks to the rest of the fediverse.
What it is
Mastodon is server software for a federated social network. You run an instance, people sign up on it, and it exchanges posts with thousands of other instances over ActivityPub, so your users can follow and talk to people elsewhere without a central company in the middle.
A production instance is a Rails application with PostgreSQL, Redis and a streaming service, fronted by a web server. As the self-hoster you are responsible for all of it, plus email delivery, object storage and the moderation decisions that come with running a public community.
It is genuinely worth running for a small instance serving a group, an organisation or just yourself, or if you want to understand how federation works. It is not a drop-in replacement for a hosted social account, and the operational weight is the reason.
Why we recommend it
There is no central company to depend on
Your instance, your data, your rules. No policy change at a platform can lock your community out, which is the entire argument for federation and the reason Mastodon exists.
It federates with a large existing network
Thousands of instances already talk to each other. You are not launching an empty network, you are joining one that has users and content on day one.
Moderation is a decision you actually control
You choose who to federate with and what to block. For an organisation or a community with a particular culture, that control is worth more than raw reach.
The stack is conventional and well documented
Rails, PostgreSQL and Redis with an official Docker Compose file and an interactive setup wizard. The parts are not exotic. The cost is that there are a lot of them and they all have to stay healthy.
How it scores
These are our editorial ratings, not benchmark results. We score on how the project behaves in practice — how long it takes to get running, how good the documentation is, how responsive the maintainers are, and how well it holds up over time. The licence and star count above are read from GitHub and are a snapshot.
Pros and cons
Strengths
- Federated with a large existing network rather than a standalone silo
- Full control over moderation, federation rules and your users data
- Official Docker Compose setup with an interactive configuration wizard
- Mature, long-running project on a stable Rails stack
- Media can be offloaded to S3-compatible object storage
Trade-offs
- This is real infrastructure to run: Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis, a streaming service and a reverse proxy, all of which you monitor and upgrade yourself
- Reliable email delivery is not optional, since users cannot confirm or reset anything without it, which means configuring and maintaining an SMTP provider
- Object storage is effectively required once you federate, because remote media grows the disk without anyone asking it to
- Federation makes moderation and abuse handling ongoing work rather than a one-off task
- Licensed AGPL 3.0, and the copyleft terms are deliberate here: they matter if you intend to modify and redistribute the code
How to get it
One-line install
Prefer the terminal? Copy a command and you are done.
git clone https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon && cd mastodon
docker compose run --rm web bundle exec rake mastodon:setup
docker compose up -d
Source and documentation
At a glance
| Category | Self-hosted |
|---|---|
| Licence | AGPL 3.0 |
| Written in | Ruby |
| GitHub stars | 50,296 |
| Repository | mastodon/mastodon |
Licence and star count were read from the GitHub API when this page was generated and are a snapshot. Check the repository for the current figure and the authoritative licence text.
Other Self-hosted tools
We are not affiliated with Mastodon or its maintainers. We list it because it is genuinely useful and genuinely free. If you plan to build a commercial product on top of it, read the licence on the repository first.