best-of ranking · updated nightly

Best Open Source Community & Social Tools

Ranked by GitHub stars — actual adoption, not editorial taste. All 10 are free, open source and self-hostable; license and last activity on every entry.

1. 1
   Mastodon ★ 50K

   Decentralized social networking in your control

   AGPL-3.0 Ruby pushed 2026-09-17 details →
2. 2
   maigret ★ 38K

   🕵️‍♂️ Collect a dossier on a person by username from 3000+ sites

   MIT Python pushed 2026-09-17 details →
3. 3
   glance ★ 37K

   A self-hosted dashboard that puts all your feeds in one place

   AGPL-3.0 Go pushed 2026-09-05 details →
4. 4
   Bluesky ★ 18K

   Social media reimagined for community and connection

   MIT TypeScript pushed 2026-09-17 details →
5. 5
   Lemmy ★ 15K

   Build your own federated discussion community

   AGPL-3.0 Rust pushed 2026-09-16 details →
6. 6
   giscus ★ 12K

   A commenting system powered by GitHub Discussions. :octocat: :speech_balloon: :gem:

   MIT TypeScript pushed 2026-05-26 details →
7. 7
   owncast ★ 12K

   Take control over your live stream video by running it yourself. Streaming + chat out of the box.

   MIT Go pushed 2026-09-16 details →
8. 8
   misskey ★ 11K

   🌎 A completely free and open interplanetary-microblogging platform 🚀

   AGPL-3.0 TypeScript pushed 2026-09-17 details →
9. 9
   core ★ 8.8K

   :cloud: ownCloud web server core (Files, DAV, etc.)

   AGPL-3.0 PHP pushed 2026-09-17 details →
10. 10
    Pixelfed ★ 7.1K

    Ad-free photo sharing with privacy and federation

    AGPL-3.0 PHP pushed 2026-09-17 details →

last updated nightly · ranking method: github stars, live-tracked

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