head to head · open source
Mastodon vs discuit
Mastodon has 50,465 GitHub stars, 7,536 forks, 4,525 open issues and last shipped yesterday. discuit has 553 stars, 77 forks, 69 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. Mastodon leads on adoption by 9,026% (50,465 vs 553 stars). Mastodon is written in Ruby under AGPL-3.0; discuit is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0. Mastodon has attracted 15% as many forks as stars, discuit 14%. Mastodon was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (social-network), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Mastodon | discuit | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 553 |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-28 |
| Forks | ⑂ 7.5K | ⑂ 77 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Mastodon if
- You weight community size — 50K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick discuit if
- You want the discuit feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and discuit fits your workflow better
About Mastodon
[!NOTE] Want to learn more about Mastodon? Click below to find out more in a video. Mastodon is a free, open source social network server based on ActivityPub where users can follow friends and discover new ones. On Mastodon, users can publish anything they want: links, pictures, text, and video. All Mastodon servers are interoperable as a federated network (users on one server can seamlessly communicate with users from another one, including non Mastodon software that implements ActivityPub!) Navigation Project homepage 🐘 Donate to support development 🎁 View sponsors Blog 📰 Documentation 📚 Official…
read the full Mastodon overview →
About discuit
Discuit This is the codebase that powers Discuit, which is an open source community platform, an alternative to Reddit. Built with: Go: The backend. React: The frontend. MariaDB: The main datastore. Redis: For transient data. Getting started Running locally To setup a development environment of Discuit on your local computer: 1. Install Go (1.21 or higher) by following the instructions at go.dev. 1. Install MariaDB (11.3 or higher), Redis, Node.js (and NPM). On Ubuntu, for instance, you might have to run the following commands: 1. Create a MariaDB database. 1. Discuit uses libvips for fast image transformations…
read the full discuit overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Mastodon or discuit more popular?
Mastodon has 50,465 GitHub stars and discuit has 553. Mastodon has the larger community by that measure.
Are Mastodon and discuit free?
Both are open source. Mastodon is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and discuit under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Mastodon and discuit?
Mastodon is written in Ruby and discuit in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Mastodon or discuit?
Choose Mastodon if you want the larger community (50,465 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose discuit if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.