head to head · open source
Mastodon vs laravel-love
Mastodon has 50,299 GitHub stars, 7,498 forks, 4,525 open issues and last shipped yesterday. laravel-love has 1,204 stars, 76 forks, 11 open issues and last shipped 5 months ago. Mastodon leads on adoption by 4,078% (50,299 vs 1,204 stars). Mastodon is written in Ruby under AGPL-3.0; laravel-love is written in PHP under MIT. Mastodon has attracted 15% as many forks as stars, laravel-love 6%. Mastodon was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | laravel-love | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 1.2K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-04-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 7.5K | ⑂ 76 |
| 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 laravel-love if
- You want the laravel-love feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and laravel-love fits your workflow better
About Mastodon
Mastodon is a free, open source, self hosted social network server built on ActivityPub that lets anyone run a microblogging community which interoperates with the wider Fediverse, and it is aimed at individuals, communities, and organisations that want to own their social graph instead of renting it from a platform.
read the full Mastodon overview →
About laravel-love
Laravel Love is an open source PHP package that adds social reactions to Laravel Eloquent models. It is built for the Laravel ecosystem and distributed through Composer under the name cybercog/laravel love . The project describes itself as the emotional part of an application: it lets people express how they feel about content, and it is designed so that any model can be made reactable in minutes.
read the full laravel-love overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Mastodon or laravel-love more popular?
Mastodon has 50,299 GitHub stars and laravel-love has 1,204. Mastodon has the larger community by that measure.
Are Mastodon and laravel-love free?
Both are open source. Mastodon is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and laravel-love under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Mastodon and laravel-love?
Mastodon is written in Ruby and laravel-love in PHP. 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 laravel-love?
Choose Mastodon if you want the larger community (50,299 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose laravel-love if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.