head to head · open source
Mastodon vs upvote-rss
Mastodon has 50,328 GitHub stars, 7,504 forks, 4,525 open issues and last shipped yesterday. upvote-rss has 500 stars, 13 forks, 15 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. Mastodon leads on adoption by 9,966% (50,328 vs 500 stars). Mastodon is written in Ruby under AGPL-3.0; upvote-rss is written in PHP under MIT. Mastodon has attracted 15% as many forks as stars, upvote-rss 3%. 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 | upvote-rss | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 500 |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-26 | 2026-03-13 |
| Forks | ⑂ 7.5K | ⑂ 13 |
| 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 upvote-rss if
- You want the upvote-rss feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and upvote-rss 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 upvote-rss
Upvote RSS is a self hostable PHP application that generates rich RSS feeds of the most popular posts from Reddit, Hacker News, Lemmy, Lobste.rs, PieFed, Mbin, and GitHub, aimed at people who want to follow those communities from a feed reader rather than browsing them directly.
read the full upvote-rss overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Mastodon or upvote-rss more popular?
Mastodon has 50,328 GitHub stars and upvote-rss has 500. Mastodon has the larger community by that measure.
Are Mastodon and upvote-rss free?
Both are open source. Mastodon is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and upvote-rss under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Mastodon and upvote-rss?
Mastodon is written in Ruby and upvote-rss 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 upvote-rss?
Choose Mastodon if you want the larger community (50,328 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose upvote-rss if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.