head to head · open source
Mastodon vs upvote-rss
Mastodon has 50,583 GitHub stars, 7,571 forks, 4,525 open issues and last shipped yesterday. upvote-rss has 513 stars, 17 forks, 15 open issues and last shipped 21 days ago. Mastodon leads on adoption by 9,760% (50,583 vs 513 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Mastodon | upvote-rss | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 51K | ★ 513 |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-11-11 | 2026-10-22 |
| Forks | ⑂ 7.6K | ⑂ 17 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Mastodon if
- You weight community size — 51K 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
[!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 upvote-rss
Upvote RSS Generate rich RSS feeds for popular posts from social aggregation websites Reddit, Lemmy, Hacker News, Lobsters, PieFed, Mbin, and git forge GitHub. Table of Contents Features Motivation Installation Usage Feed options Additional configuration Environment variables Disclaimer Attribution License Features Supports subreddits, Hacker News, Lemmy communities, Lobste.rs, PieFed communities, Mbin magazines, and GitHub Configurable filtering to dial in the right number of posts per day in your feed reader Embedded post media (videos, galleries, and images) Parsers to extract clean content and add featured…
read the full upvote-rss overview →
More in Community & Social
Related comparisons
More Social Networking projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Social Networking field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Mastodon or upvote-rss more popular?
Mastodon has 50,583 GitHub stars and upvote-rss has 513. 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 (50,583 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.