social network open sourcery

We’ve focused on Mastodon here, but there are all kinds of other open source, decentralised alternatives to popular social media platforms. PeerTube is a video-sharing platform that uses WebTorrent technology to ease the burden on servers (again, anyone can host a server and servers can federate with each other). When a user views a video they also share it with other users, creating a sort of positive feedback loop for popular videos.

For static images, and those looking for a home for them that isn’t Instagram or Flickr, there’s PixelFed ( https://pixelfed.org). Like Mastodon you can host your own Pixelfed instance and federate with other instances, such as the one you’ll find at https://pixelfed.social.

For a more Facebook, less Twitter, type of decentralised social network, diaspora* ( https://diasporafoundation.org) is where you should turn your attention. Instances are referred to as “pods” and pods may be based on geographical location, interest, the foresaid funky domain names, or popularity. For the indecisive, The Federation ( https://the-federation.info) collects opt-in statistics for not just diaspora* pods, but instances for all the networks mentioned here and many more. Federation blurs traditional boundaries, so many of these networks can talk to each other, either through crossposting tools or natively via ActivityPub.