Fediverse

FediDB provides a list of instances available to join, along with their user counts, the software they’re running, and general environment growth.

Fediverse.Party also contains information about various federated software platforms.

Facebook Alternatives

• Friendica is a Facebook-like replacement. It integrates with most of the other popular ActivityPub-based solutions like Mastodon, but also works with diaspora*.

Reddit Alternatives

For non-federated options, check Link Aggregators

• kbin.social
  • Fedi.Tips has recommended this platform
• squabbles.io
• Tildes
• Lemmy
  • Note: Fedi.Tips has strongly recommended not using or supporting Lemmy due to human rights and oppression concerns. See this thread for more information
  • I haven’t checked to see if these are still valid concerns

Twitter Alternatives

This covers any sort of microblogging.

• Mastodon is one of the biggest options available. The software is stable and there are many instances available to use already.
  • The official site has lots of information about how it works and its key features
  • They provide a list of servers that you can join that have committed to adhere to the Mastodon Server Covenant. This commitment provides some guarantee of stability, active moderation against hate speech, and promote decentralization.
• Wildebeest
  • This was built by Cloudflare for deployment on their platform.
  • Prepare to pay for this offering. As of 2023-06-12, their Requirements docs suggest that the minimum monthly cost is about $10/month USD for an instance, which isn’t too bad when shared with other people.
• Misskey seems to have a very anime/vtuber focus to its style. Its marketing content is written in Japanese.
  • Source code on GitHub
  • The documentation notes that it’s intended to be a general-purpose ActivityPub-equipped solution.
  • Its mascot / “guardian deity” is known as Ai and has their own website with fanart (Japanese only)
• Pleroma is a lightweight, Mastodon-like option written in Erlang/Elixer.
  • Source code for Pleroma is hosted on their own GitLab instance.
• Akkoma supports a number of special features available on other systems, such as “Misskey Markdown” and boasts being 30-50% faster than Pleroma.
  • Akkoma source code
• GNU social is very much in the style of the original Twitter

The following are not compatible with Mastodon’s federation:

• diaspora*
  • I had used diaspora* in the past, but it’s a bit more of a walled garden. diaspora* pods can federate, but they can’t federate with Mastodon.

Other Services

• write freely is an ActivityPub-equipped writing/blogging platform.
  • It notes that there’s “no news feed, notifications, or unnecessary likes or claps to take you away from your train of thought”.
  • write.as is one of the biggest instances of it