Open Source Community & Social Software
Community & Social software provides platforms for hosting forums, social networks, and news aggregators. These tools enable the creation of decentralized spaces where users share posts, media, and discussion threads. This type of software serves individuals and organizations that need to manage their own member directories and interaction logs. By self-hosting these apps, you avoid reliance on proprietary algorithms and keep your chat history and social connections on your own hardware. These tools allow you to federate with other servers to expand your reach without using corporate platforms.
This page lists 54 open source tools in the Community & Social category. The most popular are Mastodon, Discourse and RSSHub. Most use the AGPL-3.0 or Apache-2.0 license, and 45 offer an official Docker image.
selfoss
A self-hosted feed aggregation web application for following updates from websites and social networks in one place.
Peergos
A peer to peer encrypted filesystem for secure file storage, sharing, and decentralized collaboration.
Fusion
A lightweight, self-hosted RSS reader with Fever API compatibility and a distraction-free reading workflow.
Movim
A federated blogging and chat platform that serves as a web frontend for the XMPP protocol.
RetroShare
A decentralized communication toolkit providing secure file sharing, chat, forums, and messaging without central servers.
Coral
An open-source commenting platform designed to improve moderation and conversation quality for digital publications.
Talkyard
A community discussion platform combining forum threads, real-time chat, and embeddable blog comments in one system.
Elgg
A rapid development framework for building socially aware web applications and social networking engines using PHP.
Friendica
A decentralized social communication platform that connects users to the federated network known as the Fediverse.
Cypht
A webmail aggregator that combines multiple email accounts and news feeds into a single unified view.
Mezon
A communication platform for communities and teams featuring encrypted messaging, voice calls, and AI moderation tools.
Databag
A federated, self-hosted messenger featuring end-to-end encryption and topic-based threads for secure, decentralized communication.
InspIRCd
A high performance Internet Relay Chat server supporting the IRCv3 protocol for various operating systems.
Open Source Social Network
A PHP based social networking platform for creating community websites with member profiles and engagement tools.
Freenet
A peer to peer platform for censorship resistant communication and publishing via a decentralized encrypted datastore.
Idno
A social publishing platform for creating blogs and connecting with others via decentralized web protocols.
Tiny Tiny RSS
A web-based news feed reader and aggregator for managing RSS, Atom, and other feed formats.
ENiGMA½
A modern bulletin board system server with support for retro terminal protocols and federated social networking.
Chirpy
A privacy-focused and customizable comment system for websites with real-time updates and moderation tools.
ClearFlask
Collect and manage customer feedback and feature requests to inform product development and roadmap planning.
Loops
A federated short video sharing platform that utilizes the ActivityPub protocol to enable decentralized community ownership.
Valour
A community communication platform featuring multi-window chat, integrated economy systems, and a decentralized node architecture.
Storyden
A community platform combining discussion forums, wiki functionality, and content curation for building permanent and discoverable knowledge bases.
ShipShipShip
A self-hosted platform for managing product roadmaps and changelogs with community voting and automated newsletters.
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