Mastodon
Mastodon is an open-source, self-hosted app in the Social & Forums category, licensed AGPL-3.0 and written mainly in Ruby. It is a self-hosted alternative to Twitter / X and ships a Docker image. It has 50,452 GitHub stars and its last commit was on Oct 26, 2026 (data as of Oct 26, 2026).
GitHub stats
- GitHub stars
- 50,452
- Forks
- 7,523
- Open issues
- 4,408
- Commits, last 12 months
- 3,038
- Last commit
- Oct 26, 2026
- Latest release
- v4.7.3Oct 1, 2026
- Created
- Feb 22, 2016
- License
- AGPL-3.0Open source
Data as of from the GitHub API. Report an error
Project health
ActiveActive: last commit Oct 26, 2026, 3,038 commits in 12 months.
- Regular releases10 or more releases in 12 months
- Security policyPublishes a security policy on GitHub
| Last commit | Oct 26, 2026 |
|---|---|
| Commits, last 12 months | 3,038 |
| Latest release | v4.7.3 (Oct 1, 2026) |
| Releases, last 12 months | 10 or more |
| Releases, all time | 373 |
| Open issues | 4,408 |
| Open pull requests | 258 |
| Good first issues | 0 |
| Contributing guide | Yes |
| Security policy | Yes |
| Created | Feb 22, 2016 |
Health as of , from the GitHub API. A label describes activity, not quality or security. How we label project health · Report a data error
About Mastodon
Federated microblogging server.
Description adapted from awesome-selfhosted (CC BY-SA 3.0). Source code: github.com/mastodon/mastodon.
Topics
- mastodon
- docker
- microblog
- activity-stream
- webfinger
- social-network
- activitypub
- fediverse
- social-web
Open-source alternative to
Mastodon can replace these commercial products. Compare every option on each page.
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Is Mastodon free and open source?
Yes. Mastodon is open-source software released under the AGPL-3.0 license, so you can self-host it at no cost. You only pay for the server it runs on, and some projects also offer an optional paid cloud plan.
Can I run Mastodon with Docker?
Yes. Mastodon provides a Docker image, so you can run it on any Linux server with Docker and Docker Compose installed. The project README lists the image name and the environment variables to set.
What are the best alternatives to Mastodon?
Popular self-hosted alternatives to Mastodon include Discourse, Flarum and Answer. Mastodon itself is a self-hosted alternative to Twitter / X.
Is Mastodon actively maintained?
The most recent commit to Mastodon was on Oct 26, 2026 with 3,038 commits in the past twelve months. The latest release is v4.7.3, published Oct 1, 2026. It had 4,408 open issues on GitHub. appsgit's project-health label for it is "Active" as of Oct 26, 2026.