Mastodon

What is Mastodon?

Mastodon is an open-source, federated microblogging platform. Running your own instance gives you full control over moderation and data while still connecting to the wider fediverse through ActivityPub.

Best for

Communities wanting their own social platform with federation

Why choose Mastodon

Running your own Mastodon instance is an unusual thing to do and an occasionally wonderful one. You get a social account whose identity is a domain you own — nobody can ban it, rename you or change the rules underneath you — and you become part of a federated network where you can follow and be followed by people on thousands of other servers. For anyone whose public writing or professional identity matters, owning the address is a real form of insurance.

Replaces

• Twitter
• X
• Bluesky

Key features

• ActivityPub federation
• Full moderation control
• Custom domain identity
• Public, unlisted and follower-only posts

What to watch out for

Be honest with yourself about the commitment. A Mastodon instance is a full Rails application with a database, background workers, media storage that grows steadily, and an upgrade treadmill you must keep up with for security. You are also the moderator: anything that lands on your server is your responsibility, and federated instances can send you content you would rather not host. Storage and bandwidth costs are small but genuinely non-zero, and downtime means your own account is offline.

How to deploy

• Docker Compose
• Manual install

Getting started

Use the official Docker deployment or a well-maintained image rather than installing by hand; the component list is long and mistakes are hard to diagnose. Decide your media retention and remote-media policy before federating, because connecting to the network starts a flow of cached files you will otherwise store forever. Back up the Postgres database on a schedule and confirm the restore works — losing it is not recoverable. Start by only following people, with discovery turned off, until you are comfortable with what arrives.

Typical setup

Instances live on a VPS with enough disk for a growing media cache, usually two gigabytes of memory or more, with object storage offloaded for larger deployments. The database and the media directory are backed up separately and regularly. Most people run a small, single-user or few-user instance and follow the wider network from there, deliberately avoiding open registration so they are not moderating strangers' content on hardware they pay for.

Who should look elsewhere

Not worth it for anyone whose goal is reach. A single-user instance with no established followers has none of the built-in discovery of the large platforms, and federated growth is slow and deliberate. It is also a serious mismatch for anyone unwilling to become a moderator and a sysadmin, because both roles arrive on day one.

Project health

• GitHub stars: 50,340
• Last code push: 2026-09-30
• Open issues: 4,561
• Status: actively developed

Figures pulled from the GitHub API and refreshed periodically.