Big business moves have ripple effects in all kinds of places.
Here at InMotion, we’ve noticed a sudden surge of interest in our Mastodon content. Mastodon, a popular federated social media application, can be hosted on virtual private servers and boasts the same features as Twitter.
Just as Elon Musk bought the Twitter social media platform and announced plans to make major changes, some users began looking for alternatives.
The trend suddenly increased, but then fell. Perhaps legacy Twitter users will recover from the shock of the acquisition and return to their beloved app. Maybe the searchers found what they were looking for, installed Mastodon or joined an existing instance and walked away happy. The data does not say.
Still, exploring alternatives is a great way to learn more about open source software. Below, we’ll talk about the pros and cons of Mastodon compared to other open sources.
Here are 5 Twitter alternatives you might consider for your website:
This list is not exhaustive, but it is a good starting point to find an alternative that best meets your needs.
1. Mastodon
Mastodon is a “federated” open source micro-blogging platform that has recently grown in popularity as an alternative to Twitter. Instead of “tweets”, you can put “toots”.
Federated applications generally use a variety of protocols and APIs to connect servers and users across a vast, decentralized network.
With its decentralized nature, Mastodon stands out the most from Twitter. While Twitter (and other large-scale social applications) are centrally controlled “walled gardens,” decentralized networks have no such controls.
This means you can have more freedom, but you can potentially connect with unsavory users who would otherwise be banned from Twitter.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try federated services if you’re interested in it.
With Mastodon you can host your own server or join an existing instance. With your own server, you have ultimate control to enforce your own standards and provide a productive environment for your subscribers.
2. Pleroma
like a mastodon Pleroma is a federated open source micro-blogging application. Similarly, Pleroma offers many features of a Twitter-like network, such as activity streams, hashtags, private messages.
However, unlike Twitter, Pleroma boasts a nice live chat feature.
In my experience, I found Pleroma quite easy to install and manage.
Even better, Pleroma is generally considered lighter and more efficient than Mastodon, requiring less server resources. This means that you will be fine with Pleroma, even on a cheap VPS cloud server. Mastodon requires Ruby on Rails, NodeJS, and a whole stack of other software, while Pleroma only requires Elixir and a PostgreSQL database.
3. body press
The BuddyPress plugin WordPress is probably the easiest social network to install because WordPress itself is easy to install. BuddyPress also boasts the same social features as the other apps on this list.
BuddyPress users can send friend requests, private messages, and create groups.
BuddyPress is not federated. This means that user accounts on your WordPress site cannot connect to the larger network. However, with a WordPress multisite network, you can create virtually unlimited sites, and users on one node can interact with other sites on that network.
This acts as a federated service, but is limited to a single WordPress installation. It’s more like creating your own walled garden.
Given the general user friendliness of WordPress, I’d say BuddyPress is the easiest and most straightforward way to start a social network. And with WordPress hosting plans widely available, you won’t have to spend time configuring a server.
4. Pixelfed
Something completely different, federated Pixelfed The app works just like Instagram. You can upload high-quality photos and videos and manage the site on your own private server.
It’s not exactly a Twitter alternative, but if your ideal subscribers are more focused on sharing photo and video media than text, you might consider Pixelfed as a good option.
Like other decentralized social apps, Pixelfed puts a lot of emphasis on privacy and security.
However, much of the security and maintenance of your server will be your responsibility.
5. Email newsletter
The ultimate open source alternative to Twitter isn’t a social network, it’s good old-fashioned email.
Everyone still has an email account. WordPress offers a wide variety of email newsletters.
Often, emails are sent from a third-party network, offloading email management to a larger provider. This aspect of the process is generally not open source. However, managing your own email server is notoriously difficult.
Email offers a less dynamic, but overall simpler and more direct way to communicate with your subscribers.
Likewise, an email list can stay with you forever, and you can bring it to any service you use over the years.
These are just a few options for open source social networking apps. Exploring alternatives is a fun way to test open source projects. If you have any questions about these tools, be sure to leave a comment below or contact our support team.
