Alternatives and competitors

Sites like mastodon.social

The 20 closest decentralized social network alternatives to mastodon.social, ranked by what they actually offer, and the 2 technologies behind it.

Looking for an alternative to mastodon.social? The closest matches are Archive of Our Own, Bluesky and Facebook. We match sites by what they actually offer, from their homepages, Wikidata and a summary by Claude, in any language. Vote on each alternative and leave a short note to help the next person choose.

Neighbours: k = 20
Sites searched: 4,032
Vector: 384-d
Query: 13 ms

01 · Entity

About mastodon.social

mastodon.social

Mastodon.social

The original server of Mastodon, operated by Mastodon GmbH for the common good.

Wikidata: the largest Mastodon instance, operated by the Mastodon gGmbh non-profit

Top 10K · #2,700 English 2 technologies Crawled Nov 6, 2026

Visit mastodon.social

Summary by Claude

A general-purpose Mastodon server where users can create accounts to post short messages, follow others and interact across the decentralized fediverse. It is the flagship instance run by the non-profit Mastodon gGmbH.

Who it’s for: General public social media users
Business model: Donations (non-profit)

02 · Embedding space

Competitor map

Each alternative by how close its vector is to mastodon.social’s (x) and how much traffic it gets, how much of the stack it shares, or where it sits in the embedding space itself (y). Lines split each axis at the median. Hover for the numbers, click to jump to it in the list.

similarity × popularity

03 · Nearest neighbours

Alternatives to mastodon.social

Thumbs up if it’s a real alternative to mastodon.social, thumbs down if it isn’t.

Only in English

01
Archive of Our Own archiveofourown.org Top 10K English

Request temporarily denied. | Archive of Our Own

nonprofit online fanfiction repository operated by the Organization for Transformative Works
Close cos 0.882
02
Wikimedia movement wikimedia.org Top 1K English

Wikimedia Error

global social movement for free educational knowledge
Close cos 0.873
03
Zenodo zenodo.org Top 10K English

Zenodo

research data repository
Close cos 0.870
04
Flaticon flaticon.com Top 10K English

That request didn't go through. Our security filter flagged something. You don't have permission to access this page.

database of icons
Close cos 0.869
05
ShareThis sharethis.com Top 10K English

ShareThis | Share Buttons | Website Tools | Behavioral Intelligence

Discover how social sharing tools can drive traffic and help you understand consumer intent for better targeting and personalization.
Close cos 0.870
06
NLnet Labs nlnetlabs.nl Top 10K English

NLnet Labs - Home

Research & Development, Internet architecture, DNS, Routing, Stability and Security.
Close cos 0.868
07
Matomo matomo.org Top 10K English

Privacy-first analytics you can trust - Analytics Platform - Matomo

Popular analytics tools can miss up to 40% of traffic. Matomo delivers accurate, GDPR-compliant analytics with full data ownership in a platform teams can set up in minutes.
Close cos 0.867
08
Tumblr tumblr.com Top 1K English

Tumblr

Tumblr is the place you go to be yourself on the internet. No performance, no perfection. Just you, and the people who get it.
Close cos 0.868
09
PubNub pubnub.com Top 10K English

Build, manage, & optimize real-time apps at scale | PubNub

Power your real-time app with PubNub - the world's largest pub/sub network. Scale to 3 trillion API calls/month, with <30ms global delivery. Start building now!
Close cos 0.866
10
Groupon groupon.com Top 10K English

Groupon Status Page | Access Restricted

American worldwide e-commerce marketplace
Close cos 0.866
11
FreeBSD freebsd.org Top 10K English

The FreeBSD Project

free Unix-like operating system
Close cos 0.866
12
AddToAny addtoany.com Top 1K English

AddToAny: Share Buttons by the Universal Sharing Platform

Get share buttons for your website visitors to share content on any social sharing service. AddToAny is the universal sharing platform for websites and apps.
Close cos 0.865
13
Linode linode.com Top 1K English

The World's Most Distributed Cloud Computing Platform | Akamai

Build and deliver low-latency, edge native applications on Akamai Connected Cloud.
Close cos 0.865
14
Netnod netnod.se Top 10K English

Start | Netnod

internet exchange in Sweden
Close cos 0.863
15
Messenger messenger.com Top 10K English

Messenger

Hang out anytime, anywhere—Messenger makes it easy and fun to stay close to your favorite people
Close cos 0.865
16
Sanity sanity.io Top 10K English

The Content Operating System for the AI era | Sanity

Sanity is the back-end built for AI content operations. Power web, mobile, and agentic applications at scale.
Close cos 0.863
17
ResearchGate researchgate.net Top 1K English

ResearchGate - Temporarily Unavailable

commercial scientific social network
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18
OSF osf.io Top 10K English

OSF

tools that make open science practice easier
Close cos 0.866
19
SlideShare slideshare.net Top 1K English

Client Challenge

American hosting service, owned by Scribd, for professional content including presentations, infographics, documents, and videos
Close cos 0.866
20
Polymarket polymarket.com Top 10K English

Polymarket | The World’s Largest Prediction Market™

Polymarket is the world’s largest prediction market, allowing you to stay informed and profit from your knowledge by trading on future events across various topics.
Close cos 0.863

Ranked by score: the cosine similarity of each site’s vector to mastodon.social’s, less a small penalty for generic sites that are close to everything. Highlighted technologies are ones mastodon.social uses too. Votes and comments come from visitors and don’t change the ranking.

04 · Fingerprints

Technology

What mastodon.social is built with, and what its closest competitors use, from its homepage’s code and its DNS records.

Built with

CDN: Fastly header x-served-by: cache-fra-etou8220077-FRA, cache-fra-etou8220077-FRA, cache…
Email hosting: Google Workspace MX smtp.google.com

Stack changes

No changes yet. Each new crawl is compared with the last one, and what mastodon.social adds or drops shows up here.

What competitors use

Across the 20 closest sites.