Barnraiser
Editor's Picks
WebFinger and How Federated Accounts Are Found
Alternatives to the Big Social Platforms
What You Need to Self-Host a Community
Hosting Your Own Social Network
Running a Self-Hosted Community
Social Networking That Respects Your Privacy
Pleroma: A Lightweight Fediverse Server
Pixelfed: Federated Photo Sharing
PeerTube: Federated Video Hosting
Open-Source Options for Microblogging
Open-Source Social Networks: A Complete Guide
Open-Source Options for Facebook-Style Networking
Open-Source Software for Building Communities
Misskey: Features of a Flexible Fediverse Platform
Matrix and Discord Compared for Communities
Matrix: Open Standard for Chat
Mastodon: Servers, Culture and Basics
Lemmy: Federated Link Aggregation
Starting and Maintaining Your Own Mastodon Server
Friendica: A Federated Network With Broad Reach
Choosing Forum Software for Your Community
The Fediverse Explained
What Makes a Social Network Federated
Diaspora: The Pioneering Distributed Network
How Decentralized Social Networks Work
Community Platforms and the Protocols Behind Them
Moderation Basics for Small Online Communities
The Bulletin Board: Origins and Modern Use
ActivityPub and AT Protocol Compared
ActivityPub: The Protocol Connecting the Fediverse
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What You Need to Self-Host a Community
A practical checklist of the server, domain, email, security, backup and human resources needed…
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Hosting Your Own Social Network
A plain overview of running your own social network: how federation works, software styles,…
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Running a Self-Hosted Community
A practical hub guide to choosing software, sizing servers, securing access and moderating a…
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Starting and Maintaining Your Own Mastodon Server
A practical guide to starting a Mastodon server and keeping it healthy, from server…
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Choosing Forum Software for Your Community
How to choose forum software for a self-hosted community: Discourse and Flarum compared, hosting…
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Moderation Basics for Small Online Communities
A practical look at writing community moderation guidelines: what to include, how graduated responses…
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WebFinger and How Federated Accounts Are Found
WebFinger is the lookup step that lets federated servers turn a handle into a profile and actor. This guide covers the request, the response,…
More reading
Browse by topic
- Online Communities (7)
- Open Source Software (8)
- Social Networking (15)
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The Fediverse Explained
A plain-language guide to the fediverse: how independent servers connect through ActivityPub, where the network came from, which platforms use it and how moderation works.
Guides
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Community Platforms and the Protocols Behind Them
A guide to the community platform and the open protocols behind it: ActivityPub, Matrix, AT Protocol, WebFinger and the older…
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The Bulletin Board: Origins and Modern Use
From cork boards to the first dial-up BBS in 1978, the bulletin board idea still shapes how small communities share…
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ActivityPub and AT Protocol Compared
A sourced comparison of ActivityPub and the AT Protocol: architecture, identity, portability and tradeoffs.
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ActivityPub: The Protocol Connecting the Fediverse
How ActivityPub lets independent servers share posts, follows and likes, and why it became the standard behind the Fediverse.