GoToSocial

★★★★☆

A very lightweight social networking server, with a very clean web interface for viewing public posts. Compatible with Mastodon apps and interacts well with Mastodon and other major ActivityPub platforms on the Fediverse.

You can run it as a semi-private server, so your group can interact locally without the posts leaking, and still share public posts with followers on Mastodon etc. And they’ve been building in safety features like local-only posts, controls on who can reply, and so on.

GoToSocial optionally supports formatting using Markdown, and if you enable it on your profile, it will apply basics like bold/italics, lists, blockquotes and code snippets, and inline links. These days, most Fediverse servers (even Mastodon) will display that much formatting, even if they don’t let you write it.

And there’s a utility to import your old posts from another site, something that even Mastodon still doesn’t have!

It’s server-only, though. You can manage settings and your profile on the website, and others can view public posts, but all the interaction has to be done through an app like Phanpy (what I’m currently using on desktops), Ivory (on iOS), or Tusky (my preferred app on Android).

Hosting

It’s not meant for handling zillions of use(post editing has been available since version 0.18), rs. GoToSocial is more for setting up a server for your group or family or friends (or even just yourself) on a spare Raspberry Pi or cheap VPS host. It’s not as small as Snac (which is incredibly tiny!), but I’ve got GTS running quite well on a 1GB Linode.

Admin is a lot simpler than Mastodon. You can install a single binary or a single container, and it just uses SQLite instead of running a full DB in a separate container. I still haven’t had to add storage or RAM.

Basically the only sysadmin stuff I’ve done aside from setup in over two years has been installing updates, which has just been incrementing the version number in docker-compose.

Compatibility

Interoperability is a lot better now than it was when I started testing it, and these days it interacts well with varieties of Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey, Bookwyrm, Pixelfed, Snac, WordPress, etc. Bridgy Fed works with it now, and I’m able to follow Bluesky accounts (and vice versa) through it. Postmarks patched its compatibility with the broader Fediverse, and works with GTS now.

Not compatible: Threads still won’t talk to GTS. Lemmy can partially interact, but still has issues.

When editing a formatted post, most front-end apps will let you edit the original Markdown even if they don’t know what to do with it. GTS will process it when you post the edit. But I’ve had trouble with Elk’s own Markdown parsing interacting badly with it.

Beta

Right now it’s still in beta. Post editing landed recently (in 0.18), but some of the more noticeable features that haven’t been built yet:

• link previews
• search posts (except your own)
• auto-delete (which I could probably hack together as a database script)

But it already handles most of what I need, and I’ve been using a personal server as my primary Fediverse presence since early 2024.