Distributed Social Network Projects

A distributed social network allows for multiple servers to host user data. These servers communicate and provide one another with the user data.

History

A Brief History of the GNU Social Fediverse and ‘The Federation’

Federated Social Web

These are projects that are designed to run on servers and use federation protocols to reach out and interchange between each other.

• buddycloud, http://buddycloud.com/

• Crabgrass, http://crabgrass.riseup.net/

• Diaspora, https://diasporafoundation.org

• Diso, http://diso-project.org/

• Dyskinesia, http://about.psyc.eu/Dyskinesia

• Elgg, https://elgg.org/

• Friendica, http://friendi.ca/

• GNU Social, https://gnu.io/social/

• GNU Social P2P, http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:GNU_Social_P2P

• Hubzilla, https://project.hubzilla.org

• HumHub, https://www.humhub.org/

• Lorea, https://lorea.io

• Mastodon, https://mastodon.social

• Movim, http://www.movim.eu/

• Noosfero, http://noosfero.org/

• OpenSource Social Network, https://www.opensource-socialnetwork.org/

• ownCloud, http://owncloud.org/

• psyced, http://www.psyced.org/

• psycTiVE, http://about.psyc.eu/Psyctive

• StatusNet, http://status.net/

Inactive Development

• Ampify, https://github.com/tav/ampify
• Appleseed, https://github.com/appleseedproj/appleseed
• Monocles, https://github.com/maxogden/monocles
• HelloWorld, https://github.com/opensource-socialnetwork/HelloWorld
• Jappix, https://github.com/jappix/jappix
• Kopal, http://code.google.com/p/kopal/
• NoseRub, https://code.google.com/archive/p/noserub/
• OneSocialWeb, https://github.com/onesocialweb
• OpenMicroBlogger, https://github.com/voitto/openmicroblogger
• psyconaut, http://about.psyc.eu/Psyconaut
• PsycZilla, http://about.psyc.eu/PsycZilla
• Saikound, http://about.psyc.eu/Saikound
• Socialriver, http://socialriver.org/
• Socknet Provider- FoolishMortal.org, https://sourceforge.net/projects/foomor-socknet/
• Thimbl, https://github.com/thimbl/Thimbl-UI

Distributed Social Networks

These are projects that are fully distributed and operate directly from people's devices without requiring servers. They have the advantage of providing end-to-end encryption between users and leave no social data on servers.

• freenet, https://freenetproject.org
• Friend2Friend, http://www.altruists.org/projects/ge/ff/
• Pandora, https://github.com/Novator/Pandora
• retroshare, http://retroshare.sourceforge.net
• Safebook, https://www.safebook.info
• secushare, http://secushare.org
• versionvega, https://github.com/peacekeeper/versionvega

More Information

Other lists of social networking projects:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_protocols_for_distributed_social_networking