Gmane is an e-mail to news gateway. It allows users to access electronic mailing lists as if they were Usenet newsgroups, and also through a variety of web interfaces. Since Gmane is a bidirectional gateway, it can also be used to post on the mailing lists. Gmane is an archive; it never expires messages. Gmane also supports importing list postings made prior to a list's inclusion on the service.
BitlBee is a cross-platform IRC instant messaging gateway, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
Microblogging is a form of blogging using short posts without titles known as microposts. Microblogs "allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links", which may be the major reason for their popularity. Some popular social networks such as X (Twitter), Threads, Tumblr, Mastodon and Instagram can be viewed as collections of microblogs.
identi.ca was a free and open-source social networking and blogging service based on the pump.io software, using the Activity Streams protocol. Identi.ca stopped accepting new registrations in 2013, but continues to operate alongside several other pump.io-based hosts provided by E14N which continue to accept new registrations.
GNU social is a free and open source microblogging server written in PHP that implemented the OStatus and ActivityPub standard for interoperability between installations. While offering functionality similar to Twitter, GNU social seeks to provide the potential for open and distributed communications between microblogging communities. Enterprises and individuals can install and control their own services and data.
OpenMicroBlogging is a deprecated protocol that allows different microblogging services to inter-operate. It lets the user of one service subscribe to notices by a user of another service. This enables a federation of new communities, as potentially an organization of any size can host a service. OpenMicroBlogging utilizes the OAuth and Yadis protocols and does not depend on any central authority.
A distributed social network or federated social network is an Internet social networking service that is decentralized and distributed across distinct service providers, such as the Fediverse or the IndieWeb. It consists of multiple social websites, where users of each site communicate with users of any of the involved sites. From a societal perspective, one may compare this concept to that of social media being a public utility.
The tables below compare general and technical information for some notable active microblogging services, and also social network services that have status updates.
WebFinger is a protocol specified by the Internet Engineering Task Force IETF in RFC 7033 that allows for discovery of information about people and things identified by a URI. Information about a person might be discovered via an acct: URI, for example, which is a URI that looks like an email address.
Friendica is a free and open-source software distributed social network. It forms one part of the Fediverse, an interconnected and decentralized network of independently operated servers.
Distributed social network projects generally develop software, protocols, or both.
Evan S. Prodromou is a software developer and open source advocate. He is a co-editor of ActivityPub, the W3C standard for decentralized social networking used by platforms such as Mastodon.
pump.io is a general-purpose activity stream engine that can be used as a federated social networking protocol which "does most of what people want from a social network". Started by Evan Prodromou, it is a follow-up to GNU Social, and is designed to be more lightweight and usable for general data instead of just microblogging. The largest StatusNet instance at the time, Identi.ca, which was the largest StatusNet service and was run by Prodromou, switched to pump.io in June 2013.
Mastodon is free and open-source software for running self-hosted social networking services. It has microblogging features similar to Twitter, which are offered by a large number of independently run nodes, known as instances or servers, each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, and content moderation policies.
The fediverse is a collection of social networking services that can communicate with each other using a common protocol. Users of different websites can send and receive status updates, multimedia files and other data across the network. The term fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
ActivityPub is a protocol and open standard for decentralized social networking. It provides a client-to-server API for creating and modifying content, as well as a federated server-to-server (S2S) protocol for delivering notifications and content to other servers. ActivityPub has become the main standard used in the fediverse, a popular network used for social networking that consists of software such as Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube.
Pleroma is a free and open-source microblogging social networking service. Unlike popular microblogging services such as Twitter or Weibo, Pleroma can be self-hosted and operated by anyone with a server and a web domain, a combination commonly referred to as an instance. Instance administrators can manage their own code of conduct, terms of service, and content moderation policies, allowing users to have more control over the content they view as well as their experience.
Eugen Rochko is a Russian-born German software developer, best known as the creator of Mastodon, a decentralized open-source social networking platform consisting of a large number of independently run nodes, known as instances, each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, and moderation policies.
Christine Lemmer-Webber is a software engineer, best known for her lead authorship and co-editorship of ActivityPub. She is currently the Executive Director at Spritely Institute.
Misskey is a free and open-source social networking service. Created in 2014 by Japanese software engineer Eiji "syuilo" Shinoda, Misskey was originally developed as bulletin board software. A microblogging feature similar to Twitter was added to the platform, which eventually became the main format of the service. The name Misskey comes from the lyrics of Brain Diver, a song by the Japanese band May'n.
