Looking to create your own online community? The fediverse is for you. David Rutland tests the best self-hosted fediverse servers available.
WE COMPARE TONS OF STUFF SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO!
Roundup
Akkoma Misskey Lemmy Mastodon Pixelfed
HOW WE TESTED…
The fediverse is all about choice. You can pick a server, decide you don’t like it, and go elsewhere. If you’re running your own server, it’s a little more difficult, as you’re also responsible for your users, and any changes will affect them, too. It’s important to get it right and to choose an instance type that suits your users and your own responsibilities as an admin.
We tested based on usability from these perspectives, and deployed instances on a variety of VPS setups, along with a Raspberry Pi and a more powerful physical server. While we did load up our instances with virtual users to test moderation, threaded conversations and image uploads, we didn’t always let them out on to the internet or federate away from our network. For some of the screenshots, we joined large public servers.
For the mobile apps, we used the Android versions from F-Droid, as the author has neither an iPhone, nor a Google Account.