GoToSocial service

• Official website
• Full documentation
• Source code
• Support

GoToSocial is an ActivityPub social network server, written in Golang. With GoToSocial, you can keep in touch with your friends, post, read, and share images and articles. All without being tracked or advertised to!

If you’ve ever used social network services like Twitter or Tumblr (or even Myspace!) GoToSocial will probably feel familiar to you: You can follow people and have followers, you make posts which people can favorite, reply to, and share. Scroll through posts by those who you follow on a timeline. You can write long posts or short posts, or just share pictures. Of course, you can also block them or otherwise limit interactions that you don’t want by posting just to your friends. It is up to you how to use it and intaract with other people!

Features¶

GoToSocial provides a lightweight, customizable, and safety-focused entryway into the Fediverse, and is comparable to (but distinct from) existing projects such as Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica, and PixelFed.

Key features of GoToSocial include:

• Mastodon API compatibility: GoToSocial implements and extends the Mastodon API, ensuring compatibility with popular Mastodon client apps like Tusky, Semaphore, and Feditext.
• Granular post settings: Users can choose who can view their posts, with options including public, unlisted, friends-only, mutuals-only, and direct posts. Additionally, users can customize interactions on their posts such as reblogging, liking, and replying.
• Customizability for admins: Admins have access to plenty of configuration options, including adjustable post length and media upload size settings.
• Easy to run: With no external dependencies apart from a database, GoToSocial is easy to deploy and run. It’s designed to work well even on lower-powered machines like small VPSes.
• Safety + security features: GoToSocial prioritizes security with built-in support for secure HTTPS using Let’s Encrypt, strict privacy enforcement, and HTTP signature authentication.
• Various federation modes: Users can choose from different federation modes, including ‘blocklist’ mode (default), ‘allowlist’ mode (experimental), and ‘zero’ federation mode (not yet implemented).
• Backend-first design: Unlike other federated server projects, GoToSocial doesn’t include an integrated client front-end. Instead, it provides a backend server implementation with a well-documented API, allowing developers to build their own front-end implementations or mobile applications.

Usage¶

We host your GoToSocial instance at a URL like: https://social.your-server.com — just replace your-server.com with your actual server domain, and open the URL on your web browser. Welcome to your GoToSocial instance!

Optional S3 storage¶

GoToSocial supports S3-compatible providers, which allows it to store its content (audio/image/video/etc.) in an object storage system like Amazon S3 or another S3-compatible object storage providers like Backblaze B2, Storj, Wasabi, Digital Ocean Spaces, Cloudflare R2, etc.

Moving media files off of the server’s local filesystem and into an external storage (the S3 storage system) allows you to free up disk space on the server and effectively gives you infinite storage (for a relatively-cheap price).

See this page for details about how to choose the Amazon S3 compatible object storage provider which suits your needs and set it up for the service.