What is GoToSocial?
GoToSocial is an ActivityPub social network server, written in Golang.
GoToSocial provides a lightweight, customizable, and safety-focused entryway into the Fediverse.
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 something 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 favourite and reply to and share, and you scroll through posts from people you follow using a timeline.
You can write long posts or short posts, or just post images, it's up to you.
You can also, of course, block people or otherwise limit interactions that you don't want by posting just to your friends.
GoToSocial is not designed for 'must-follow' influencers with tens of thousands of followers, and it's not designed to be addictive.
Your timeline and your experience are shaped by who you follow and how you interact with people, not by metrics of engagement!
Why use GoToSocial and not Mastodon or [xyz] other software?
Mastodon is great! If you want a full-featured ActivityPub microblogging server with all the bells and whistles, go use that instead :)
GoToSocial's niche is small or single-user instances running on low-powered devices, like single-board computers or old laptops repurposed as home servers.
Our focus is on providing lightweight software which is simple to install and maintain, and has good security and sensible defaults out of the box.
The system requirements are right here.
Other GoToSocial features are here.
Is there a flagship instance I can join?
Nope!
Rather than dealing with moderating a big instance (with all the headaches that brings), we'd rather focus on improving the software, fixing bugs, and adding nice features.
We also don't believe that flagship instances with thousands and thousands of users are very good for the Fediverse, since they tend towards centralization and can easily become 'too big to block'.
How do I get started?
To get going with GoToSocial, you need to install it on a server, and access it using a client on your phone or desktop.
All the docs you need for installation and configuration are hosted at docs.gotosocial.org.
Once your instance is up and running, you can start following people from other Fediverse servers like Mastodon, Misskey, and more :)
License and Attribution
GoToSocial is free, open-source software, licensed under the GNU AGPL v3 LICENSE.
Sloth logo by Anna Abramek, Creative Commons BY-SA license.