Invidious vs Mastodon
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted social networks options
— licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one
replaces.
Not the right match-up?
Compare Invidious with
choose an app… Discourse PeerTube NodeBB Lemmy diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Piped Tube Archivist Fizzy Pixelfed Flarum HumHub Elk WriteFreely Pinchflat LibReddit MediaCMS Campsite Campfire Redlib Mixpost Pro Vanilla Forums Misago Loomio Artalk pump.io Plume Pleroma Endurain Manyfold phpBB Elgg Friendica Mobilizon Phanpy Firefish OSSN Bridgy Fed Takahe Fedify snac NeoDB webmention.io Bridgy Hometown Glitch-soc Damselfly Web Soapbox Enigma 1/2 BBS Chirpy kbin Sharkey ActivityPub for WordPress Smithereen Postmarks Mastodon Bird UI Wavelog Hollo Gathio Loops Snikket Ktistec Libremdb Mbin Trustroots Akkoma Gancio Honk Socialhome Hubzilla Epicyon Iceshrimp mlmym Wafrn GoBlog Hatsu BuddyPress Sphinx Relay noStrudel Mitra lemmyBB Friendiqa Hub Fedibird MeshChatX Streams Enafore Sublinks Buddycloud Zap Nostr Relay Squeaknode Khatru Pyramid Catodon Route96 Osada usocial Tesseract AsmBB Bloat Forte GoToSocial Iceshrimp.NET Masto-FE (🦥 flavour) PeerTube search-index Snort Tube yarn.social
Compare Mastodon with
choose an app… Discourse NodeBB Lemmy diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Piped Fizzy Pixelfed Flarum HumHub Elk WriteFreely LibReddit Campsite Campfire Redlib Mixpost Pro Vanilla Forums Misago Loomio Artalk pump.io Plume Pleroma Endurain Manyfold phpBB Elgg Friendica Mobilizon Phanpy Firefish OSSN Bridgy Fed Takahe Microblog.pub Fedify snac NeoDB webmention.io Bridgy Hometown Glitch-soc Soapbox Enigma 1/2 BBS Chirpy kbin Sharkey ActivityPub for WordPress Smithereen Postmarks Mastodon Bird UI Wavelog Hollo Gathio Loops Snikket Ktistec Libremdb Mbin Trustroots Akkoma Gancio Honk Socialhome Hubzilla Epicyon Iceshrimp mlmym Wafrn GoBlog Hatsu BuddyPress Sphinx Relay noStrudel Mitra lemmyBB Friendiqa Hub Fedibird MeshChatX Streams Enafore Sublinks Buddycloud Zap Nostr Relay Squeaknode Khatru Pyramid Catodon Route96 Osada usocial Tesseract AsmBB Bloat Forte GoToSocial Iceshrimp.NET Masto-FE (🦥 flavour) PeerTube search-index Snort yarn.social
Feature Invidious Mastodon Category Social Networks Social Networks License GPL-3.0-only AGPL-3.0 Language Crystal Ruby Setup difficulty Medium Hard Min. RAM 50 MB 2,048 MB Deployment bare-metal docker, bare-metal, source GitHub stars ★ 22,442 ★ 50,177 First released 2023 2016 Replaces YouTube Twitter, X
Why pick each one
Choose Invidious if… Released under the GPL-3.0-only license Mature project with 22.4k GitHub stars Written in Crystal Tiny footprint — runs in 50 MB RAM Invidious details Choose Mastodon if… Large fediverse network Strong moderation features Mastodon details
Frequently asked questions Is Invidious or Mastodon better? Neither is universally better. Mastodon has the larger community, while Invidious is simpler to set up (medium difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are Invidious and Mastodon free and open-source? Yes. Invidious is licensed under GPL-3.0-only and Mastodon under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Invidious and Mastodon with Docker? Invidious: check the project docs for container support. Mastodon: yes.