Mastodon vs Nitter
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 Mastodon with
choose an app… Discourse Invidious NodeBB Lemmy diaspora* 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
Compare Nitter with
choose an app… Discourse Invidious NodeBB Lemmy diaspora* 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 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 Mastodon Nitter Category Social Networks Social Networks License AGPL-3.0 AGPL-3.0-only Language Ruby Nim Setup difficulty Hard Easy Min. RAM 2,048 MB 50 MB Deployment docker, bare-metal, source bare-metal GitHub stars ★ 50,177 ★ 13,408 First released 2016 2023 Replaces Twitter, X X
Why pick each one
Choose Mastodon if… Large fediverse network Strong moderation features Mastodon details Choose Nitter if… Released under the AGPL-3.0-only license Easy to set up — beginner-friendly Mature project with 13.4k GitHub stars Written in Nim Nitter details
Frequently asked questions Is Mastodon or Nitter better? Neither is universally better. Mastodon has the larger community, while Nitter is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are Mastodon and Nitter free and open-source? Yes. Mastodon is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Nitter under AGPL-3.0-only. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Mastodon and Nitter with Docker? Mastodon: yes. Nitter: check the project docs for container support.