Mastodon vs Misskey

Both are self-hosted communication - social networks and forums projects. This page compares how well each one is actually maintained — the part you cannot see from a feature list.

Mastodon scores 93 against Misskey's 88, putting it slightly ahead. That measures project health, not feature fit — Misskey may still be the right choice if it does what you need.
MastodonMisskey
Health score 93/100 88/100
Commits (11 mo) 2554 1091
Commits (last 3 mo) 727 396
Stars 50k 11k
Latest release 15 Sept 2026 23 Sept 2026
Licence AGPL-3.0 AGPL-3.0
Built with Ruby Nodejs, Docker
Typical RAM 2 GB 1 GB

Mastodon

Federated microblogging server.

93/100
Thriving

High commit volume, frequent releases and growing activity.

Maintenance 37/40
Releases 25/25
Community 19/20
Momentum 12/15

Commit activity more than 92% of tracked projects; popularity more than 97%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

2025-10: 210 commits 2025-11: 213 commits 2025-12: 170 commits 2026-01: 219 commits 2026-02: 218 commits 2026-03: 332 commits 2026-04: 255 commits 2026-05: 210 commits 2026-06: 301 commits 2026-07: 221 commits 2026-08: 205 commits

Misskey

Decentralized app-like microblogging server/SNS for the Fediverse, using the ActivityPub protocol like GNU social and Mastodon.

88/100
Thriving

High commit volume, frequent releases and growing activity.

Maintenance 32/40
Releases 25/25
Community 16/20
Momentum 15/15

Commit activity more than 81% of tracked projects; popularity more than 81%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

2025-10: 142 commits 2025-11: 155 commits 2025-12: 110 commits 2026-01: 66 commits 2026-02: 18 commits 2026-03: 47 commits 2026-04: 62 commits 2026-05: 95 commits 2026-06: 150 commits 2026-07: 200 commits 2026-08: 46 commits

How to read this

Everything above is measured, not opinion: commit counts and release dates come from the public repositories, and the health score ranks each project against all 1352 projects we track. Read the full method.

What this comparison deliberately does not do is tell you which has the better feature set. Maintenance health tells you which project will still be receiving security fixes in two years. Decide that first, then compare features on the projects that survive the filter.

See every option in this category: self-hosted communication - social networks and forums.