Software Alternatives & Reviews

Discourse VS Mastodon

Compare Discourse VS Mastodon and see what are their differences

Discourse logo Discourse

Discourse is an open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.

Mastodon logo Mastodon

Mastodon is a decentralized, open source social network. This is just one part of the network, run by the main developers of the project It is not focused on any particular niche interest - everyone is welcome!
  • Discourse Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-13
  • Mastodon Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-20

Discourse videos

Why We Chose The Discourse Platform For Our Forums

More videos:

  • Review - Why Discourse is the Best Forum Software Out There (No, Really) | Location Rebel
  • Review - A Grammar Review for Discourse Analysis

Mastodon videos

Mastodon - Emperor of Sand ALBUM REVIEW

More videos:

  • Review - MASTODON Emperor of Sand Album Review | Overkill Reviews
  • Review - A Closer Look at Mastodon, The Twitter Killer!
  • Review - Mastodon App: The Social Media Alternative to Twitter? | Tech News Briefing Podcast | WSJ
  • Review - 5 Reasons to DITCH TWITTER For Mastodon!
  • Review - No, Mastodon Will Not Replace Twitter

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Discourse and Mastodon)
Forums
100 100%
0% 0
Social Networks
10 10%
90% 90
Forums And Forum Software
Decentralized Social Network

User comments

Share your experience with using Discourse and Mastodon. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Discourse and Mastodon

Discourse Reviews

20 Telegram Alternatives to Chat With in 2024
Discourse is a basic forum function that could be an alternative to Telegram if you want to stick to text discussions. It's pretty analog, missing both video and livestreaming tools. Instead, Discourse is a basic community that lets you organize discussions--it feels a bit like having your own reddit or Quora.
18 Best Discord Alternatives 2020 | Expert Reviews
Discourse comes in a couple of flavours. You can self-host it yourself in which case the software is free, and you simply need to sign up for server space, or you can pay Discourse for a hosted-for-you option, though self-hosting is a lot cheaper the premium option takes care of the technical side.
IndieHackers: Best forum software
I used Flarum when trying to get a community set up for my product (ended up abandoning it to revisit when we have a larger customer base). It worked fairly well and I enjoyed it but it's definitely beta and unless you're fairly tech savvy it's not quite worth the setup / maintenance. Lots of config changes, crashes, huge issues with plugins, and some features missing. I'd...

Mastodon Reviews

If You Want to Leave Twitter Because of Elon Musk, These Are Your Options
The most obvious Twitter replacement is probably Mastodon, a decentralized series of social networking sites that are, in form and function, the most similar to Twitter. The one big difference is that instead of just one Twitter, it’s more like a network of Twitters that can interact with each other but don’t necessarily have to. It’s theoretically possible to be a part of...
Source: www.vice.com
Facebook Alternatives 2020 – Social Networks That Won’t Sell Your Data
Mastodon launched in 2017 and made quite an impact on the social network scene. Mastodon is a free, open-source social network. When it launched it was presented as an open source Twitter competitor, but as people are leaving Facebook its being used the same way you would Facebook, which makes it a really good alternative to Facebook.
8 Best Facebook Alternatives With Focus On Privacy For 2018
Last year, Mastodon made splashes as an open source Twitter competitor but you can also use it as a Facebook alternative. Apart from all the differences in terms of privacy, character length, what really sets Mastodon apart is the “instance” feature. You can think of the service as a series of connected nodes (instances) and your account belongs to a particular instance.
Source: fossbytes.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Mastodon seems to be a lot more popular than Discourse. While we know about 607 links to Mastodon, we've tracked only 23 mentions of Discourse. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Discourse mentions (23)

  • Qilin: A Starter Project Template For Every Open Source Project
    GitHub Discussions can also be a great place for support as long as these are regularly monitored. Another option along the same lines is Discourse and the Open Source Matrix which is used by quite a few Open Source and community-based projects. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Ask HN: How to run an old-school mailing list?
    A lot of communities use [Discourse ](https://discourse.org). [LPSF](https://forum lpsf.org) migrated to it when Yahoo Groups was discontinued. Some of the advantages are that it's open source, self-hostable, and can be configured to work as both a traditional mailing list and modern forum. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago
  • My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy
    More like https://discourse.org/. You can run it yourself, but I can also just have them ding a credit card every month and not think about it again (I do this for a community). - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge
    Discourse perhaps? I've seen it in use in a few places; it has a modern look and feel to it at least. https://discourse.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
  • So Long, Twitter and Reddit
    I fully agree with you see my comment here[0] -- I think you may have misread my comment, it says "Discourse" (as in the forum software[1]), not Discord. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37245220. - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago
View more

Mastodon mentions (607)

  • TIL: You can open man or info pages in Firefox by man:<page> or info:<page>
    Addendum from https://mastodon.social/@mofosyne/112385581085525369 Turns out that it's because KHelpCenter in some linux distros hooks to these uris. So typing this uri would autoopen these man entries in KHelpCenter. - Source: Hacker News / about 6 hours ago
  • Systemd Rolling Out "run0" As sudo Alternative
    Good news! Run0 will use polkit[1], which uses JavaScript for its rules[2], so there's no limit on how complex your rules can get! On the other hand, maybe adding a JavaScript interpreter to Linux's trusted computing base isn't such good news... [1] https://mastodon.social/@pid_eins/112353420303876549 [2] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/polkit/docs/latest/polkit.8.html. - Source: Hacker News / 5 days ago
  • TfL's simple pop-up message led to a significant drop in paper ticket sales
    Apparently there are some stations which still have ticket gates, but I haven't seen any in the rather short time I've been in the Netherlands - they seem to be concentrated in metropolitan areas[1], and I've only been in the somewhat more rural[2] province of Limburg. As it happens, though, I have never actually used the OV-chipcard myself, as I always use an Interrail pass when travelling any further than... - Source: Hacker News / 7 days ago
  • Systemd Wants to Expand to Include a Sudo Replacement
    Uh, depending on exactly how it's implemented, it could break a lot of things. If all you are using sudo on is a personal (i.e. Single user) laptop/desktop to install packages, this (along with other things like pkexec or doas) would seem to present no issues (and personally, from what I can see, I'd be happy to run `run0` on my personal systems!), but sudo does significantly more than that,... - Source: Hacker News / 5 days ago
  • Ask HN: What do you think about a subscription based social media?
    Oh, TIL about https://mastodon.social/ (https://joinmastodon.org/) Looks like what you describe, doesn't it? > Social networking that's not for sale. - Source: Hacker News / 8 days ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Discourse and Mastodon, you can also consider the following products

Flarum - Flarum is the next-generation forum software that makes online discussion fun. It's simple, fast, and free.

X (Twitter) - Connect with your friends and other fascinating people. Get in-the-moment updates on the things that interest you. And watch events unfold, in real time, from every angle.

phpBB - Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi is a cheap, credit-card sized computer. The official website uses phpBB for their discussion forums. phpBB is not affiliated with nor responsible for any of the sites listed on the showcase.

Facebook - Connect with friends, family and other people you know. Share photos and videos, send messages and get updates.

Vanilla Forums - Build an engaging community forum using Vanilla's modern cloud forum software.

Gab - Gab is an ad-free social network dedicated to free speech.