Ocelot.Social

October 10, 2026About 5 min

Ocelot.social is free and open-source software to run your own social network — for a community, an association, a movement or a region. It is developed by a community of programmers and the operators of the networks running on it.

Our goal is that people can take part fairly and equally in online social networks — with every voice able to be heard. Instead of one platform for everybody, operators run networks of their own, and people choose where they want to be. The data stays close to the people and to the operator they trust.

In the long run we want these networks to connect (ActivityPub, Fediverse), so that people can follow and befriend each other across networks. If you would like to help build that, get in touch.

Screenshots

The pictures are taken from our demo data by the CI on every change to master, so they show the network as it is today.

Features

Content

news feed, filtered by topic, post type, the people you follow or your groups, and sorted by date or event start
posts as articles and events (date, place, online or on site), with images and embeds
comments, reactions, shouts and pinned posts
hashtags, @-mentions and full-text search
a map of people, groups and events

Community

user profiles with location, social media links and badges
following, muting and blocking
groups — public, closed or hidden — with their own roles and rights: who may read, post, comment, invite, join or manage members is set per role, from a template or right by right
invite links for the network and for groups

Communication

chat: direct messages, group chats and file messages
video calls in groups (LiveKit)
notifications in the app and by e-mail, the e-mails configurable per kind

Running a Network

roles and permissions: define who may do what in the network, beyond the built-in user, moderator, admin and owner
network policies: switch features on or off — registration, invitations, groups, video calls and more
moderation: reports, review decisions, disabling content and users
administration of users, groups, categories, hashtags, pages, donations and API keys
branding: name, logo, colours and texts of your own network
11 languages, installable as an app (PWA)

User Guide and FAQ

Demo

Try it on our staging network stage.ocelot.social. These logins work there and on a local installation with the demo data:

email	password	role
`user@example.org`	1234	user
`moderator@example.org`	1234	moderator
`admin@example.org`	1234	admin
`owner@example.org`	1234	owner

Help Us

Spread the word: link ocelot.social on your website, like it on AlternativeTo, star this repository, tell your friends, or write about it.
Take a good first issue — read CONTRIBUTING.md first.
Test and report bugs, review pull requests.
Translate: please contact us.

Donate

Ocelot.social is mostly developed and maintained by the association busFaktor() e.V.. Please support it with a donation. Thanks a lot! ❤️

Contact

Would you like to run a network of your own, or join one?

hello@ocelot.social
our developer chat on Discord

For Developers

New here? The documentation covers the backend, the webapp, testing and deployment; questions are welcome on Discord.

Quick Start

With Docker (24.0.6 or newer):

$ git clone https://github.com/Ocelot-Social-Community/Ocelot-Social.git
$ cd Ocelot-Social
$ cp webapp/.env.template webapp/.env
$ cp backend/.env.template backend/.env
$ docker compose up

# in a second terminal, once everything is up
$ docker compose exec backend npm run db:migrate -- init
$ docker compose exec backend npm run db:migrate -- up
$ docker compose exec backend npm run db:seed

Then open http://localhost:3000 and log in with one of the demo accounts. The full guide — production compose, local installation without Docker, Apple Silicon and the one-time MinIO volume migration — is in installation.md.

Repository Layout

Folder	What it is
backend	GraphQL API server (Node.js, TypeScript, Apollo) on a Neo4j graph database
webapp	the web frontend (Vue 2, Nuxt 2), server- and client-side rendered
packages/ui	the component library, Vue 2 and 3 compatible, with Storybook
packages/branding	what a network can brand, and the defaults
cypress	end-to-end tests and executable feature specifications
deployment	Helm charts and configuration for running a network
maintenance	the page shown while a network is under maintenance

Technology Stack

Vue.js and Nuxt, Tailwind CSS in the component library
GraphQL with Apollo, Node.js and TypeScript
Neo4j, MinIO / S3 for uploads, LiveKit for video calls
Docker, Kubernetes and Helm
Testing: Vitest (backend), Jest with Vue Test Utils (webapp), Cypress (end-to-end), Playwright and Storybook (visual and accessibility tests of the components), ESLint

Contributing

Choose an issue — our good first issues are a good start — and leave a comment there. We will then invite you to our volunteers team, which gives you the permission to push to this repository; if we have not invited you yet, ask for it on Discord.

Please work on a branch of this repository rather than a fork: the CI needs credentials a fork does not get. Name the branch <issue-number>-<description> and open a pull request against master.

Before you push, run the linters, and the tests of what you changed:

# in folder webapp/
$ npm run lint -- --fix
$ npm run locales -- --fix
$ npm test

# in folder backend/ — the tests wipe the database they run against,
# so never point them at data you want to keep
$ npm run lint -- --fix
$ npm test

More in our contribution guideline. On Discord, introduce yourself at #introduce-yourself and mention @@Mentors to get onboard 🤓