GoToSocial provides a lightweight, customizable, and safety-focused entryway into the [Fediverse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse), and is comparable to (but distinct from) existing projects such as [Mastodon](https://joinmastodon.org/), [Pleroma](https://pleroma.social/), [Friendica](https://friendica.net), and [PixelFed](https://pixelfed.org/).
If you've ever used something like Twitter or Tumblr (or even Myspace!) GoToSocial will probably feel familiar to you: You can follow people and have followers, you make posts which people can favourite and reply to and share, and you scroll through posts from people you follow using a timeline. You can write long posts or short posts, or just post images, it's up to you. You can also, of course, block people or otherwise limit interactions that you don't want by posting just to your friends.
**GoToSocial does NOT use algorithms or collect data about you to suggest content or 'improve your experience'**. The timeline is chronological: whatever you see at the top of your timeline is there because it's *just been posted*, not because it's been selected as interesting (or controversial) based on your personal profile.
GoToSocial is not designed for 'must-follow' influencers with tens of thousands of followers, and it's not designed to be addictive. Your timeline and your experience is shaped by who you follow and how you interact with people, not by metrics of engagement!
GoToSocial doesn't claim to be *better* than any other application, but it offers something that might better *for you* in particular.
This project sprang up in 2021 out of a dissatisfaction with the safety + privacy features of other Federated microblogging/social media applications, and a desire to implement something a little different.
It began as a solo project, and then picked up steam as more developers became interested and jumped on.
## Contributing
You wanna contribute to GtS? Great! ❤️❤️❤️ Check out the issues page to see if there's anything you wanna jump in on, and read the CONTRIBUTING.md file on the repository for guidelines and setting up your dev environment.
For questions and comments, you can [join our Matrix channel](https://matrix.to/#/#gotosocial:superseriousbusiness.org) at `#gotosocial:superseriousbusiness.org`. This is the quickest way to reach the devs. You can also mail [admin@gotosocial.org](mailto:admin@gotosocial.org).
For bugs and feature requests, please check to see if there's [already an issue](https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/issues), and if not, open one or use one of the above channels to make a request (if you don't have a Github account).
GoToSocial is free software, licensed under the GNU AGPL v3 LICENSE. We encourage forking and changing the code, hacking around with it, and experimenting.
See [here](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html) for the differences between AGPL versus GPL licensing, and [here](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html) for FAQ's about GPL licenses, including the AGPL.
If you modify the GoToSocial source code, and run that modified code in a way that's accessible over a network, you *must* make your modifications to the source code available following the guidelines of the license:
> \[I\]f you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software.
