The GNU Operating System

GNU social, true to the Unix-philosophy of small programs to do a small job, will be a decentralized social network that you can install on your own server

What if you could authorize your server to reveal as much, or as little information about you to other sites, as you wish... one time, one day, or forever?

You can use GNU social today — by cloning the code from gitorious (requires a git client), or by downloading as a .tar.gz snapshot.

Buy GNU social buttons

Installing GNU social on your server...

You will need PHP5 (including the OpenID, gd and curl libraries) plus MySQL 5 or later. Apache 2 or later, or lighttpd are supported as web servers.

Extract or clone the code at a web accessible location, such as /var/www and point your browser at the URL of your site or server. Installation is simple, and will need you to have already created a MySQL database and user.

Enabling GNU social theme (alpha) in your site...

Enable the GNUsocialTemplatePlugin in your config.php:

require_once('plugins/GNUsocialTemplatePlugin.php');
$tpl = new TemplatePlugin();

You may find that you prefer to use one of the default themes at this stage, and so the lines above are not needed.

Future enhancements to come — Duki Duki Snail (almost ready for testing), as well as plugins for various media types (photos, videos, notes, events) — both of these are expected in the next few weeks