Truly federated
Follow people on any Fediverse server with their @user@domain address. ActivityPub inbox and outbox, WebFinger, HTTP Signatures — full bidirectional federation.
PHP + MySQL · Shared hosting friendly · Federated
Social networking, the simple way — connected to the whole Fediverse
Openbook is a general-purpose social network inspired by the clarity of early Facebook, built natively on ActivityPub with PHP and MySQL. Not a microblog, not a Mastodon clone: a place for personal, local, and thematic communities — and something you can host yourself without a dedicated server or heavy infrastructure.
Your own social network on a budget shared hosting plan
Openbook is written in PHP with a MySQL database — the same stack offered by almost every web host. It was designed from the ground up for minimal setups: no VPS, no Docker, no Redis, no background workers, no Node.js in production.
- Works on typical shared hosting — the kind you already use for a website or blog
- Guided web installer: upload the files, open /install in your browser, done
- Federation queue runs via MySQL and a simple cron job (or a protected web endpoint if cron is unavailable)
- No need for a dedicated server, Kubernetes, or significant CPU/RAM — a small plan is enough to start
Anyone with a domain and a basic PHP/MySQL hosting account can run their own Fediverse node.
Read the installation guideBuilt for real communities
Openbook focuses on what matters: people talking to each other, on your terms, across servers.
Simple by design
A clean, Facebook-style interface with a home feed, profiles, nested comments, likes, and shares. Chronological ordering — no recommendation algorithms.
Free and open source
Released under AGPL-3.0. Inspect the code, run your own instance, adapt it to your community. No vendor lock-in, no proprietary traps.
Privacy-minded
No third-party analytics, ad trackers, or mandatory remote fonts. Sessions are protected, actor keys are encrypted at rest, and you control registration on your instance.
Minimal hosting requirements
Just PHP, MySQL, and a cron job. No Redis, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch, object storage, or permanent worker processes. Openbook keeps infrastructure lean so your community is not tied to expensive cloud resources.
A window on the Fediverse
The World section surfaces public posts from remote actors already relevant to your instance, plus accounts worth discovering — without pretending to index the entire network.
What you can do today
- Publish posts with images, hashtags, and mentions
- Comment with nested replies, like and share posts
- Follow local and remote users across the Fediverse
- Search for people by @handle@domain from the interface
- Customize your profile: avatar, cover, bio, and links
- Choose post visibility: public, unlisted, followers-only, or direct
- Browse a chronological World timeline of federated content
Ready to join — or run your own instance?
Try the live community at openb.app, or install Openbook on your own domain from any modest PHP/MySQL hosting plan — no dedicated server required.