Completely free for personal use!
A modern, self-hosted, source-available social platform
Fork, Customize, and Deploy your own social media platform for personal or commercial use.
Designed to seemlessly work with:
Features & Benefits
A fully featured experience social media platform
Includes common social media functionality: Posting (Viewing / Editing / Deleting), Commenting, Upvoting/Downvoting.
Create custom Communities where users can subscribe and follow things they care about.
Communication functionality: Email alerts when someone responds to a post, alert preferences,
Security features: Hiding and Reporting Posts, Blocking Users
Available for: Web, iOS, Android
Scalable & Flexible
A scalable social media platform that can be deployed and scaled using Google Cloud Run. Scale and deploy as many Cloud run instances as you need depending on your traffic requirements, and set whatever specs needed for your backend DB.
Community-based Approach
Create custom communities that your users can follow, similar to Reddit. This way you can create a custom social media experience where users are only seeing posts related to subjects they care about.
Customizable Frontend
Administrators can fully customize the React Native frontend. Each Tab and section of the frontend can be fully customized to your needs, including the UI, colours/schemes, and expo settings.
Customizable Backend
The backend uses Django and it is fully customizable so that you can expand on it’s existing functionality to add more API endpoints or backend functionality. Change the logic to do different things as needed.
AI-Powered Functionality
In-built scripting to scrape certain content and post in specific communities on the platform. Powered by cronjobs.
Self-Hosted
Host the platform in your data-center or in your own Google Cloud instance to retain control of the platform and any data collected.
Web Experience
With Axion Node, you get a fully functional web-based social platform experience.
Mobile Experience
With Axion Node, you get fully functional iOS and Android client apps.
Our Perspective
The Why
After spending many years in the tech sector and watching the social media landscape deteriorate, we became increasingly frustrated with what major platforms have become. Endless algorithm-driven “doom scrolling” designed to keep us hooked, feeds overloaded with ads for things we don’t want, and content we never asked to see have all turned social media into an exhausting experience. On top of that, platforms are now routinely bought by billionaires who reshape them to maximize profit—pushing paid “Pro” tiers, limiting reach unless you pay, and monetizing every possible data point about users. Even basic features are being locked behind subscriptions, while personal information is quietly harvested and sold.
Tired of seeing social platforms drift further away from serving everyday people, we decided to take a different path. Our mission became clear: build a truly open-source, transparent, free social media system that anyone can self-host. No surveillance algorithms, no paywalls, no billionaire ownership—just a source-available platform that puts control back in the hands of users and democratizes what social networks can be.
Modern tech stack
Leverage a modern tech stack
- Frontend – React Native Expo / JavaScript/TypeScript
- Backend – Django / Python
- Reverse Proxy – Nginx
- Email – SendGrid
- Database – PostgreSQL
Licensed under the BSL 1.1
Contribute to creating future social experiences
Join us on GitHub and help us improve the social platforms of the future. Here we can collaborate, create PR’s, and work together to create a social platform structure that we all have visibility into.
Self-hosted
Deploy a self-hosted instance for your company
AxionNode can be forked into your own repository, customized and then self-hosted in your Google Cloud (or equivalent platform) and used as an internal corporate social platform – think of it as a version of Reddit or Facebook for your company.
Personal use is completely free, but you need a paid license for corporate/commercial use.
Frequently Asked Questions
Have Questions? We’ve Got Answers.
Check our FAQ section for answers to commonly asked questions
Do I need to host this on Google Cloud Platform?
No. We believe you should have the freedom to self-host AxionNode wherever you want.
That being said, the initial product was designed to work out-of-the-box with Google Cloud Platform, using Cloud Build, Cloud Run and Cloud SQL. So it depends on how turn-key you want the deployment to be.
We hope to have more turn-key deployment capabilities for Azure, AWS and other self-hosted options in the future with more community support.
What are the benefits of using Axion Node over creating my own platform?
We’re giving you a source-available software, licensed under BSL 1.1 that uses a modern stack – React native using Expo for the frontend, and Django/Python for the backend, with a ton of functionality out of the box – posts, commenting, upvoting, communities, photo uploading, youtube video posting and more, so it gives your team a headstart.
You can then customize it based on your needs and deploy your own custom variant. Having builds that work out-of-the-box for web, iOS and Android is a good headstart.
What are the main components of the architecture?
A frontend built in React Native – the frontend can be customized and builds can be generated easily for iOS and Android using react native expo.
A backend using Django – A structured robust backend with APIs, models, views and serializers.
When you deploy, we leverage a reverse proxy using Nginx to route traffic as needed from the container instance running in Cloud Run.
As part of the deployment process, there is also a static build that gets generated for Web. The system hosts a version of the frontend in the container to allow support for Web traffic. You can optionally turn on/off the web frontend running in the container if you just want the iOS and Android apps on the client-side.
How do the client apps connect to the backend?
The frontend clients (for iOS and and Android) connect to the backend APIs using TCP traffic over port 8080 (encrypted over TLS 1.2+ pending you set it up properly). Only the 1 TCP port 8080 is exposed via the Cloud Run instance. The Reverse Proxy (Nginx) only forwards api related traffic to the backend for processing.
How do a generate a build for Docker
The steps included in our readme show you how to use Cloud Build and then how to run it using Cloud Run.
You can also generate a build locally using Docker and test locally without Docker.
Does it use or integrate with the Fediverse?
Not currently. The platform was originally built as a fully self-hosted solution that runs in a single container, prioritizing simplicity and internal corporate use.
That said, if someone wants to integrate with the Fediverse through ActivityPub or similar protocols, the system is structured so that a federation layer could be added on top.
Is this project open source?
Technically no. We released the project initially under the BSL 1.1 (Business Source License), which is an alternative to closed source or open core licensing models.
Under BSL, the source code is always publicly available. Non-production use of the code is always free, but for commercial use a Commercial license must be purchased.
Source code is guaranteed to become Open Source at a certain point in time. On the Change Date, or the fourth anniversary of the first publicly available distribution of the code under the BSL, whichever comes first, the code automatically becomes available under the Change License. The Change License is mandated to be GPL Version 2.0 or later or a compatible license (i.e., the Change License is always an Open Source license that enables use of the software in a GPL project).
To learn more about BSL 1.1, visit here.
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