Opinionated Mastodon fork adding power-user features like rich text formatting and local-only posting that upstream won't implement.
Glitch-soc is a Mastodon fork written in Ruby on Rails with a React frontend. It adds formatted posts, local-only posting, content warnings as content, collapsible toots, doodle support, and custom themes while remaining compatible with the Mastodon API and federation protocol.
Mastodon exploded in popularity as a decentralized Twitter alternative, but its creator Eugen Rochko maintained a firm vision of what Mastodon should be — and more importantly, what it shouldn't. Rochko consistently rejected features he considered harmful to the user experience, including rich text formatting (bold, italic, code blocks), local-only posts visible only to instance members, and app-level theming. Many instance administrators and power users disagreed.
Glitch-soc (Glitch Social) emerged in 2017 as a 'friendly fork' — not a hostile breakaway but a parallel version that adds the features Mastodon won't. The name 'glitch' reflects its experimental nature: a version that's a little off from the mainstream, embracing features that Mastodon proper considers too weird or risky.
The fork is maintained as a soft fork, regularly rebasing on top of upstream Mastodon releases. This means glitch-soc instances get all of Mastodon's security updates and improvements while keeping their additional features. The approach requires significant ongoing effort to resolve merge conflicts, but it avoids the divergence problems that plague hard forks.
Key additions include: formatted posts (Markdown, HTML, BBCode), local-only posting (toots visible only to your instance), collapsible posts for long content, a 'vanilla' Mastodon-compatible mode, custom app themes, and doodle functionality. Several of these features, particularly local-only posting, have become beloved by communities that treat their instances as semi-private social spaces.
Glitch-soc runs some of the fediverse's most prominent instances and has influenced Mastodon development — features first prototyped in glitch-soc have occasionally been adopted upstream, though often in simplified form.
Glitch-soc created as a soft fork adding features Mastodon upstream rejects
Local-only posting feature becomes popular among community-oriented instances
Twitter exodus brings massive new attention to Mastodon and glitch-soc instances
Continues active development, tracking upstream Mastodon releases
Glitch-soc proved that a soft fork can sustainably add features an upstream project refuses to implement, without fragmenting the ecosystem. It serves as a pressure valve for community demands that upstream won't accommodate, and has influenced which features Mastodon eventually adopts.