vutuv

Many people call vutuv the LinkedIn of the Fediverse: a free, fast and open source social network for the profiles of humans and organizations. It began as a LinkedIn alternative and picked up the good parts of X and Facebook along the way: posts, likes, reposts, replies and direct messages. And it federates, so members can be followed from Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse (ActivityPub, opt-in per member). The reference installation runs at vutuv.de; anyone can run their own — on the public internet or inside a company intranet.

We use the MIT License.

What it does

• Public member profiles (work experience, education, tags, links, contact details) with follow relationships, posts, likes/reposts/replies and 1:1 direct messages — all real-time (Phoenix LiveView) where it matters.
• Passwordless: login by emailed PIN, optionally passkeys (WebAuthn).
• Agent-ready: every public page is also served as Markdown, plain text, JSON and XML; RSS feeds, sitemap, JSON-LD, /llms.txt and a REST API (/api/2.0, OAuth 2 + personal access tokens, webhooks).
• Built-in moderation (family-friendly by design), admin panel, newsletter system, GDPR data export, a formatted CV (Lebenslauf) download for job applications (print/PDF, Word, OpenDocument, LaTeX, JSON Resume), and per-installation legal pages (Impressum, Datenschutzerklärung, Nutzungsbedingungen) edited at /admin/legal.
• German and English UI; dark mode follows the system.

Technology: Elixir / Phoenix 1.8, PostgreSQL, Bandit, Tailwind CSS v4, libvips (AVIF images). A single modest server goes a long way (vutuv.de has yet to outgrow one), and because vutuv is built on Elixir it scales out to multiple nodes for very large installations.

Run your own installation

The operator's manual — requirements, release build, configuration reference, nginx, first admin, legal pages, intranet setups, backups and upgrades — lives in docs/ADMINS.md.

We'd love to hear about your installation. If you run vutuv (intranet or internet), tell us — and send feedback, bug reports and feature requests — via GitHub issues.

Development

mise install          # Erlang + Elixir (pinned in .tool-versions)
mix setup             # deps, database, assets
mix phx.server        # http://localhost:4000

The developer guide (prerequisites, setup, tests, how vutuv.de itself is deployed) lives in docs/DEVELOPERS.md; the architecture is documented one subsystem per file in docs/architecture/. Ground rules for contributions: CONTRIBUTING.md.

API

Third-party REST/JSON API at /api/2.0 (Bearer tokens). Create a personal access token at /access_tokens, then:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer vutuv_pat_YOUR_TOKEN" https://vutuv.de/api/2.0/me

Full developer documentation is served at /developers (sources: priv/dev_docs/).