Open Source Social Network: a PHP social platform you install on your own server

This is a full social platform, not a forum with profiles

The README describes OSSN as open-source social networking software developed in PHP that enables you to create a fully functional social networking website which fosters community engagement and helps members form meaningful social relationships, with the audience being people connecting over professional interests or personal passions. The front-end feature list sets the scale. There is user registration and login, profiles with a cover photo and a photo, friends management and friend tagging, live chat and messaging, wall posts, albums, photos, ads, groups, a block system, a poke system, comments, likes and reactions, an expense management component, Giphy integration in comments, invite friends, embedded videos, smiles and emojis, site pages for terms and about and privacy, mobile responsive layout, notifications, search, a gallery, post backgrounds, realtime comments, realtime messages, blogs, themes, mentions, custom pages, custom menu items, a captcha, site announcements, a login-as feature, progressive web app support and Microsoft Active Directory login. The final line of that table is telling, many free components of community website, because the component system is the point.

The directory layout is the architecture

The repository root tells you how the application is organised, and it is a component system rather than a framework. There is a components/ directory for the pluggable features, and separate directories for classes/, system/, themes/, libraries/, vendors/, locale/, actions/, configurations/, installation/ and upgrade/, plus a dedicated licenses/ directory. The entry point is index.php at the root, and the whole thing is described by an XML file, opensource-socialnetwork.xml. The themes/ directory explains how the presentation layer is separated from the component layer, which is why the README can claim themes on community as a feature, and the fact that components ship their own locales is what makes the multi-language support work without a separate translation system for the whole application.

Twenty languages, and a K&R indentation standard

The languages table lists twenty-one of them, and the list is worth reading for what it reveals about the audience. English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Turkish, Russian, Hebrew, Greek, Esperanto, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Traditional Chinese, Sinhala, Tamil, Persian, Hungarian and Danish. The presence of Hebrew, Traditional Chinese, Persian and Tamil alongside Esperanto suggests a user base spread across regions rather than a translation effort done once for a market. The README notes the Kernighan and Ritchie K&R variant with 1TBS indentation is used for OSSN, and points to a coding standards page in the wiki for the details, which is an old-school choice but a consistent one for a codebase with this many contributors.

The back office is a real admin surface

The backend feature list describes the administrative side, and it is extensive enough to be the deciding factor for anyone running OSSN as an organisation rather than as a hobby. There is an admin dashboard for a site overview, an online users count with a gender based graph, a total site users count by months graph, component configurations, and separate screens for adding, removing and editing users, an ads manager, cache settings, basic settings, unvalidated users, custom pages, a menu builder, themes management, components management and a web services API. There is also a manual action to validate unvalidated users, which matters for a signup flow. The dashboard graphs tell you the project treats itself as a multi-tenant-capable site rather than a single club.

Three installation routes, and a writable directory is not optional

The installation section points to a wiki page and then offers a web installer, a Docker option in a separate repository and a VM image. On Ubuntu x64, across 18.04 through 24.04 LTS, a personal package archive is available.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:arsalanshah/opensource-socialnetwork
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install opensource-socialnetwork

Before that, the directory permissions section sets out a hard requirement. OSSN must be installed into a directory writable by the webserver or it will not function properly, and for most Linux servers running Apache v2 that means changing the group ownership of the parent directory to the www-data group and adding group write permission with chgrp and chmod. If you are not on Apache v2 or use a different webserver, the README says you will need to read your system documentation or speak to your server administrator. That instruction is a hint about the shape of the application, since a social platform that writes into its own installation directory is doing things a modern twelve-factor deployment would not.

The licence is the one thing to read before you commit

The licence line is the most consequential sentence in the README, and it is not a standard one. OSSN is licensed under the Open Source Social Network License 4.0 with the Cryptographic Autonomy License version 1.0 as the alternative, and GitHub cannot classify it as a standard licence, so LICENSE.md at the root is the only text to read. That means a company reading the badge expecting MIT-style permission is making a mistake. The copyright notices in the README name several holders, including the individual author, the project organisation, Open Teknik, OpenHost247, Softlab24 and Informatikon Technologies, which is the sort of list that appears when a project has passed through several owners.

Version 10.1 with a separate upgrade path

The README header carries the version number 10.1, and the release history matches with 10.1 on 2026-10-01, 10.0 on 2026-07-27 and 9.11 on 2026-07-01, so the major version moves roughly every few months and the last push was on 2026-10-10. Upgrades have their own documentation page, which is what you would expect for a system with an upgrade/ directory in the repository and a UPGRADE.txt at the root alongside CHANGES.txt, ChangeLog.txt, COPYRIGHT.txt and SUPPORT.txt. A live demo is hosted at demo.opensource-socialnetwork.org, and the repository also carries a SECURITY.md, a CONTRIBUTING.md, a CONTRIBUTORS.md, a TESTS.md and an AUTHOR.txt, which is a lot of process files for a project of this kind and suggests a mature rather than a casual governance.

Editorial conclusion

OSSN fits an organisation that needs a branded community site with real social features, on its own infrastructure, where a hosted platform is not an option and a bare forum would feel too thin. It is a poor fit for a small site, because the component system, the theme layer, the admin dashboard and the multi-language machinery are a lot of surface to operate, and it is a poor fit if you want a permissive licence, since the Open Source Social Network License is a custom licence rather than a standard one. Verify first that your hosting meets the writable-directory requirement, because the README states OSSN will not function properly without it, and read LICENSE.md rather than assuming the MIT-style terms you might expect.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. opensource-socialnetwork/opensource-socialnetwork on GitHub
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases