Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, MySpace, and LinkedIn have taken off. They are now among the top sites visited among the entire World Wide Web. As you might have guessed, the open source community has some involvement in the social networking space.
A social networking service focuses on building social relations among people, e.g., who share interests or activities. A social network service essentially consists of a representation of each user, his/her social links, and a variety of additional services.
Most social network services are web based and provide means for users to interact over the internet, share ideas, discuss shared concerns etc. Here is a list of 12 open source platforms to build your own social networking website.Let’s take a look at free social network software 2017.
The Best Open Source Social Network CMS
BuddyPress
BuddyPress is an open source social networking software package owned by Automattic. “Social networking, in a box. Everything you need to start your own self-hosted and WordPress-powered social network”.
Check out: The Best Free and Premium BuddyPress Themes
WordPress+BuddyPress help you to build self hosted social network for your company, team and organization.
See Also: 25 Best Free CMS – Open Source Content Management Systems
Dolphin
Dolphin is a CMS that lets you create social networks, dating sites and web communities. It comes loaded with video chat, recorder, video player, forums, groups, events, video messaging, emails, file sharing as well as desktop and mobile apps.
Elgg
This powerful open source social networking engine is one of the most popular development platforms. It’s built to run on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) platform. It offers blogging, microblogging, file sharing, networking, groups, and numerous other features.
Jcow
Jcow is a flexible social networking CMS coded in PHP. Jcow makes it easy and interesting to create Social Networks and online communities. You can create a website like Facebook with this open source.
Pligg
Pligg is a social media CMS (content management system) platform that powers tens of thousands of websites.
Some popular hosting providers (Dreamhost) offer this social media CMS so you can create self-hosted bookmarking site Reddit.
It specializes in creating social publishing networks, where users submit and promote content similar to sites like Digg, Reddit, and Mixx.
b2evolution
b2evolution is an open source social CMS engine supporting, photo albums, community forums, online manuals and social network sites.
Oxwall
Oxwall is flexible and easy to use PHP/MySQL community software platform. Oxwall is used for a wide range of projects starting from family sites and custom social networks to collaboration tools and enterprise community solutions. It is a solutions for your social community.
Etano
Open Source PHP Script, Etano lets you create a social network, dating website and other collaborative sites. It doesn’t really offer many unique features, but it can surely suffice for a small social networking project.
Anahita
Anahita is a social networking platform and framework for building knowledge sharing apps and services
Hotaru CMS
Hotaru CMS is an open source, PHP platform for building your own websites. With flexible plugins and themes, you can make any site you like. The most common use for Hotaru is social bookmarking.
LiveStreet CMS
LiveStreet CMS lets you create social networks and team blogs. It offers many extensions and multilingual translations.
Beatz
Beatz is a free open-source social networking community script that allows you to start your own favourite artist band website just like Pure Volume. The script is coded in Php, Mysql and licensed under Creative Commons GPL license. In other words, its an online community script for sharing, discussing and learning about new artists and your favourites.
Also check out: 20 Free Open Source eCommerce Platforms to Create a Website
