Hometown
A lightweight fork of Mastodon adding local-only posting, support for more content types, and better list management.
What is Hometown?
Hometown is a lightweight fork of the Mastodon social network server that adds features like local-only posting, support for reading multiple content types (e.g., full articles), and improved list management. It aims to enhance community privacy and serve as a universal reader within the ActivityPub-fediverse while staying closely aligned with Mastodon's codebase.
Server administrators and communities seeking a Mastodon-compatible social platform with enhanced privacy controls, better content consumption, and community-focused features without deviating significantly from the mainline Mastodon experience.
Developers choose Hometown for its focused, minimal modifications that deliver significant user experience improvements—like local-only posting and multi-content support—while ensuring easy updates from upstream Mastodon, making it ideal for maintainers who value stability and community-centric enhancements.
Overview
A supported fork of Mastodon that provides local posting and a wider range of content types.
Use Cases
Best For
- Creating private, server-local communities where posts don't federate externally
- Running a Mastodon instance that can display full articles and rich text from other ActivityPub services
- Organizing feeds with exclusive lists that separate curated content from the home timeline
- Self-hosting a social network with better accessibility defaults than vanilla Mastodon
- Maintaining a Mastodon fork with minimal code divergence for easier upstream updates
- Building a community-focused fediverse server with enhanced privacy and inside-joke-friendly features
Not Ideal For
- Teams wanting a kitchen-sink of features and UI customizations beyond Mastodon's core
- Large enterprises requiring multi-maintainer support and enterprise-level scalability
- Instances focused solely on public, fully federated content without need for local privacy features
Pros & Cons
Pros
Local-only posting provides per-post security to keep content server-local, enabling private community conversations as highlighted in the README.
Supports rendering full Article objects and rich text from services like Write.as, making timelines versatile beyond microblogging.
Exclusive lists allow accounts to appear only on specific lists, not the home timeline, for better curation without clutter.
Maintains 99.999% code parity with Mastodon, enabling straightforward updates and minimizing maintenance overhead.
Cons
Maintained by essentially one person, which could lead to slower updates and limited support resources, as acknowledged in the README.
Focuses on minimal changes, so it lacks the wide array of features found in forks like Glitch Edition, potentially limiting customization.
While designed for easy updates, conflicts with Mastodon's changes could require manual fixes, risking stability and compatibility.
Frequently Asked Questions
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