A supported fork of Mastodon that provides local posting and a wider range of content types.

Darius Kazemi 3ddd4448b1 WIP 2 tahun lalu
.circleci 02851848e9 Revamp post filtering system (#18058) 2 tahun lalu
.devcontainer d86dd067ce Fix auto detect language for translate service (#19244) 2 tahun lalu
.github 840688318f Merge tag 'v4.0.0' into hometown-4.0-merge 2 tahun lalu
app 3ddd4448b1 WIP 2 tahun lalu
bin cbd0ee1d07 Update Mastodon to Rails 6.1 (#15910) 3 tahun lalu
chart 87fbd08f74 helm: Add helm chart tests (#20394) 2 tahun lalu
config 357186376c Revert About page to v3 static version (#1264) 2 tahun lalu
db a98750aac0 Merge tag 'v3.5.5+hometown-1.0.8' into hometown-4.0-1.0.8-merge 2 tahun lalu
dist 53817294fc Fix nginx location matching (#20198) 2 tahun lalu
lib 5de8a60c1a Add command to remove avatar and header images of inactive remote acc… (#1259) 2 tahun lalu
log 9c4856bdb1 Initial commit 8 tahun lalu
public 840688318f Merge tag 'v4.0.0' into hometown-4.0-merge 2 tahun lalu
spec 6281823df0 Add a user setting to show/hide domains on remote usernames (#1254) 2 tahun lalu
streaming 5732db7348 Merge tag 'v4.0.2' into hometown-4.0-merge 2 tahun lalu
vendor d5bdfaf0bb Increase files checked by ESLint (#9705) 6 tahun lalu
.browserslistrc 702b709d9a Add ES6 compatibility to browserslist (#18519) 2 tahun lalu
.buildpacks 0ab97107c7 Remove nodejs buildpack from buildpacks (#14364) 4 tahun lalu
.codeclimate.yml 84266f87e7 Replace from Code Climate to Super-Linter (#18587) 2 tahun lalu
.deepsource.toml fc145de238 Update .deepsource.toml (#15753) 3 tahun lalu
.dockerignore 211958e8b8 Update .dockerignore/.gitignore for #16947 etc (#17099) 3 tahun lalu
.editorconfig 3bdcf5d8f0 Add final newline to locale files (#2890) 7 tahun lalu
.env.production.sample 25e076505e ip_cleanup_scheduler: Make IP and session retention configurable (#18757) 2 tahun lalu
.env.test 5605b828e5 Bump webpacker from 4.0.7 to 4.2.0 (#12416) 5 tahun lalu
.env.vagrant 728148c2e5 Add a default DB_HOST to .env.vagrant for enable the streaming (#14030) 4 tahun lalu
.eslintignore d5bdfaf0bb Increase files checked by ESLint (#9705) 6 tahun lalu
.eslintrc.js 84266f87e7 Replace from Code Climate to Super-Linter (#18587) 2 tahun lalu
.foreman f5bf5ebb82 Replace sprockets/browserify with Webpack (#2617) 7 tahun lalu
.gitattributes 7aeb9168b0 Add .gitattributes file to avoid unwanted CRLF (#3954) 7 tahun lalu
.gitignore b907871604 Helm update readme.md (#20154) 2 tahun lalu
.haml-lint.yml 48594b18e6 Added haml-lint and fix warnings (#2773) 7 tahun lalu
.nanoignore aa803153e2 Remove Storybook (#4397) 7 tahun lalu
.nvmrc 229f5d1681 NodeJS 14 support - circleci/docker/.nvmrc (#16163) 3 tahun lalu
.prettierignore 584d8b977b Format JSON and YAML using Prettier (#17823) 2 tahun lalu
.prettierrc.js 584d8b977b Format JSON and YAML using Prettier (#17823) 2 tahun lalu
.profile f5c3d20e9c Add ffmpeg and dependent packages as well as LD_LIBRARY_PATHs (#3276) 7 tahun lalu
.rspec 71fe24096c Adding a Mention model, test stubs 8 tahun lalu
.rubocop.yml 5de8a60c1a Add command to remove avatar and header images of inactive remote acc… (#1259) 2 tahun lalu
.ruby-gemset f879cf03f0 Make Mastodon use its own gemset (#17858) 2 tahun lalu
.ruby-version 113dd90aa3 Bump Ruby version from 3.0.3 to 3.0.4 (#18028) 2 tahun lalu
.slugignore aa803153e2 Remove Storybook (#4397) 7 tahun lalu
.yarnclean 3e56f95c73 Replace from scss-lint to sass-lint (#10958) 5 tahun lalu
AUTHORS.md 1e83092e47 Update AUTHORS.md (#20630) 2 tahun lalu
Aptfile c8bf6192e4 Heroku fix (#19807) 2 tahun lalu
CHANGELOG.md 03b0f3ac83 Bump version to 4.0.2 (#20725) 2 tahun lalu
CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md 92aaa55f06 Add code of conduct from GitHub generator (#5674) 7 tahun lalu
CONTRIBUTING.md 97f657f818 Note that CircleCI auth may be required to run PR pipelines (#20371) 2 tahun lalu
Capfile 24a5d13d60 remove capistrano/faster_assets from Capfile (#2737) 7 tahun lalu
Dockerfile 5cf056fdb0 Install python3 when building with Docker (#18072) 2 tahun lalu
FEDERATION.md 9c44cf205f Add FEDERATION.md (#17029) 3 tahun lalu
Gemfile 21fd25a269 Fix rate limiting for paths with formats (#20675) 2 tahun lalu
Gemfile.lock 5732db7348 Merge tag 'v4.0.2' into hometown-4.0-merge 2 tahun lalu
LICENSE d709151781 Fix #49 - License changed from GPL-2.0 to AGPL-3.0 8 tahun lalu
Procfile 8630afb468 fix: make Procfile compatible with herokuish (#12685) 4 tahun lalu
Procfile.dev 7cb72956a6 Set RAILS_ENV in Procfile.dev (#15502) 4 tahun lalu
README.md 69ff67746b Trying to be clearer what "light weight" means 2 tahun lalu
Rakefile 9c4856bdb1 Initial commit 8 tahun lalu
SECURITY.md 73fecc3358 Change e-mail in SECURITY.md (#20384) 2 tahun lalu
Vagrantfile 298491a816 Remove protobuf dependencies (#17539) 2 tahun lalu
app.json 9feba112a7 Make enable_starttls configurable by envvars (#20321) 2 tahun lalu
babel.config.js dde0529fbc Remove dependency for @babel/plugin-proposal-class-properties (#16155) 3 tahun lalu
config.ru fdc17bea58 Fix rubocop issues, introduce usage of frozen literal to improve performance 8 tahun lalu
crowdin.yml 2e0d5753e3 Prevent translations from accidentally becoming completely different from source strings on Crowdin without translators noticing. (#17085) 3 tahun lalu
docker-compose.yml 840688318f Merge tag 'v4.0.0' into hometown-4.0-merge 2 tahun lalu
ide-helper.js ee017ca533 Add JS IDE helper (#13012) 4 tahun lalu
jest.config.js 8c644dcbd9 Bump jest from 27.5.1 to 28.0.3 (#18280) 2 tahun lalu
jsconfig.json 219c38b921 Replace `CancelToken` to `AbortSignal` (#19352) 2 tahun lalu
package.json 18ac5f1cc8 version emoji-mart (#19715) 2 tahun lalu
postcss.config.js d5bdfaf0bb Increase files checked by ESLint (#9705) 6 tahun lalu
priv-config 905bd24788 TOR federation (#7875) 6 tahun lalu
scalingo.json 9feba112a7 Make enable_starttls configurable by envvars (#20321) 2 tahun lalu
stylelint.config.js 84266f87e7 Replace from Code Climate to Super-Linter (#18587) 2 tahun lalu
yarn.lock 18ac5f1cc8 version emoji-mart (#19715) 2 tahun lalu

README.md

Hometown: a Mastodon fork

photo of a village of stone huts nestled in a lush green valley

Photo by Joana Mujollari, CC0 / Public Domain.

Mastodon is a free, open-source social network server based on ActivityPub. This is not the official version of Mastodon; this is a separate version (i.e. a fork) maintained by Darius Kazemi. For more information on Mastodon, you can see the official website and the upstream repo.

Hometown is a light weight fork of Mastodon. By "light weight" I don't mean more efficient; I mean this fork is 99.999% identical to Mastodon with a few key tweaks. This project is based on the principle of: minimum code change for maximum user experience change. This makes it easy for the basically-one-person who runs the project to keep it up to date. By our best understanding, our major changes are not wanted by the Mastodon project, hence maintaining this fork instead of trying to commit the changes to Mastodon.

Please check out our wiki for a list of Hometown-exclusive features. Some but not all of these are covered in this document.

You can also find a list of running Hometown instances, don't hesitate to open an issue to add yours!

Support this project

Please consider supporting Hometown by pledging to my Patreon, which supports all my open source projects including this one!

Of course this project couldn't exist without Mastodon so maybe support the Mastodon project Patreon too.

Migrating from Mastodon to Hometown

Please see this article in the wiki for directions on migration from Mastodon to Hometown.

Local only posting

Mastodon right now is designed to get your messages out to the entire fediverse. This is great, but there is a huge need for more private communities. And in a federated network I think it makes the most sense for your home server to be that community (hence "Hometown").

In the context of Hometown, local only posting is a per-post security option that lets you set whether that post can federate out to other servers or not.

I've been running Friend Camp, a Mastodon fork with local only posting, for about a year. Being able to have conversations with people on your server that don't federate is a hugely liberating thing. It allows inside jokes to develop. It allows people the freedom to complain about things that they wouldn't necessarily feel comfortable leaving a trusted server (cops, employers, etc). It also lets us do things like have a server-wide movie night where we flood the local timeline with posts about the movie, and it doesn't pollute the rest of the Fediverse.

This feature is based on the work of Renato Lond, which is itself based on a feature in the Mastodon Glitch Edition fork.

Reading more content types

Mastodon is microblogging software, meant for Twitter-style shortform posting.

Hometown is microblogging for writing, but its goal is to accept many content types for reading. So while I don't plan to let Hometown users publish massive blog posts, I would like your Hometown instance to be your one-stop shop for viewing all sorts of things on the Fediverse.

For Hometown this means if you subscribe to a service that sends out Article objects over ActivityPub (such as a blog on Write As), then those full articles render in your home timeline, behind a cut for length. Also, Hometown will render a variety of rich text like italic and bold.

Click on this GIF for a brief video demo:

Video demo of someone clicking 'read article' on an incoming article post, which then renders a full article.

This is based on rich text work by Claire Girka, and my own work on Article support.

It's more than just reading more stuff

Reading more content types also helps make the fediverse better. ActivityPub supports all kinds of content, but most ActivityPub servers shoehorn all their content into Note because that's the type that Mastodon treats as first-class. This has important implications for the fediverse and also on your day to do user experience.

Take the "quote tweet" debate for example.

Twitter has a feature called "quote tweeting" that lets you embed what someone else tweets, with your own comment right next to it. It's really useful for provide commentary in context, like this, where I point people to a sale and they can read both my comment on the sale and the original tweet about the sale in one post:

An example of a quote tweet from Twitter.

Hometown doesn't support quoting articles yet... but it will.

Better list management

If Hometown is going to be a universal reader, you're going to need better control over organizing your feeds than mainline Mastodon provides.

I've introduced a new kind of exclusive list. In vanilla Mastodon, if you add an account to your "friends I like" list, posts from people on that list appear on that list. But they also appear on your home timeline, and maybe you don't want that! You'd rather treat your "friends I like" list as your "real" home timeline, and then check your home timeline when you're bored. Check out more details about exclusive lists on the wiki.

Better accessibility defaults

Look, right now this pretty much just means that we underline hyperlinks by default. I'm of course open to implementing other obviously beneficial accessibilty defaults that Mastodon itself doesn't implement.

Hometown is still 99.999% Mastodon

I don't intend to stray very far from mainline Mastodon with this fork. If you want something that provides a ton of new features and widgets and stuff, the Mastodon Glitch Edition fork is a wondrous kitchen sink of major and minor tweaks.

Part of why I don't want to stray far from mainline Mastodon is that this project is going to be just me for the foreseeable future, and I'd like to keep it up to date with new Mastodon versions as easily as possible. The less code I change from Mastodon, the easier that is. Hence the principle of "minimum code change for maximum user experience change."

Versioning

Hometown uses semantic versioning and follows a versioning convention like v1.0.0+2.9.3. The 1.0.0 part is the actual Hometown version number, and then the 2.9.3 after the + sign is what's known in semantic versioning as "build metadata". It just means that a particular release is synchronized with Mastodon version 2.9.3, so for example an upgrade from v1.0.0+2.9.2 to v1.0.0+2.9.3 would upgrade Mastodon but not provide any new Hometown features or fixes.

Contributing to Hometown

Setting up your Hometown development environment is exactly like setting up your Mastodon development environment. Pull requests should be made to the hometown-dev branch, which is our default branch in Github.

You can open issues for bugs you've found or features you think are missing. You can also submit pull requests to this repository or submit translations using Crowdin. To get started, take a look at CONTRIBUTING.md. If your contributions are accepted into Mastodon, you can request to be paid through our OpenCollective.

IRC channel: #mastodon on irc.libera.chat

License

Copyright (C) 2016-2022 Eugen Rochko & other Mastodon contributors (see AUTHORS.md)

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.