Table of Contents

Hometown is a fork of Mastodon that makes small but impactful tweaks to Mastodon. This fork strives for minimum code change for maximum user experience change.

Hometown v1.1.1 has a few key differences from Mastodon.

Local only posting (aka posts that never federate)
In-line reading of full articles behind a cut for length
Exclusive lists which let you follow accounts without them clogging up your home timeline
Themes of a pastel variety!
Custom max toot characters to change the default 500 characters limits imposed by Mastodon
An improved mobile web experience (page coming soon)
More privacy controls for admins (page coming soon)
Indicators for missing descriptive text on all media in all timelines (page coming soon)

For more information, check out our README on our Github repository landing page.

If you would like general information about how to use Mastodon, rather than Hometown's specific features above, please check out the Mastodon documentation.

Finding a server to join

Are you looking for a server to join? Check out our list of Hometown servers.

Installing

You can find the latest Hometown release on our releases page. Please see the Initial migration page for instructions on migrating from Mastodon to Hometown.

If you are installing Hometown from scratch, rather than starting with Mastodon, I highly recommend this very detailed technical guide. It is for Hometown v1.0.8 but then you can upgrade to the latest Hometown from there: https://n00q.net/articles/guide-mastodon-hometown/#configure-linode-dns-with-mailgun-s-settings

Contributing

I plan to add more contribution guides, but for now we have this, because people have asked for it.

How to merge upstream Mastodon into Hometown (partial guide for now, sorry!)

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.