<imgwidth="300"src="https://live.staticflickr.com/7005/26777339042_b32cef4e1f_b.jpg"alt="photo of a village of stone huts nestled in a lush green valley">
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](https://friend.camp/@darius). For more information on Mastodon, you can see the [official website](https://joinmastodon.org) and the [upstream repo](https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon).
**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](https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/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](https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/wiki/Hometown-servers), don't hesitate to open an issue to add yours!
Please consider [supporting Hometown by pledging to my Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/tinysubversions), 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](https://www.patreon.com/mastodon) too.
Please see [this article in the wiki](https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/wiki/Initial-migration) for directions on migration from Mastodon to Hometown.
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](https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/pull/8427), which is itself based on a feature in the [Mastodon Glitch Edition](https://glitch-soc.github.io/docs/) fork.
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](https://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**.
<imgsrc="http://tinysubversions.com/pics/hometown-article.gif"alt="Video demo of someone clicking 'read article' on an incoming article post, which then renders a full article.">
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.
Mastodon has a feature called "quote tweeting" that lets you embed what someone else posts, 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:
I've introduced a new kind of [exclusive list](https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/wiki/Exclusive-lists). 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](https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/wiki/Exclusive-lists).
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](https://glitch-soc.github.io/docs/) 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."
Hometown uses [semantic versioning](https://semver.org) 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.
Setting up your Hometown development environment is [exactly like setting up your Mastodon development environment](https://docs.joinmastodon.org/dev/overview/). Pull requests should be made to the `hometown-dev` branch, which is our default branch in Github.
You should read the overall [CONTRIBUTING](https://github.com/mastodon/.github/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md) guide, which covers our development processes.
You should also read and understand the [CODE OF CONDUCT](https://github.com/mastodon/.github/blob/main/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md) that enables us to maintain a welcoming and inclusive community. Collaboration begins with mutual respect and understanding.
