Doing a little victory dance because today #Hometown's "exclusive lists" feature was merged into Mastodon. Which means once it is part of a release, that is one less thing for me to maintain. Everything is going according to plan :AngelDevil:
If there are any folks out there who would like to merge #hometown with Mastodon 4.2.x, that would be really helpful to me. My recent attempts to do the merge have ended in inscrutable failure and I don't have a ton of extra time to work on this. (Specifically there will no longer be security patches for 4.0.x from the main project that I can merge as needed.)
I'll have a backport for people running the older Hometown version 1.0.8+3.5.5 later today when I'm not stuck on my phone at an airport. Thank you @jasmin and @misty for your help!!
There's been plenty of buzz lately surrounding #Meta connecting to the #Fediverse through #ActivityPub. As a #FOSS project that hasn't yet shipped software that federates, we don't have too much to say yet. However, it's worth saying a few things about how #Pinetta will federate, in general.
Briefly, Pinetta is a creative tool with social characteristics. Server admins will be able to operate in both "allow mode" and "deny mode"; they can choose to federate with everyone, a select few, or even no one. This means, for example, that you'll be able to use Pinetta as a fully functional Fediverse server open to large communities, or as a private server—for instance, in the context of a school where students might produce and share work with only the school's community of learners, staff, and selected guests. Even if you choose to federate with other servers, users will have fine-grained control over the reach and visibility of their posts, similar to the way #Hometown and #Calckey users do. Essentially, we're aiming to make community safety as configurable as possible to meet the widest possible set of needs—including those of the most vulnerable people and communities.
As a project, we don't plan on hosting a central instance for very large numbers of users to use; for the time being, our goal is to gradually refine the software to allow it to respond to the needs of communities, and to foster the development of united, diverse and healthy communities based on respect and trust. Our aspiration is to serve humanity, whether it's by making a nice app or by creating human connections that allow good people to do good things together. We will amplify the voices of those who share these values and aspirations, and will work actively with collaborators everywhere to prevent harm.
I did it! I'm finally leaving mastodon.social for a Mastodon+Hometown instance of my own creation! You can now find my new account @kostyn !!!!
Thanks very much to @mart0 for your incredible step-by-step guide to hosting Mastodon for a begininer like me, and of course, to @darius for their incredible writings and work on Hometown.
P.S. don't fall for Facebook's ("Meta's") bullshit.
And another #Hometown release this morning. There's been another critical upstream security patch from Mastodon. So even if you updated 2 days ago (and thank you for doing it), you should update again:
I will note that I expect the Mastodon team to stop supporting security releases for v3 at some point, and I'm not going to be able to implement those myself, so basically once Mastodon stops maintaining v3 I'm going to have to stop as well. So I encourage admins to make a plan to update to v4.
How ya gonna expect most blind people to jump over to a different platform (with the exception to a #HomeTown instance), if all the work is being specifically put into Mastodon?
Hopping on a #bus to return to your #hometown during #festive#holidays may soon become a thing of the past if nothing is done to halt the declining number of bus drivers
With at least 5,000 #vacancies to fill, it has been suggested that the government offer free #training to those interested in becoming #busdrivers
The #shortage was expected to become more severe with each passing year
Has anyone implemented local trends on #mastodon? Is this a #hometown feature? I'd love to see local-only trends or at least some mechanism for positively weighting the contributions of local #AoIR users.
A lot of people have talked about the possibility of forking Mastodon to get the many improvements their communities need. Making such an effort successful is another discussion entirely.
@deadsuperhero There are several forks of Mastodon that have been around for years and work well (not only #Hometown) like #Ecko, #Glitchsoc, etc. for years.
They have many more functions such as editable character limit,
editable poll options, local posts, changeable favicon, markdown formatting - and if that's not enough, there is plenty of other software in the Fediverse for micro- and macroblogging
The Trouble with Forking Mastodon (wedistribute.org)
A lot of people have talked about the possibility of forking Mastodon to get the many improvements their communities need. Making such an effort successful is another discussion entirely.