Troubleshooting & How-Tos 📡 🔍

The State of Local-Only Fediverse Posts (WIP)

I got curious about the state of local-only post capability in the Fediverse. Yeah, that might sound like a contradiction, but on an instance that serves a specific community, sometimes you might want to only interact with other people on the same site.

Between reading and testing, here’s what I’ve found so far.

Servers

Notably, mainstream Mastodon does not support local-only posts.

GoToSocial (my current favorite), Pleroma/Akkoma, Takahē (discontinued?) and the Mastodon forks Hometown and Glitch all support local-only posts, but not in the same ways. Takahē did, but

Snac doesn’t seem to.

IIRC Friendica, Hubzilla and some of the Misskey forks (Firefish?) supported it.

I need to re-check a bunch of others. I’d be surprised if Bonfire doesn’t handle local posts (possibly through Circles), for instance.

Compatibility

There are several approaches being used tell a server not to federate a post out to its neighbors.

App/Client Support

There’s nothing special needed to display local-only posts (though an indicator is certainly helpful).

For making local-only posts, you need a front-end that can handle it.

  • Fedilab (Android) will set local_only=true and add the eye emoji, so it works with Hometown, Glitch, and GoToSocial, but not Akkoma.
  • Husky (Android) sets the Pleroma/Akkoma-specific visibility=local (which can confuse other servers if you try to use it with one!)

The rest of these don’t support it directly (yet?), but you can still make local posts if your server recognizes a “magic emoji.” I’m linking to the feature requests for each.