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.
- A
local_only
flag added to the Mastodon API in Hometown and GoToSocial. - The
visibility
flag can be set tolocal
in Pleroma and Akkoma. (One downside to this approach: They can’t make make some local-only posts available to everyone on the instance and other local-only posts only available to followers on the same instance) - The
visibility
flag can be set tolocal_only
in Takahē. I’m not sure any client supports this! - An eye emoji at the end of the post, used by Glitch.
- A
:local_only:
custom emoji used by Hometown.
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.
- Tusky (Android)
- Phanpy (Web)
- Elk (Web)
- Feditext (iOS) plans to start with GTS
- Subway Tooter
- Pachli
- The Mastodon app won’t support any features that aren’t in the main server.
- OpenVibe doesn’t seem like it would be interested in offering local-only posts.