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, Misskey and its forks, Takahē (discontinued?) and the Mastodon forks Hometown and Glitch all support local-only posts, but not in the same ways.

Snac, Lemmy and Pixelfed don’t seem to.

TODO: check Friendica, Hubzilla, Bonfire.

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 to local 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 to local_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.

TODO: Check whether Sharkey supports one of these or something else in the Mastodon API.

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.

• Moshidon (Android) is a fork of the official Mastodon client that supports all three methods. If you enable the feature in settings, it’ll offer local visibility when posting to Akkoma and a local-only checkbox on other platforms.
• Fedilab (Android, reviewed here) 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!)
• Phanpy (web, reviewed here) supports Pleroma/Akkoma-specific local posts, but not other platforms yet.

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, reviewed here) has discussed the Hometown/GTS approach
• Elk (Web) has considered Hometown support once they decide how best to detect it
• Feditext (iOS) plans to start with GTS
• Subway Tooter (Android, reviewed here) #
• Pachli (Android) #
• The Mastodon app (review) 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.

TODO: Check more apps