A wild contributor appears

Misty De Méo, a self proclaimed “coder, archivist, and librarian”, has drafted a massive pull request which aims to bring Hometown-fork up to date with Mastodon 4.3.0. This welcoming news comes as Mastodon 4.2, which Hometown is currently based upon, reaches end-of-life status on January 8th 2026.

The maintainer of Hometown has reportedly tested the changes and found that local-only posts, Hometown specific federation settings, and exclusive lists all appear to be working as expected.

A fork in the road

The long standing “Future of Hometown” discussion was just updated with more information on the work being done now and touches on long standing community topics such as diverging from Mastodon upstream, material situation of the project’s developers, absenteeism, and community governance.

Next steps

Considering the work up to this point seems stable, the next steps are to begin merging in the Mastodon 4.4 changes after applying some styling fixes.

Below the fold

Thunderhost.com is first and foremost, an entirely a bootstrapped labor of love without the expectation of a million dollar exit.
On corporate blogs, this might be the space where it would not be unusual to find an advertisement or marketing filled AI generated rant sparkled with a subtle sales pitch call-to-action. We are an opinionated “mom and pop” company that does not rely upon big tech or any sort of outside investment funding.