Future of Hometown

[graue]

For the past year, with the exception of one critical security vulnerability, Hometown seems to have received no maintenance. Our fork creator Darius Kazemi no longer seems to have time to maintain the fork due to other commitments. That's OK, it's perfectly natural for people to move on—Darius doesn't owe us indefinite maintenance—but it also appears no one else can merge PRs or issue a release.

To illustrate the problem, Mastodon 4.2 came out in late September 2023, a community PR syncing Hometown with 4.2 was deployed in production and ready for review by late December 2023, but despite multiple comments by Darius promising to get to reviewing the PR soon, no movement occurred until early July 2024, 9 months after 4.2 was released and 6 months after the PR was largely complete, when a critical security update forced Hometown to finally release a 4.2 version.

No maintenance has been done since that release. A PR submitted one day later fixing a bug in that release has not been merged or reviewed after 3 months. Issues have not been acknowledged, and with Mastodon 4.3 coming out today with some major improvements, I don't have confidence Hometown will sync with 4.3 anytime soon.

So I wanted to open a space to talk with other Hometown admins on paths forward.

The options I see are: if someone is willing to step up and be a maintainer, they could take over the project either with Darius' blessing, or without (fork the fork). Or we could migrate to other server software, such as the Glitch fork which also has local-only posts; I'm not sure how difficult that would be. In my case, the server I co-admin has never used local-only posts very much, because we didn't attract enough critical mass of our community to our server for it to be useful, so we have considered just deleting the few local-only posts and switching to stock Mastodon. What are you thinking, Hometown admins?

[a-dows]

My three hometown servers have all grown happily for years without paying much mind to mastodon vanilla’s feature releases. Hometown has been stable and meets the asks of my users. I don’t need it to do anything it doesn’t do already, as long as critical security updates continue (as they have).

…

On Tue, Oct 8, 2024 at 7:34 PM Scott Feeney ***@***.***> wrote: For the past year, with the exception of one critical security vulnerability, Hometown seems to have received no maintenance. Our fork creator Darius Kazemi no longer seems to have time to maintain the fork due to other commitments. That's OK, it's perfectly natural for people to move on—Darius doesn't owe us indefinite maintenance—but it also appears no one else can merge PRs or issue a release. To illustrate the problem, Mastodon 4.2 came out ***@***.***/111104350824645579> in late September 2023, a community PR syncing Hometown with 4.2 <#1337> was deployed in production and ready for review by late December 2023, but despite multiple comments by Darius promising to get to reviewing the PR soon, no movement occurred until early July 2024, 9 months after 4.2 was released and 6 months after the PR was largely complete, when a critical security update forced Hometown to finally release a 4.2 version <https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/releases/tag/v4.2.10%2Bhometown-1.1.1> . No maintenance has been done since that release. A PR submitted one day later <#1351> fixing a bug in that release has not been merged or reviewed after 3 months. Issues have not been acknowledged, and with Mastodon 4.3 coming out today with some major improvements, I don't have confidence Hometown will sync with 4.3 anytime soon. So I wanted to open a space to talk with other Hometown admins on paths forward. The options I see are: if someone is willing to step up and be a maintainer, they could take over the project either with Darius' blessing, or without (fork the fork). Or we could migrate to other server software, such as the Glitch fork which also has local-only posts; I'm not sure how difficult that would be. In my case, the server I co-admin has never used local-only posts very much, because we didn't attract enough critical mass of our community to our server for it to be useful, so we have considered just deleting the few local-only posts and switching to stock Mastodon. What are you thinking, Hometown admins? — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1358>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AKFZEWGEOU7GAXZDTU4ERG3Z2RTW7AVCNFSM6AAAAABPTKBEAKVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43ASLTON2WKOZSGU3TINBRGQZDSMA> . You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>