Seeing the overwhelmingly positive responses from their community further confirms to me that the "global townsquare" experiment truly might be coming to an end.
Yes, there is still definitely room for a place for global conversations, but between the fragmentation of our shared online world, invasion of privacy through laws and regulations, and LLM crawlers hoovering up the public internet, it just makes sense to turn our attention to tools that let people build more tight-knit communities online.
Hopefully we'll see the fediverse step up in this area.
Well, ideally before Bluesky completes their "pivot to Reddit".
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/04/bluesky-twitter-rival-reddit-social-media.html
@stefan I remember being on a forked Mastodon instance where you could put an eye emoji at the end of your post and it would be local only, so there is certainly no technical issue in ActivityPub preventing this being implemented..
@vfrmedia Yep, there is an open issue here https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/861
And you might be thinking of Hometown? https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/wiki/Local-only-posting
(Not sure how it works there, I just know that's one Mastodon fork that has this feature.)
The Glitch fork has had local-only posts since 2017, and Hometown since 2018 or 2019. Which makes it all the more ridiculous that mainline Mastodon hasn't implemented it.
Not sure about Hometown's UI, but Glitch has a per-post option that lets you control it. You can also use an emoji -- this is a clever hack to accommodates apps that don't have local-only built into their interface.
https://glitch-soc.github.io/docs/features/local-only-toots/
@voorstad Maybe, but the overall trends show that people don't necessarily care to engage in "global conversations".
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/11/20/americans-social-media-use-2025/
