hometown VS migrator

You could try hometown as an alienating server? https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown

What I'd recommend is that you ask about this on the Hometown github repo (https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown). Open an issue to put in a feature asking for admins to have the ability to restrict all users' posts to local only. I have no idea if Darius, the guy who maintains hometown, will be into the idea, but it can't hurt to ask.

I have a friend who is advocating for something called Neighborhoods. It's not exactly what you're talking about, but similar. https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/issues/1222

Hometown is a fork of Mastodon that adds "local only" visibility, which is what you're describing. I hope that Mastodon eventually adopts it because it's extremely useful on smaller, focused instances.

Hometown - Mastodon Branch

Hometown has two themes (aside from the basic ones that come with Mastodon): fairy-floss and macaron. See here for more info on those themes. I assume one of these two themes is what you are referring to.

It sounds like what you want is Exclusive Lists, a feature from the Hometown fork of Mastodon, which allows you to define certain lists as "exclusive" meaning that when you add someone to that list, they no longer show up on your Home timeline.

Hometown

"By our best understanding, our major changes are not wanted by the Mastodon project, hence maintaining this fork instead of trying to commit the changes to Mastodon."

https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown#readme

My understanding is in theory yes. But in practice things might be more complicated.

Like merely keeping the same name and domain is easy enough. Just shut down the old system, start the new one, create an account with the same name. Of course you would need to refollow everyone. I'm not sure what happens to your followers. Your new server will not know they are followers, so unless this triggers mastodon to try to automatically refollow, I think they are left in a half-broken state. You definitely lose all your old content. All in all, this is not really a great option.

For a full migration where in theory everything works, you could try to follow the linked process to migrate to Pleroma 2.0.5, and then obviously just upgrade to latest following plemora documentation for upgrading. description of migration process: https://icyphox.sh/blog/mastodon-to-pleroma/ (This is based on the following migrator: https://gitlab.com/soapbox-pub/migrator). I have no idea if it works with newer mastodon minor releases.