mastodon-android VS hometown

Mastodon app is built like that, the release apk is around 3 Mb, ~half of which is resources: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-android

Though it's not without compromises — because of Google's stupid policy that "nothing goes into the system unless it needs direct access to privileged or private system components", RecyclerView, ViewPager, and some other basic UI components are still AndroidX libraries that depend on AppCompat for no good reason. I had to fork them to rid them of that dependency: https://github.com/grishka/LiteX

You should file an issue https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-android

Mastodon (version 45): Decentralized social network

I love that Mastodon is decentralized. But as a privacy engineer, I was curious about how their app handles our data compared to what they claim in their privacy policy, so I analyzed their open-source app code in my privacy code scanning tool.

We tried to analyze if the actual application code (which is open-source) actually adheres to the privacy policy as declared by mastodon.social server. Therefore, we ran the Privado privacy scanner on Mastodon’s Android application code.

this was fixed yesterday, see this issue in the bugtracker: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-android/issues/298

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