Hello instance members! A question from your friend local admin team here (@andrew and @leigh) about updates to this instance.

As some of you have probably noticed, we're still on version 4.2 of Mastodon, because that's the most recently-released version of the "Hometown" Mastodon fork that we're currently running. Unfortunately, the fork hasn't seen updates recently, and I don't see that changing soon.

As such, I wanted to check with folks here on the instance about what y'all would prefer as the path forward! I think we have a few options:

1. Keep running Hometown, and wait for an update. Upside: very little change in your day-to-day, downside: no new features (like quote posts), security updates require manual work from the admin team.

2. Switch back to the mainline Mastodon software. Upside: reasonably easy to do, we track upstream so security and feature updates are easy. Downside: no local-only post option, a few other smaller features / changes from Hometown also go away.

3. Switch to a different Mastodon fork (e.g. the glitch fork). Upside: keep local posts, along with newer Mastodon features. Downside: the most technically difficult migration (which will also almost certainly require extended downtime), we'd still be on a fork of Mastodon with no guarantee of ongoing maintenance.

4. Something else I haven't thought of!

(also if we do option 2, we'd need to decide what to do with local-only posts; I could delete them, change the visibility on them, or something else entirely)

I'm going to open this up to everyone here as a poll, open for a week. I'll probably re-run the same poll later to make sure we don't miss anyone, too. Please feel free to leave comments, suggestions, and more in the replies here.