Hometown vs Honk
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted social networks options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
| Feature | Hometown | Honk |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Read-the-docs project |
| Category | Social Networks | Social Networks |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | ISC |
| Language | Ruby | Go |
| Setup difficulty | Hard | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 2,048 MB | 128 MB |
| Deployment | docker, bare-metal | binary, source |
| GitHub stars | ★ 823 | ★ 400 |
| First released | 2019 | 2019 |
| Replaces | Twitter, Mastodon | Twitter, Mastodon |
What are Hometown and Honk?
Hometown
Hometown is a friendly fork of Mastodon that adds local-only posting, full-text content support, and other community-oriented features. It is aimed at small, close-knit fediverse instances.
- Local-only posts
- Full-text content
- Mastodon compatibility
- Small-community focus
Honk
Honk is an opinionated, single-user ActivityPub server written in Go that federates with the wider fediverse. It deliberately omits algorithmic feeds and trends in favor of a simple chronological timeline.
- Single-user fediverse server
- Chronological timeline
- SQLite storage
- Minimal dependencies
Hometown vs Honk: key differences
Hometown is written in Ruby, while Honk is built with Go. Licensing differs — AGPL-3.0 for Hometown versus ISC for Honk. Honk is the lighter option, starting around 128 MB of RAM against 2,048 MB for Hometown. Hometown has the considerably larger community, at 823 GitHub stars versus 400. Hometown lists first-class Docker deployment; Honk does not.
Why pick each one
Choose Hometown if…
- Released under the AGPL-3.0 license
- First-class Docker support for quick deployment
- Written in Ruby
Choose Honk if…
- Released under the ISC license
- Written in Go
- Tiny footprint — runs in 128 MB RAM
Frequently asked questions
Is Hometown or Honk better?
Neither is universally better. Hometown has the larger community, while Honk is simpler to set up (medium difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are Hometown and Honk free and open-source?
Yes. Hometown is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Honk under ISC. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Hometown and Honk with Docker?
Hometown: yes. Honk: check the project docs for container support.
Which is lighter on resources, Hometown or Honk?
Honk has the smaller minimum footprint at 128 MB of RAM, compared to about 2,048 MB for Hometown. Real-world usage depends on library size, user count, and enabled features.