Wow, this is very interesting. Smalltown is a new fork of Mastodon specifically for civic communities looking to host their own social media. It is being developed at Ethan Zuckerman's lab at UMass Amherst.

https://publicinfrastructure.org/2022/09/28/welcome-to-smalltown/

(It's explicitly inspired by Hometown and very nicely links to my Patreon on their github, too.)