Chinwag

It’s been a while since the last formal release, but we’re happy to announce that Chinwag Social 4.5.11 is now available!

This release is based on Mastodon 4.5.11, and Tangerine UI 2.5.4. It is likely to be the final major release in the current repository.

Future Plans

As Tangerine UI has announced that the project is ending, we no longer have a viable front-end theme to apply to Mastodon 4.6.x releases. As there have been major changes to theming in that project, it’s will need a significant amount of work to adapt Mastodon to look like Chinwag going forward. The Tangerine UI project bought us a lot of time and demonstrated how good the user experience could be, but we don’t have the resources to carry this on ourselves.

As such, Chinwag will remain at parity with Mastodon 4.5 for some time, but will be updated with any bug fixes from upstream where possible.

We’ll be examining how the third-party UI theme landscape changes over the next few months and see what our options are, and what of our other changes and additions to Mastodon may need to be reworked or removed.

There will likely be a new git repository for the next version, and the current one retired. There will be a next version, that’s not in doubt, but it will take as long as it takes.

Availability

Chinwag 4.5.11 is live now on Chinwag Social for all users, or you can install it yourself if you’d like to join us on this journey!