Since we first deployed a Mastodon instance, back in the wild times of 2017, the defining characteristic of Chinwag has been its style. Back then, Mastodon had extremely basic theme options, and no light mode theme at all. For someone who has trouble reading dark themes, Mastodon was extremely inaccessible and it was actually easier to fork the code, modify it to patch in a third party light theme, and deploy a new instance than it was to sign up for and use the stock software somewhere else.
So that’s what happened. Chinwag has been a fork of Mastodon, mainly running with cosmetic changes, for around seven years now. It’s a lot of work to maintain this, but the design choices have not been helpful since and it’s only with the most recent 4.3 release that there’s any support at all for detecting and using the colour scheme preferences of a visitor’s browser.
Our current style has evolved without much having changed other than a couple of rearrangements for a while. We put off deploying anything based on Mastodon 4.2 for quite some time, as there were a lot of style changes to work with, and our War On Blurple took more effort than anticipated. The current 4.2 version is intended mostly as a short-term placeholder until a new, more sustainable option is deployed.
Fortunately, just like in 2017, a third-party project is tackling things very, very well and we have an option! For the next Chinwag update, we’ll be incorporating a modified TangerineUI theme which is strikingly lovely to use and resolves a lot of problems with the stock Mastodon UI.
Chingerine
What we’ve got is essentially the Chinwag colours we all know and love of course, plus the tremendous work done by the TangerineUI project. Our hope is that we can reduce our need to maintain a full fork of Mastodon, and possibly be able to run a stock Mastodon build if needed, but still have our own distinct identity and accessibility.
We would love anyone interested to look over the Chinwag source code, and we’d be happy to discuss or take suggestions for any theme tweaks. You should also leave a tip for TangerineUI in appreciation for their work, because without that project we’d be nowhere, or even worse – living in a blurple world.
Please also consider supporting Chinwag, of course!
Coming Soon!
Chinwag 4.3 is coming soon! Probably within a couple of days of this post, at which point we’ll add a few final technical details about the setup here, as we’re doing things a little bit off-book as far as the Tangerine documentation goes, not to mention Mastodon’s.
One response to “Chinwag: The Next Generation”
@announce @mike oh this looks really nice. Oh damn I might be re-skinning cathode to a new tangerine variant.
Might call it photomultiplier.