social.lol is gonna go glitchy (in a good way!)
As announced earlier today, the social.lol instance is switching to Mastodon Glitch Edition. Yay!
Mastodon Glitch Edition is a fork of Mastodon that preserves the vast majority of the Mastodon experience while also adding some lovely quality of life features. With this change, we’ll be able to enjoy all of the cool features listed here integrated within the same Mastodon software that we’ve come to love over the years.
If you’re using a Mastodon client, you won’t notice any change from this switch. Everything will pretty much be the same as it’s always been, and you shouldn’t expect any changes (or disruptions) in your usual experience. The extent to which you’ll be able to use any of the new features from within your client depends on your client’s compatibility with those features. But the important thing here is that you certainly won’t be taking a step backwards as a result of this change regardless of the client you’re using.
If you tend to use the Mastodon web interface, this is where you’ll notice some differences right away. Vanilla Mastodon has support for themes, and social.lol has been happily using the Tangerine UI theme for a while now. The Glitch Edition changes the theme setup quite a bit, though for good reason—the changes here ensure that custom themes can take advantage Glitch’s features in a way that’s not currently possible with the vanilla Mastodon theming setup.
So, what does that mean for web interface users? Glitch Edition changes things up a bit, shifting from Themes over to Flavors and Skins. Think of Flavors as “modes”, because that’s how they currently work: you can use the Glitch Edition flavor (where you’ll have the Glitch features built into the UI), or the Vanilla flavor (where you’ll have the same Mastodon experience you’ve always had). Once you’ve chosen a flavor, you can then choose a skin for that flavor. The Tangerine theme hasn’t yet been expanded to include all of Glitch’s features, so you’ll find it listed as a skin under the Vanilla flavor if you’d like to continue using it.
Phew, that kind of feels like a lot, even though it’s really not. I’ll try to summarize:
- If you use a Mastodon client or app, just keep doing what you’re doing!
- If you use the web interface, you’ll find that the UI/theme will be reverted to the default Mastodon theme.
- If you want to go back to the Tangerine theme, you’ll click Preferences → Flavours → Vanilla Mastodon and then set the Skin to Tangerine UI.
That’s pretty much it. I guess the only other thing to mention here is that switching to this fork is not a permanent or irreversible action, so in the event that anything goes haywire or explodes, we can always revert back to regular old Mastodon. But the Glitch Edition is also very well established and actively maintained by Mastodon geniuses who use it on tons of active servers, and it’s super reliable and stable. So I’m not really expecting any reason to have to move away from it, but it’s good to know that there’s some flexibility there just in case.
This change will be made a little over 24 hours from when I’m writing this blog post, starting roughly 3 AM UTC on Saturday morning. Once we’ve switched to Glitch Edition, feel free to explore the new features and give them a try! And don’t underestimate the Doodle feature, which I recently tested on our bot instance, beep.town:
If you have any questions about this change, you can get in touch at any time. I’ll see you over in the Glitch side of Mastodon soon!
— Adam
