Almost three years ago exactly today, I started working on Tangerine UI with the goal of creating a full custom theme for Mastodon’s Web UI, with a fun color scheme, multiple variants, cute icons and animations, and visual features that did not exist in other alternatives. The project immediately became incredibly successful: hundreds of stars on GitHub, with at least 50+ Mastodon instances that decided to offer the theme to their 40,000+ cumulated users (including several institutional instances!).

Tangerine UI was very ambitious in regard to how crudely it actually works (overriding Mastodon's CSS). And I feel like I was successfully able to push the limits of what's possible with this constraint. But maintaining it is sadly no longer sustainable for me. Which is why the time has come for me to announce that Tangerine UI will reach its end of life at the end of this month, June 2026:

• Tangerine UI is no longer being maintained, effective immediately.
• The repository will be frozen and archived (made read-only) on June 30th.
• Current open issues and PRs will not be addressed, and the last supported release of Mastodon will remain Mastodon 4.5.x
• Mastodon 4.6 and future releases of Mastodon will not be supported and will break the theme.

Don’t get me wrong, I had a ton of fun creating the theme and its four variants. But as soon as Tangerine UI had come to a point I had considered finished, it immediately became genuinely depressing to have to spend many hours of my spare time on it every time a new major version of Mastodon was released — all just to un-break it and bring it up to speed, and without the fun felt on evolving the project and adding new features. With my motivation declining, my energy spent on other side projects (some of which I’d actually get paid for), and the fact that even I stopped using my own theme day-to-day in favor of other Mastodon clients, it feels like now is the right time to let it go.

That being said, I’ve been feeling very confident in the direction that the Mastodon team has been heading in lately. With a new system of design tokens in place (https://docs.joinmastodon.org/dev/frontend/design-tokens/), the Mastodon team has actually made it easier to customize the look of the Web UI. Even if it probably means that the way forward for custom Mastodon themes is more basic changes, with a focus on color first and foremost, I still think making sure future custom themes are less likely to break over time and require less maintenance is a good approach, and I’m glad they’re taking it.

And the reality is that I’m no longer feeling as dissatisfied with the default theme as I used to be in 2023 when I got started on Tangerine UI. Even if the default look of Mastodon is still too sterile to my liking, and not merely as fun and colorful as it should be, I’m kinda hopeful that maybe that's going to change sooner rather than later (crossing fingers).

If you are wondering what I’ve been using if not Tangerine UI: my answer is @phanpy (https://phanpy.social), Phanpy all the way! Phanpy has always been a massive source of visual inspiration for Tangerine UI, because it’s fun, opinionated, and designed with care. But also, it’s just a fantastic (and powerful) client honestly. If you loved Tangerine UI, you should check out Phanpy.

So there we are, thank you everyone for loving Tangerine UI.
It’s awesome when you get to create and maintain a lil’ thing on the Internet that actual humans genuinely like and want to share to their friends. I hope I’ll get to do that again in the future.

— @nileane