[Announcement] It’s time to say goodbye to Tangerine UI 🧡

[Announcement] It’s time to say goodbye to Tangerine UI 🧡

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

@TangerineUI @nileane so long, and thanks for all the tangerines!

@TangerineUI @nileane merci pour les travaux !!

@TangerineUI Merci pour les travaux @nileane

@TangerineUI Un énorme merci pour ton travail durant ces 3 années. Tangerine était magnifique 🫶

@nileane

@TangerineUI @nileane Sad but I understand and thanks for everything up until now!!

@adamas @TangerineUI avec plaisir

@TangerineUI @nileane @phanpy thank you for all the time and effort you've put into it since the start!

Oh! And I suppose now is a good time to finally reveal the easter egg only a handful of you ever found over the past three years:

@TangerineUI @nileane @phanpy you've done an amazing job, thank you for all your hard work and for naming phanpy as an alternative.

best wishes for your next endeavour ️

Merci 🧡 pour tout! @TangerineUI @nileane @phanpy

@TangerineUI @nileane Thank You! Goodbye!

@bergmeister @TangerineUI haha, you're welcome!

@TangerineUI @nileane @phanpy Thank you for all the work.

@TangerineUI @nileane Merci énormément pour avoir fait et maintenu cette personnalisation de l'interface Web, elle est géniale !
J'adorerais qu'elle soit reprise par l'équipe de Mastodon et maintenue officiellement.
En attendant, je vais jeter un coup d'œil à Phanpy

@TangerineUI @phanpy @nileane j'ai jamais eu à l'utiliser mais c'étati vraiment du beau travail ! Je pense tu peux être fière de toi et aussi d'avoir pris le courage de mettre un stop à la maintenance ​​

@tournesol @phanpy @TangerineUI Merci

@TangerineUI @nileane
Oh no, it was my favorite! I completely understand, though. Thank you for letting us use it. I'm glad it lasted me as much as it did

@TangerineUI Dear @nileane, I have to say, with Mastodon Bird UI I've gone through the same feelings over the years, so I can truly relate! Like many open source projects, it really takes a toll on you once it gets popular enough. At times, it turns into a bit of a whack-a-mole situation. Personally, I have over 600 repositories to maintain, and I get paid for roughly half of them, so having one passion project is not that bad. I've also started moving many of the most customized quirks to my own fork instead of the theme itself, which helps a lot.

With Mastodon Bird UI, I also try to keep the colors and styles as close to Mastodon's as possible. That was one of the original goals to avoid too many breaking changes. None of this would be possible without the contributors and testers, they do steady work and handle half the job for me.

Your theme was fun, and I love the "OG style" approach to things we do. "Skinning" used to be much more popular back in the day, and I’m really glad you brought Tangerine UI to life to spread some joy. I hope someone feels inspired enough to continue your work.

Merci pour ton travail, de la part d'un gars du CSS en Finlande

@phanpy

@TangerineUI @nileane @phanpy Much respect for anyone who steps back from an open source project when it is the right time for them to do so. It is not an easy thing! Thanks for your work.