Mastodon community discussion: Mastodon 5.0 (design preview): Composer should be at the top https://community.joinmastodon.org/t/mastodon-5-0-design-preview-composer-should-be-at-top/74/7?u=rolle

Someone asked if I have a repository with this change so they could cherry-pick it for their instance too.

Yes, I do. I'm posting it here in case it helps others too.

Core: https://github.com/mementomori-social/mastodon/commit/d14b2ddc668ddf332e9d88e80f3977764858c31b
CSS: https://github.com/rollecode/mastodon-bird-ui/blob/724cf08cb343a4cc0ac3b1b79c850a05096492a4/src/components/_modals.scss#L1-L8

#MastoAdmin #Mastodon #Mastodon5

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Mastodon compose form at top

🇬🇧 STRENGTHENING ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT

In summary:
- Automated assistance for moderators to filter out fake sign-up requests,
- Automated cleanup of ghost accounts,
- Automated deletion of accounts inactive for > 3 years after reminder emails.

Our policies have been updated to reflect these changes!

Fake accounts and bots are a plague. Across the Fediverse—and on Mastodon in particular—we regularly face waves of suspicious sign-ups, yet we are poorly equipped and lack the right tools to deal with them.

We already use Anubis to filter out bots, but that isn't enough.

That’s why I built a simple decision-support tool for our moderators: a single web page summarizing all pending sign-up requests. For each request, it provides a risk score based on IP address reputation, email domain risk, language consistency, and a few other indicators. Moderators can review all of this information and approve or reject requests directly from the same page.

This dashboard is now live for Mastodon, and I will gradually add all our other Fediverse applications whenever their APIs allow it.

However, some fake accounts still slip through—or already have. For instance, we see "ghost accounts" that, once registered, have zero activity, no profile information, nothing at all. My tool will now handle them and automatically delete them after one month if they remain inactive. One might think these accounts are harmless, yet they skew our statistics and pose a dormant threat if they turn out to be bots waiting to wake up all at once.

On our instance, roughly 20% of accounts are ghost accounts. Just imagine: the situation is almost certainly the same on other servers, which adds up to a massive number of accounts overall...

Finally, there are accounts that have been abandoned or inactive for three years. These users will receive three reminder emails prompting them to log back in to avoid automatic account deletion. It might serve as a friendly nudge to come back and check us out. Otherwise, this cleanup is good digital hygiene that also supports privacy protection and GDPR compliance.

We have roughly the same percentage of abandoned accounts. Here too, the same likely holds true for most other servers.

For the time being, account deletions are running in dry-run mode, but they will go live in the coming weeks. We want to make sure the system doesn't get carried away, especially since there are a few subtleties in the data returned by Mastodon’s APIs. Be careful if you plan to go down the same path!

These measures will lower our total account count, but they will improve platform hygiene and security for everyone's benefit. I wish all servers would do the same—it would make the Fediverse much more resilient.

I’ll consider open-sourcing the project if there’s interest. In the meantime, here is an (anonymized) screenshot of the moderation dashboard.

#gayfr #MastoAdmin

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Screenshot of our new tool to assist moderator decision-making for registration requests.

We've upgraded our Mastodon server to v5.0.0-beta.1+mementomods-2026-11-07. That is 453 new commits from upstream since our October, 11.10.2026 build.

You might need to refresh or flush your browser, in case you were logged in.

🧭 Mastodon 5 is here

This is the big one! Mastodon's new 5.0 design is now live on our server, together with a rebuilt Mastodon Bird UI. Mastodon 5 is officially in beta, but it is what Mastodon itself is working on, and everything our server had before came along. We basically cherry-picked all our fork changed on top of fresh Mastodon v5 nightly version.

Things look familiar, but almost every view changed under the hood, so please tell us if something looks or works wrong. A lot has changed.

🚀 New in Mastodon 5

- A new design for the whole web interface: navigation, posts, column headers and menus
- A new composer that opens over the timeline (the core has it in bottom, ours is on the top)
- A conversation view for threads
- Posts show both a quote and attachments at the same time
- You can see the edit history of a post again
- Pick an accent colour for the interface in Preferences, Appearance
- Blocked accounts and blocked domains are on one page
- Admin and moderator links are in the main navigation
- Verified links use the colours of the site they point to

🔒 Security

- Support for verifying ML-DSA-44 HTTP message signatures, a post-quantum signature type (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/41119).
- The Mastodon 4.7.5 security fixes we picked on 3.11.2026 are now part of the regular code.

🐦‍⬛ Mastodon Bird UI

Mastodon Bird UI is completely rewritten for Mastodon 5 as 5.0.0-beta.1-2026-11-07: https://github.com/rollecode/mastodon-bird-ui/releases/tag/5.0.0-beta.1-2026-11-07

- The familiar icons and heart from the old version are back.
- Reply, boost and like sit together on the left, bookmark and the menu on the right.
- Notifications look like they used to.
- The Ultra accessible and Ultra accessible Plus+ themes are also rewritten for v5, and Mastodon Bird UI follows the light, dark and high contrast settings as usual.

Themes are now: Mastodon Bird UI (the default), Mastodon, Mastodon Bird UI (Ultra accessible) and Mastodon Bird UI (Ultra accessible Plus+). You can change yours in Preferences, Appearance.

🏠 Changes specific to our server

Everything from our Mastodon 4 server came along:

- The For you feed
- Follow buttons on avatars
- The 10000 character limit, bigger polls, snow in December and the rest of the list at https://help.mementomori.social/mementomori.social/instance-features

New in this update:

- Boosting gives the boost icon a quick spin, and the numbers under posts roll when they change.
- You can hide the Translate button for languages you read: Preferences, Other, Translations. This replaces the old "hide Finnish translate links" and "hide all translate links" settings, so if you used those, please pick your languages again.
- The right sidebar shows trending hashtags and who to follow, also when you are logged out (I did not like it as empty)
- The For you feed is ported to Mastodon 5

Source code: https://github.com/mementomori-social/mastodon

As always, if you notice anything unusual or buggy, please reach out to me or any of the admins. Enjoy your time here, and feel free to message me with any questions or thoughts.

If anything feels off, please let us know!

#MementoMoriSocial #Mastodon #MastoAdmin #MastodonBirdUI #Mastodon5 #NewMastodon

Das neue Design von #Mastodon in Version v5.0.0-beta.1 ist übrigens total unübersichtlich und hässlich 🤨

#mastoadmin

@Gargron 🤷🏻‍♂️

I've restored some changes on to of Mastodon v5, like using an icon with two check marks for "mark as read" instead of always showing a "0 unread" bar and a text label for "mark as read" (issue opened: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/41579).

Mastodon v5 has some good UI stuff, but some changes are really unnecessary and bad for UX. Having my most-used feature, the notifications button, at the bottom is messing with my muscle memory. I'll get used to some changes, others not at all, and some honestly need fixing and more work. Glad we have the fork - we already have a dozen features that are either restored or custom.

#MementoMoriSocial #MastoAdmin #Mastodon #Mastodon5 #Mastodonv5 #NewMastodon #MastodonUI

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Old mark as read feature

RE: https://mementomori.social/@rolle/117580443329960773

I'm quite swamped with incoming tasks right now, so please make sure to follow this process. I will fix most of the issues that cause real friction for our users, but the rest are opinionated and will take time. We'll see what the stable v5 release brings - things are still a work in progress.

#Mastodon #MastodonBirdUI #MastoAdmin #Mastodon5

🐦‍⬛ Mastodon Bird UI 5.0.0-beta.1-2026-11-08 (nightly) is out. This is Bird UI rebuilt for Mastodon 5, the new 5.0 design that is now in beta.

The nightly follows Mastodon 5.0.0-beta.1. If you are on Mastodon 4, stay on 4.7.3-2026-10-11 from the main branch.

New:
- Rewritten from scratch for the Mastodon 5 design
- Micro-interactions, likes and boosts are whimsical
- Notifications, content warnings, link cards and thread lines look like they did on Mastodon 4
- Follows Mastodon's own light, dark and high contrast settings
- A darker, blurred backdrop behind the composer and every popup
- A new install script for Mastodon 5, or paste dist/mastodon-bird-ui.css into Custom CSS
- The star favorite, light and language variants are no longer supported

You can see it live at https://mementomori.social.

Release notes and full changelog: https://github.com/rollecode/mastodon-bird-ui/releases/tag/5.0.0-beta.1-2026-11-08

#MastodonBirdUI #BirdUI #Mastodon #MastoAdmin

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Mastodon Bird UI v5 screenshot

Lots of nightly updates coming in today!

Most notable bugs:

- When you type a hashtag or at-person, the popout gets in the way
- Ultra Accessible themes for vision impaired have some font size issues
- Some hover states and element proportions, especially padding, have regressions from v5 and the new nightly theme
- Bugs in the advanced view

The latest changes are in the nightly branch, and work is still in progress. You can follow my work here: https://github.com/rollecode/mastodon-bird-ui/tree/nightly

Some of these are core issues and will probably be fixed or changed in Mastodon v5 stable. If not, fixes will go live in our fork.

#MastodonBirdUI #BirdUI #CSS #MastoAdmin #UI #Mastodon #OpenSource

Released 5.0.0-beta.1-2026-11-09 of Mastodon Bird UI: https://github.com/rollecode/mastodon-bird-ui/releases/tag/5.0.0-beta.1-2026-11-09

#MastodonBirdUI #BirdUI #Mastodon #MastoAdmin

RE: https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed/117586194168536723

Mastodon Canada just committed to the Digital Platform of Rights and Freedoms with the following:

"Mastodon Canada recognizes the importance of Data Sovereignty and, with this hosting, keeps our community's data on servers in Edmonton, Alberta, that we can physically touch.

We are committed to the Mastodon Covenant and provide safeguards that respect the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. We are transparent with moderation and administration decisions and remain responsive to cybersecurity events.

We are steadfast in our commitment to working with Project Arachnid in combating CSAM on the fediverse.

Our team actively seeks out equity-seeking members to join our moderation and oversight team and looks forward to continuing to build upon this."

I'm sure it'll be published shortly here: https://respectfulplatforms.org/

#mstdnca #fediverse #mastoadmin #mastodon

Daniel Supernault boosted

pixelfed » 🌐 2026-11-09
@pixelfed@mastodon.social

We, the architects and stewards of digital platforms, recognize the fundamental rights of all users to participate in online spaces that respect their privacy, dignity, and well-being.

https://respectfulplatforms.org

#RespectfulPlatforms #SocialWeb #DigitalPlatformCharterOfRights

https://respectfulplatforms.org/

If you're running a public Mastodon server, it's really important that you have a plan for closing down gracefully *even if you have no intention of closing down*.

Having a plan in place means your members don't have to worry about your server suddenly disappearing, as they know they will get plenty of warning if it happens.

Here's a step-by-step guide to closing a Mastodon server gracefully (and much of this applies to any Fedi server):

🏡 https://fedi.tips/closing-your-mastodon-server-gracefully/

#MastoAdmin #FediAdmin

You can now add up to 10 links on your DMV.community profile page!

#mastodon #fediverse #mastoadmin #LinksLinksLinks