The mastodon-bird-ui from bagasstrongman

Mastodon with modern birdsite-like UI

Blasphemy! Yes, I know, but I just had to do this. I wanted to see if it's possible to get Mastodon default user interface to resemble Twitter, but be a lot better than it ever was.

Please note that this started as a personal experiment for fun, but then got more serious.

See my original Mastodon post.
Read the blog post: The day I decided to build my own "Twitter".

Why would anyone want Mastodon to look like Twitter?
Features
Installation for Mastodon instance admins
Make Mastodon Bird UI as optional by integrating it as 'Site theme' in settings for all users
Installation for regular users, contributing and testing
Other tweaks and customizations
FAQ
Goals

Why would anyone want Mastodon to look like Twitter?

Because you can? Let's face it, we're kinda used to it, Mastodon already resembles the birdsite. Twitter UI is not bad, it's just that it's not for everyone. Twitter (in my opinion) made some bad choices with the new UI for example with the typography, so in a sense I wanted to see if I could make Mastodon look like Twitter, but better.

This is why I have defaulted Mastodon deep purple colors in this "theme", if you will. If you really want the vanilla birdsite-look, please modify the colors yourself. Or go to the hellsite if you really love it so much.

Live demo on mementomori.social

Here are some of the UI things Mastodon Bird UI is trying to solve (read the Mastodon post):

More screenshots

Features

As this is CSS-only, they are not really "features" but more like aesthetic changes.

Respects the profile Site theme setting and sets dark/light based on this alone
Missing alt text indicators
Subtle deep purple ribbon in the right corner for private messages
CSS variables for everything
Threaded replies (limited, see issue #4)
Avatars on the left in feed view
Unified transparent backgrounds
Dark patterns for dropdowns and other pop overs like emoji picker
Tinted deep purple, subtle beautiness
Action bar in the bottom on mobile
Micro-interaction in the like/favourite icon (see more about this)
Circling boost animation
Support for RTL languages
Hide lists by default, show them on hover
Carefully polished UI with hand picked/designed icons based on open source versions of Iconoir, Ionicons and Feather

Installation for Mastodon instance admins

Copy the contents of layout-single-column.css and layout-multiple-columns.css and paste them (or one of them) to the Custom CSS in the Appearance settings in your instance (https://yourinstance/admin/settings/appearance). It might be recommended using the single layout CSS as "base" and use the advanced view CSS with browser extension (as it's desktop only anyway).

Make Mastodon Bird UI as optional by integrating it as 'Site theme' in settings for all users

Mastodon Bird UI can be integrated as a Site theme for all instance users using Bird UI Theme Admins written by STUX.

Add the files from the repo (elephant.scss) and the folder elephant to your Mastodon themes directory:

app/
  javascript/
    styles/
    elephant.scss                             | **new**
      contrast/
        ...
      fonts/
        ...
      elephant/                                   | **new**
        layout-multiple-columns.scss                               | **new**
        layout-single-column.scss                              | **new**

Add your theme to the config. This is what the default themes.yml looks like in Mastodon. To make your custom theme visible in settings, you need to add a new line in the form themeName: path/to/theme.scss. For example, the modern-dark theme would require adding modern-dark: styles/modern-dark.scss as a new line.

        default: styles/application.scss
        contrast: styles/contrast.scss
        mastodon-light: styles/mastodon-light.scss
        elephant: styles/elephant.scss      | **new**

Add a human-friendly name for the theme (optional). You can edit each desired language's locale file in config/locales/[lang].yml to add a localized string name for your theme's themeName as added in the previous step. For example, the default config/locales/en.yml contains localizations for the three default themes that ship with Mastodon, into the english language. You need to do this for every language you expect your users to use, or else they will see the unlocalized themeName directly.

          themes:
            contrast: Mastodon (High contrast)
            default: Mastodon (Dark)
            mastodon-light: Mastodon (Light)
            elephant: Elephant              | **new**

Compile theme assets and restart. Run RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails assets:precompile and restart your Mastodon instance for the changes to take effect.

Installation for regular users, contributing and testing

Install Live CSS Editor (or any other extension like Stylus that allows you to inject CSS into web pages) or use Unite for macOS or use the user.js by eg
Copy the contents of layout-single-column.css and layout-multiple-columns.css
Open extension and paste the contents of both CSS files into the editor
If you use Live CSS Editor, click 📌-icon so the styles will be remembered for the domain or if you want just to use it as needed, activate styles from the extension's popup

Other tweaks and customizations

While Mastodon Bird UI works perfectly fine out of the box, there are some things you might want to modify to make it look even better.

Twitter-like link previews

If you like bigger link previews, please implement this.

Status bar color on Android PWA

Edit this line and recompile assets with yarn build:production.

Hide translate link for multiple languages

If you're a polyglot like me, you can hide the translate link on other languages than default by adding this at the end of the Custom CSS (this example is for people who understand Finnish and German):

.status__content__text[lang="de"].translate ~ .status__content__read-more-button,
.status__content__text[lang="fi"].translate ~ .status__content__read-more-button {
  display: none;
}

Thread lines

There is currently no proper thread support in replies on Mastodon core. There's an issue about it that I have commented. You should also see the discussion on issue #4.

Implement this. Tested and online at mementomori.social. This changes the HTML structure so that creating threaded lines is possible.
Enable Mastodon Bird UI 1.3.8 or later
It works!

Micro-interactions

There are two micro-interaction animations in this UI, both are inspired by the Twitter's original UI animation. The star is originally a work of a Twitter designer Brian Waddington. The heart is by Twitter design team. Both animations have been completely re-created by me, frame by frame. The star animation itself contains 100 hand made frames.

Twitter likes	Twitter fave star (2015)

If you like the heart, just remove everything between Star animation micro-interactions start (depends on the heart icon above) and Star animation micro-interactions end.

FAQ

I get many questions about this UI, so here I'm going to answer to them.

I want to make changes to the UI, can I do that?

Of course! This is all open source, customizable and extendable. You can fork this repo and make changes to the CSS. You can also use the Custom CSS box in {yourinstance.social/admin/settings/appearance} to add your own styles directly.

Can you implement feature X?

Not everything is possible via CSS only. In fact, some of the tweaks I had to do to the Mastodon core, see my fork here and the tweaks above.

However, even if they were possible, I won't implement all requests. My opinionated choices are not the only answer, but I'm not willing to add every possible customization to this UI as default. I want to keep it simple and extendable.

I want background-color to the compose form

See the end of this comment.

Why don't you just create an app?

I'm not a software developer. I'm a front end developer (and a bit of a designer) and my expertise is in CSS, UX and HTML. I don't know how to create a Mastodon app for Android, iOS or web and while I know a bit of python, JavaScript, Ruby and other programming languages, I don't have time and patience to create an app from scratch right now.

There are other people who are working on magnificent apps for Mastodon, so I'm not going to reinvent the wheel. I simply like the Twitter-ish UI and Mastodon default web back-end and I want to have these combined on my instance. As CSS is the language I live and breathe daily, it's really easy and fast for me to create a UI like this.

Also, Mastodon web UI works as an app already. See my answer here.

Why don't you just run Mastodon Bird UI in a separate URL?

See the previous answer. Mastodon Bird UI is not an app, it's a CSS file that you can use with any Mastodon instance. You don't need to run a separate instance just for this UI and perhaps you shouldn't either.

If you really would want this to run in a separate URL, you could in theory set up another nginx host for a subdomain and just use ngx_http_sub_module to load up a CSS file. I haven't tried this and it might not be even possible, but it's worth a try.

Is the advanced web interface styled?

Yes! From version 1.5.4 multiple columns are supported. Apply layout-multiple-columns.css to your Custom CSS or style extension to enable.

Why the admin interface is not styled?

We don't spend much time in the admin interface and it's not a priority for me to style it. It would mean too much work and it's not worth it right now.

Goals

CSS only. This means some pseudos and modern CSS hacks. The intent is to have the code base as simple and extendable as possible. The styles should be easily modifiable. Ready-made code works when placed in Custom CSS box in {yourinstance.social/admin/settings/appearance}
Dependency free. No JavaScript, no build process, no nothing. Just plain CSS. Linting is optional and just here to make sure the code quality is good.

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