Oct 25, 2026, 10:03 AMMastodon v5 alpha with Mastodon Bird UI v5 alpha and additional sidebar content in the test/dev environment for our Mastodon fork, mementomori.social.
It's coming together nicely.
#UI #CSS #Experimental #MastodonBirdUI #Mastodon #MastoAdmin #MementomoriSocial #OpenSource
Oct 25, 2026, 10:10 AM@rolle So pretty. I find it funny that we both seem to have had a similar idea about a blurry banner. Yours is better though. Looking forward to seeing how you modify the rest of the UI. Mine's mostly just a re-colour.
Oct 25, 2026, 10:15 AM@david I'm just using the theme I've had since 2022. I've grown fond of it and won't be making any radical changes anytime soon. Now I just need to port it to v5.
Oct 25, 2026, 11:52 AM@david Btw, this is how your posts look on other servers, including mine. It seems you're using a Cloudflare bot challenge, and it's blocking other Mastodon servers. I had to open the original post on your server to see it, and I didn't tell you first thing, because I wanted to make sure to narrow it down.
Everything throws 403 cf-mitigated: challenge in your end. Any server that tries to download your avatar or photos gets a "Just a moment..." page instead, so it's not just us. The fix is to skip the challenge, at least for /system/* (media), /users/*, /api/* and /.well-known/*. Or you can turn off Bot Fight Mode / "Under Attack" mode, which causes a lot of false positives on social media servers...
Oct 25, 2026, 12:34 PM@rolle Interesting. I thought I had fixed this by disabling the challenges before, and bot fight mode is disabled because as you say it causes nothing but problems. Ill look into it further. Thanks for letting me know.
Oct 25, 2026, 12:45 PM@david PoC: run this from any server from any other network:
```bash
curl -sI https://social.piconet.work/system/media_attachments/files/117/500/994/095/450/374/original/e24616cb57a48d95.png
```
(Mastodon truncating the URL, but you can use any media URL from your Mastodon instance)
It still shows: cf-mitigated: challenge
Oct 25, 2026, 2:50 PM@rolle I think the problem was I was trying to increase security and managed to edit one of the WAF regular expressions in such a way that it began blocking rather than exempting the social subdomain and behaviour of Mastodon. Simple fix hopefully. Couldn't do it from my phone while I was out.
Oct 25, 2026, 4:38 PM@david It's working now here. I refreshed your account here and your avatar and images show up again. Other servers fix your avatar and header on their own if they refresh your profile, and saving your profile once (re-upload the avatar, for example) pushes that update to all of them right away. Images in your old posts are only fetched again when someone opens them, or when an admin runs:
tootctl accounts refresh david@social.piconet.work
tootctl media refresh --account david@social.piconet.work --force
Mastodon caches pretty aggressively so your older stuff might not show up right away. New posts are fine everywhere.
Oct 25, 2026, 5:53 PM@rolle You didn't have to go to all that effort to tell me, so it's very much appreciated. Thank you.
Oct 25, 2026, 9:40 PM@david No probs, just here to help whenever I can ✌️ posting things like these openly just in case if others have similar issues, maybe they will find help here (my public post do index). And genuinely enjoying what I do.
@rolle looks very clean!
Had a small question/request. Would it be possible to include the version of Bird UI somewhere as well? Tangerine has that and it is an easy way for me to check if I'm on the latest version.
Oct 25, 2026, 10:25 AM@spiezmaestro That's for each server admin to decide, not me. Mastodon Bird UI is just a style, a theme. It doesn't really care about anything else, like features or how the version is displayed.
@rolle I understand that it is "just" a theme, but as admin I provide Bird UI as an additional theme for mountains.social and I just found it convenient, that Tangerine has added its version to be visible in the theme itself. Hence my question. But "no" is a perfectly viable answer as well. No sweat.
Oct 25, 2026, 10:42 AM@spiezmaestro I'm not sure I follow. Is this part of the version information in the footer, and is it always visible? Do they have a script that adds it? It would need either pseudo selectors and hardcoded text or a change to .env.
I'd rather not force it to be always visible, as we have themes in the theme selector and everyone can choose their own. In my opinion, the theme version doesn't need to be always visible, since it's a user preference rather than the app in use (like Mastodon).