Useful server patches
Safe, friendly and fun
Your on-ramp to the social web
Patchwork is perfect for publishers, non-profits and academic institutions. As the Fediverse links up with Bluesky and Threads, it’s becoming a great place to build and curate your social media presence.
Getting going with Patchwork, you can open an account on one of our servers. Or you can build your own community on a shared server, tailored to your organisation. As a next step, you can create and curate your own Patchwork server, hosting multiple communities on the topics that matter to you, some internal, some external. All with support from us.
Useful patches for server admins
Patchwork is a super-lightweight suite of patches running on Mastodon. We leave the heavy lifting to the core Mastodon code, and concentrate on bringing useful extras to your server.
Patchwork helps you fight spam, with our filters and sign-on challenge. That’s where we started, during the spam wave of early 2024 – and that might be all you need.
Patchwork is fully customisable – you only turn on the patches you want to use. You can upload shared content moderation filters and blocklists. Clearly display your Federation or Defederation choices concerning Bluesky and Threads. Add local features like themes, local posts or long posts. And stay in touch with your users through our e-newsletters.
Safe, friendly and fun for end-users
Working in the background, our spam filters and content moderation services help keep users safe. Up front, Patchwork can add some friendly and fun patches to a server.
Choose a cool theme like Mastodon Bird UI or Tangerine. Make local only posts, so you can create some local conversations, building your community. Try long posts with Markdown – the standard Patchwork post is 500 characters, but just hit + and you can create something much longer and richer. Or use local only quote posts, so you can encourage and share great posts within your community.
Introducing Patchwork
The open social web
Powered by Mastodon
The team behind Patchwork
Patchwork is a suite of patches running on Mastodon. Server admins can choose which patches to use. The software is 99.9% Mastodon, 0.1% Patchwork.
We’ve had Patchwork running for nine months at newsmast.social – a complex fork of Mastodon, with multiple timelines. During the spam wave of early 2024 we realised that we’d built some useful features which could be used on any Mastodon server. That’s Patchwork.
Like Newsmast, Patchwork is part of a charitable foundation, the Newsmast Foundation.
Join the social web
Patchwork can help your organisation reach an audience of millions, keep control of your content and increase engagement.
ORGANISATIONSUpgrade your server
With Patchwork you can run the core Mastodon code plus useful, customisable patches for you and your users.
SERVER ADMINSExperience Patchwork
On a Patchwork server you can enjoy safe, friendly and fun extras – alongside everything you're used to.
END USERS