Simple and customisable, Patchwork runs as a lightweight layer on Mastodon.
99.9% Mastodon, 0.1% Patchwork. 80% built and we’re building the rest now.
Useful patches for server admins, working behind the scenes for long hours, keeping posts federating and timelines flowing.
Patchwork helps admins fight spam, share content moderation, display Federation choices, add local features and stay in touch with server users.
Fighting spam
Spam filters are at the heart of Patchwork. Through an easy to use console, running alongside your Mastodon server, admins can:
– Pre-load keywords and hashtags for known spam
– Add keywords and hashtags to filter out spam as it emerges
– Add a simple, server specific challenge (not rCaptcha) for user sign-ups
There’s no need to block domains – spam will be instantly filtered out as it arrives at your server.
Sharing content filters and blocklists
At Patchwork we’ve developed some extra content filters which you can share, depending on the content policies of your server. You can choose to filter out NSFW content if your server is non-explicit, or add filters for hate speech or crypto. You can also upload your own list of global filters if you prefer – doing what users can do now, at a server level.
Going forward we aim to make it easy for you to subscribe to a live blocklist, like the one IFTAS is creating.
Making and displaying clear federation choices
There’s been a lot of discussion in the Fediverse about federating with Threads and bridging with Bluesky. At Patchwork we believe that server admins have a critical role to play here, in making clear choices for their server. Using Patchwork, servers can make and display these choices easily:
– Allow users to opt-in or opt-out from the Bluesky bridge, or block it completely
– Federate with Threads, limit/silence Threads, or block it completely
Adding local features
Patchwork patches include lots of extra features which server admins can turn on or leave off:
– Themes and flavours. There are some great new themes out there, which you can adopt for your server. As a start we’re offering Mastodon Bird UI and Tangerine UI – with many more to follow.
– Local posts only. Say something just to the audience on your server.
– Long posts. 500 characters isn’t much. Press a + and create a long post – 4,000, 10,000 characters of more – as set by the server.
– Quote posts. These are in development by the Mastodon team, and lots of clients have a workaround. Meantime your server users can quote post to each other. Which means a lot of the concerns can be dealt with by local moderation.
– Full-text search on by default for all users, opt-out by user.
Enabling guest accounts
With Patchwork you can open up your server to guest accounts. So users based on another server can join your server without having to open a new account, seeing your local and federated timelines alongside their home timeline, and interacting seamlessly with both.
Staying in touch with end-users
Every Mastodon server has lists of new, current and lapsed users who you can legally contact with service information. Emails are a simple way to reach people and entice them back to try the Fediverse again, or persuade them to explore and post more often. Using open-source mail software, Patchwork is developing patches to:
– Upload new users and send a series of onboarding emails.
– Upload all existing users and send a regular e-newsletter.
Patchwork apps
Once you’ve upgraded your server to Patchwork, the simplest way for end-users to use Patchwork is through the basic Web UI, a lightweight upgrade from the familiar Mastodon UI. There are other great choices too:
– You can change to Mastodon Bird UI or Tangerine UI.
– There’s a cool, lightweight app being built on Phanpy – patchwork.app
– You can download our Patchwork Community mobile app, including extra timelines from Newsmast, from the App Store or Google play.
– Or go to patchwork.news to see the same Patchwork Community app working on desktop or web browser.
Our documentation
