More on Tangerine Neue

Earlier today, I released Tangerine Neue, my fork of the beloved Tangerine UI Mastodon theme originally created by Niléane. I initially put it together just for myself, but I figured I might as well share it with the world in case anyone else wanted to use this version. To say the response has been overwhelming would be an understatement. It is already getting a ton of traction on Mastodon, hitting the trending tab on mastodon.social, and so many people seem genuinely happy that someone plans to maintain a version of it, at least for a while.

If I'm being completely honest, it is actually a bit of a strange feeling. All of the other projects I have released so far have been built from scratch, but this is different. This is me taking over, to some extent, a brilliant, well known project created by someone else. I have done comparatively very little work on it so far, yet I have received an incredible outpouring of appreciation and excitement.

In a way, this situation is simply the nature of open source software, and it happens all the time. Most of these projects are completely unfunded, and they require a massive amount of effort to maintain. In most cases, they do not offer much of a financial return for your time, so it is common for another developer to eventually pick up a project and keep working on it when the original creator no longer has the time or interest to keep at it. A great example of this is the app Thaw, which is a fork of the app Ice. It was a very similar situation where the original creator made something incredibly cool, stopped maintaining it, and someone else stepped in to create their own version to keep it alive. Side note, I use Thaw on my Mac to tame my menu bar and it's great.

Still, it is hard to shake a certain sense of imposter syndrome. I don't feel like I deserve any credit here. I am effectively serving up what is mostly the same beautiful theme that Niléane made, just under my own name. That is something I am going to have to work through, and I want to be incredibly clear from the start that this is not my baby, I'm just doing what I can with it.

At the same time, there is a clear hunger among people using Tangerine UI today to have a reliable place they can go to keep getting the same great experience they have enjoyed for years. With that in mind, I want to clarify one thing from my announcement earlier today, and it's based on the feedback I've received so far. I intend to maintain this fork of the project for a good amount of time, and I want it to be a stable, trustworthy place for people who want to use it on their own instances. I was worried about looking like I was stepping on toes or taking something that wasn't mine and presenting it as my own. That does not seem to have been the response, which is a relief. The response has actually been, "please keep doing this."

I plan to keep the documentation very clear about its origins because Niléane deserves all the credit here. However, I will also begin updating some of the documentation and branding to make it clear that this is an active, reliable project that people can trust (the current README, for example, is almost apologetic for existing 😅).

That is what I will be working toward next. If you have any suggestions or run into any bugs, please feel free to let me know on Mastodon. Since this is open source, you are also more than welcome to submit a pull request. I will happily review it and add it to the official project.

Oh, and Younis wins the day on reactions to this:

> New Granite theme

Babe wake up, they made Tangerine UI for men