Mastodon 5.0 (design preview): Composer should be at top

App Feedback UX Feedback
1

Hi!

Posting here after seeing the design preview to say I think the composer should really be at the top of the page, compared to the bottom where it is right now.

For this I have the following reasons:

1. Your post will appear on the top after posting (Latest activity is on top), it makes more sense to put give the composer the highest position, as it’s the freshest content (it’s bring written!)

2. On screen keyboards have the tendency on some systems to spawn in front of the bottom of the display

3. If the textbox were to expand to fit more text while typing, it would be jarring if this happened in a bottom composer situation. As the only space to expand to would be higher on the screen, this would cause the text to shift up one line when done so

Additionally I just think it would look better, but that is purely a personal opinion without specific reasoning.

Wondering what others think

8 Likes
2

I’m not sure about this…

If you are in a middle point of your timeline, composer at top could be strange…
I don’t mind if they put at the bottom right corner as the first 5.0 demo, but the problem there is you have a composer button far from the other buttons (home, explore, custom feeds, followed hashtags…).

1 Like
3

I agree, i was just going to make a new topic with the same suggestion;

With the compose box at the bottom, it feels like i’m writing (fiddling) in a tiny little box at the bottom of the screen.

Note that Phanpy does exactly this - the compose box is vertically in the top/center, and it’s a lot more convenient.

(for reference, laptop display resolution: 2560x1600)

1 Like
4

Mastodon Staff said they will need much more Space for the Composer compared to the previous Design.

That sounds like the Composer should have a Column to itself.

5

Agreed.

We have it like this:

2026-11-08_01-15-30
2026-11-08_01-15-301949×1131 57.8 KB

3 Likes
6

Stunning, do you have a repository where this change lives so we could cherry-pick it for our instance as well?

1 Like
7

Yes! It’s a single commit in our fork: Open the composer near the top like a dialog · mementomori-social/mastodon@d14b2dd · GitHub

It touches trigger.tsx and trigger.module.scss, and it cherry-picks cleanly onto current mastodon/mastodon main.

The commit itself only dims the background with 50% black. The blur and the darker background come from Mastodon Bird UI: mastodon-bird-ui/src/components/_modals.scss at 724cf08cb343a4cc0ac3b1b79c850a05096492a4 · rollecode/mastodon-bird-ui · GitHub

If you don’t run Bird UI, you can copy that one rule into your custom CSS once the commit is in.

8

The upcoming update will switch Mastodon’s composer to a center modal, which we can possibly limit to not go beyond a certain vh on extra large screens.