Flotilla
Knowledge Base

Customizing How Flotilla Looks and Feels

Using Flotilla By Jon Staab 3 min read

Adjust Flotilla's appearance and reading experience: color scheme, app theme, font size, sensitive-content blur, media/link previews, and the send delay.

Customizing How Flotilla Looks and Feels

Part of our guide to running an online community you actually own.

Flotilla’s display and reading-comfort settings are all on Settings → Content, which you can open from the Content tile in the settings menu or the Content item in the settings sidebar. The page has four sections:

  • Content Settings: “Hide sensitive content?” and “Show media?”
  • Theme Settings: color scheme and app theme
  • Accessibility: font size
  • Editor Settings: send delay

Color scheme and app theme apply as soon as you pick them. Everything else on the page takes effect when you press Save Changes, and Discard Changes reverts it.

Color scheme: system, light, or dark

The Color scheme control has three options. System, the default, follows your device or browser’s light/dark preference and switches along with it. Light and Dark keep Flotilla on one or the other regardless of your device setting. The choice applies only to the device you make it on, so your phone and laptop can differ.

App theme

The App theme dropdown changes the shape and texture of buttons, cards, and everything else, as well as their colors. The three themes are clay, flat, and navy, and each works in both light and dark. Like the color scheme, the choice applies only to the current device. A community running its own copy of Flotilla may set a different default theme, but you can still switch.

Font size

The Font size slider scales the reading text from 80% to 130% of the default, without changing your device’s system font size. The percentage next to the slider updates as you drag, but the text itself changes when you press Save Changes. Font size is saved with your account settings, so it follows you to other devices where you’re logged in.

Hiding sensitive content

Authors can flag their own posts as sensitive, and by default Flotilla blurs anything flagged that way until you choose to look. The blur covers any flagged content, not only images. Turn off “Hide sensitive content?” to see everything unblurred. For revealing individual messages as you read a room, see Chatting in a Space.

“Show media?” controls whether Flotilla renders link previews and inline images and video. With it off, messages with links or media appear as plain text, which helps on a limited connection. Loading a preview or a remote image also sends a request to the server that hosts it; see Privacy Settings.

Send delay

The Send Delay slider adds a pause of up to ten seconds between pressing send and your message going out, so you can catch a typo or a message sent to the wrong room and cancel it before it’s published. There is no delay by default.

Other settings on the page

Muted Accounts, under Content Settings, controls who you hear from; see Notifications and Muting. Under Editor Settings, Media Server sets where your own uploads go (see Privacy Settings), and OpenRouter takes an API key that enables transcribing voice recordings and having messages read aloud.