Flotilla
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Customizing How Flotilla Looks and Feels

Using Flotilla By Jon Staab 4 min read

Adjust Flotilla's appearance and reading experience: light/dark theme, font size, sensitive-content blur, media/link previews, and the send delay, plus exactly where each setting lives.

Customizing How Flotilla Looks and Feels

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

Flotilla has a handful of display and reading-comfort settings that are easy to miss, because they live in two different places: a quick toggle in the settings menu, and a fuller set of controls on the Content settings page. This article covers both.

Theme: light or dark

The first time you open Flotilla, it picks light or dark automatically, based on your device or browser’s own preference. After that, it’s a simple two-way switch — there’s no separate “system” option. To override it, look for the Theme button in the settings menu, next to About and Log Out. Tap it to flip from light to dark or dark to light; tap it again to go back.

Note that this toggle lives in the settings menu itself, not on one of the settings pages — you won’t find it under Settings → Content or Settings → Privacy.

Font size

If the default text is too small or too large, go to Settings → Content and open the Accessibility section. A slider there scales the reading text up or down from the default, so you can make a busy room easier to read without touching your device’s own system font size.

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. This isn’t limited to images — it covers any content the author marked sensitive, in whatever form. The control is Settings → Content → “Hide sensitive content?”. Turn it off to see everything unblurred by default; leave it on (the default) to keep flagged content hidden until you tap to reveal it. For what revealing looks like message-by-message as you read a room, see Chatting in a Space.

Also on the Content page, “Show media?” controls whether Flotilla renders link previews and inline images and video at all. Switch it off and messages with links or media appear as plain text instead of expanding into previews and embedded content — handy if you’re on a limited connection, want a less cluttered chat, or would rather images didn’t load automatically. (There’s a privacy angle too: loading a preview or a remote image means sending a request to whatever server hosts it. The full reasoning for that lives in Privacy Settings rather than here.)

Send delay

Under Settings → Content → Editor Settings, you’ll find a Send Delay slider. It adds a short pause between hitting send and your message going out, giving you a brief window to catch a typo, a message sent to the wrong room, or something you’ve thought better of, and cancel it before it’s published. It’s off (no delay) by default; drag the slider to add up to a few seconds of buffer. Treat it as a small safety net, not a scheduling feature — once the delay passes, the message sends normally.

Where everything lives

To recap, since these settings are split across two places:

  • Settings menu (the popup with About/Log Out) — the Theme button, a plain light/dark toggle.
  • Settings → Content — font size (under Accessibility), “Hide sensitive content?”, “Show media?”, and Send Delay (under Editor Settings).

Two things worth flagging so you don’t look in the wrong place. None of this lives under Settings → Privacy — that page is about relay authentication and telemetry, covered in Privacy Settings. And Muted Accounts, though it sits on the same Content page as the settings above, is a different kind of control: it’s about who you hear from, not how things look, so it’s covered separately in Notifications and Muting.