cohost support

 I don't mind having it automatically assume a default based on OS settings, but it seems weird that there's not some sort of button or setting on the site that you can change to force it to be in light or dark mode.

Either a button on the main feed page, or another checkbox/radio button under user settings. There's already a section for "display settings"!

 There's a few threads here asking for a dark mode but this seems the one that most explicitly asks for a setting that isn't tied to the OS.

There are cases in which the browser fails to read the OS settings (this is the case for us due to privacy hardening, and the case for a friend on iOS Safari), or a user prefers to have different OS/Website settings. Not having a dark mode toggle is an accessibility headache.

We'd also like to add that, having an option to set custom background / font colours might be very useful!

I don't even know how to adjust my OS settings to trigger it. And frankly, I shouldn't have to.
I agree, there should be a checkbox for this.

Yeah a light/dark/auto toggle defaulting to auto seems to be de rigueur these days and it's easy to see why when I fire up the site on a device where, for whatever of various reasons, the site isn't respecting my OS's theme settings. Which has happened to me constantly enough that I'm here commenting about it...

Just want to +1 that this is an accessibility issue, the site wouldn't respect my settings post-lasik and light sensitivity made light-mode-only sites painful to look at.  Some people deal with these problems regularly instead of on a temporary basis like in my case.  Especially on Linux where you can heavily tweak and customize the UI, relying on the site to detect my settings is meaningless, the OS could have some "light mode" switch flipped who knows where while I have every piece of the UI set dark.

PLEASE don't make customized colors a paid feature. i have no online payment methods (paranoia, accessibility issues) but color customisation is very basic and i really can't stand warm colors.

also i was wondering where the dark mode/light mode buttons were since i've seen it mentioned in another help post but couldn't find anything about it in my actual settings.

in the meantime, here's a userscript to set the colors to whatever you want:

https://cohost.org/kiophen/post/583603-cohost-theme-customi

staff rebugged this at some point, so i doubt they're intending to make their version of it paid later!

@Azure Lazuline

this is amazing, thank you!!

 I just explained how to change cohost theme for a developer who wasn't even aware of a light theme, and having to say "actually you'll wanna go into your system settings" feels pretty icky.

posting this here too, please make the CURRENT dark mode selectable and don't change it entirely with no way to use it again. 

i like the current "dark mode" with the soft parchment colored posts.

i dislike the "light mode" because the shadows everywhere are distracting and make the site look overloaded to me.

i don't want my posts to have dark backgrounds.

the style switcher addon (stylus) doesn't enable me to recreate the current style and i found it not really usable for me due to being unable to change post and sidebar background colors.

suggestion:  enable us to manually select "dark mode" (dark backgrounds on posts), "dim light mode" (current dark mode), and "light mode"*

*i personally don't like the light mode but i'm sure some people do, so no point in removing it entirely, making stuff selectable is enough and pleases everyone.

(addition: i found myself liking the color scheme very much after a bit, and realized it's just the bright orange in some parts that i dislike and which initially threw me off - in case someone asks why i apparently changed my opinion. but the orange parts aren't that overabundant or extreme. when scrolling through my own blogs, i don't see any of it other than the little buttons in the sidebar, so it's not that bad.)

 FYI if you are using the enhanced fingerprint protection feature of firefox, firefox will forcefully report to websites that you are using light mode on your browser and your system (since that is the most common thing worldwide for some ungodly reason, and using the most common settings for everything will make your browser less unique, helping non-cookie-based tracking work less well.) What this means is that people who are a little more privacy-savvy are gonna be forced to browse sites in light mode unless the sites allow for changing the look irrespective of their browser/system settings (or if a good userstyle exists that takes care of it for them.) Personally, I'm fine with just the userstyle that currently exists, but, if you want to cater to people who for some reason can't or won't run a userstyle plugin, you should definitely make the solution be a separate toggle that overrides the browser/system settings. You wouldn't want to discourage people who give a crap about their online privacy from using the site that promises not to track them in the first place, since those people are definitely a target demographic for you :)

With the new setting for post boxes (always light-on-dark / always dark-on-light / follow system theme),  I think it would make a lot of sense to add a similar setting for the original light/dark mode.

My use case: I really like the original dark mode, and I'd like for it to be enabled all the time. But I'd also like for the post box to follow my system theme. If I tell my browser to follow the system theme, the post box behaves the way I want, but then the background turns light too.