Your self-hosted, globally interconnected microblogging community - mastodon/mastodon

We are in the process of releasing a brand new mastodon chart to replace the old chart for various reasons (See this issue for more details). As such, we are creating this space as a place to leave...

Your self-hosted, globally interconnected microblogging community - mastodon/mastodon

This is a patch release for 4.5. Check out the 4.5.0 release notes for information. Changelog Fixes Fix Cmd/Ctrl + Enter not submitting Alt text modal on some browsers (#36866 by @diondiondion) Fi...

We started the Trunk & Tidbits series to provide greater visibility into what we’re building, and the decisions that go into making Mastodon. At the start of October, we published our ideas on an upcoming feature - that we’re _temporarily_ describing as “Packs”, or collections or lists of people to recommend to follow. As with our work on Quote Posts, we’re publishing our thinking early, and intend to follow up with a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal to share with the broader Fediverse community. Also, following on from our announcement of service offerings, we were excited to share the news that AltStore are making the Fediverse their home, including generous donations to a number of projects, and the launch of a new Mastodon server. > Post by @[email protected] > > View on Mastodon On a completely different note, we also shared that the adorable #Plushtodon is making a comeback 🥳 this time in two colours and a more compact form factor, but still perfectly squeezable. Look out for new mug designs, too - all of these should be hitting the merch store later this month 🤞🏻 ## Events October was a busy month of events for the team. We kicked off with Andy speaking at Berlin Fedi Day in Germany, to talk about sovereignty, freedom, and hope. Andy was also on stage at EmpoderaLIVE in Malaga, Spain, to talk about Mastodon and the Fediverse. You can watch the interview (on YouTube) in English, or with a Spanish translation. > Post by @[email protected] > > View on Mastodon Several members of the team dropped in to sessions at Fediforum online, and hosted a conversation about Packs. Felix attended a number of discussions around policy, cooperation, and healthy online spaces at OSCE on his “home turf” in Vienna, Austria. It remains vital that we engage in these conversations with organisations to spread awareness and understanding of the Fediverse. > Post by @[email protected] > > View on Mastodon ## Releases Mastodon **4.5** is now available as the latest stable release of the software. This follows three release candidates during October. Mastodon 4.5 brings the long-awaited consent-respecting quote posts feature (FEP-044f), as well as greater customisation for server owners, and other features (see the announcement post). As we approached the release, we published a blog post all about the changes that developers need to know about in Mastodon 4.5. For previous stable release branches, we also shipped: * version **4.4.8** (and 4.4.6 and 4.4.7 before that) * version **4.3.14** * version **4.2.27** As always, we recommend that all Mastodon server owners should be running the latest point version for their release branch, and ideally, to upgrade to the newest stable version of Mastodon. There are a lot of new features in version 4.5, particularly since this release makes display and authoring of quote posts available to everyone. The release of Mastodon 4.5 also updates our list of supported versions, and upcoming end-of-life dates. In particular, the 4.2 branch will no longer receive updates after January 8, 2026, and the 4.3 branch will reach EOL on May 6, 2026. ### Looking ahead You will find that the Roadmap page on the website has had a complete overhaul. We know that the previous roadmap was outdated and did not reflect what we are currently working on, or considering for future versions - particularly with our expanded team and the increased pace of development. The page is now simplified into: * features we’ve recently shipped (current stable release); * those we are actively working on (for the next major release); * and those we are exploring (this may include research and specification work, usually for a version after the next major update). The road map is simply to provide a little more insight into where the team’s efforts are directly focused. The existence of this page and its contents, does not exclude other changes and adjustments that we make along the way. ## Backend and Web Reflecting the pace of change in the final weeks before 4.5 shipped, we reviewed and merged 202 Pull Requests (134 with translation and dependency updates removed) from 21 contributors. It was a huge month. We appreciate the support and contributions from the community. * interface The refactor of Mastodon’s UI colours to use semantic theme tokens is almost complete. We’re planning to merge this change in two phases starting soon after Mastodon 4.5 is released. This is a large PR with countless changes across our SCSS files, and very likely to affect third-party themes and forks. Please let us know your feedback or any concerns directly in the Pull Request. — PR #36640 (by diondiondion) * interface We updated our supported emoji to 16. — PR #36501 (by ChaosExAnima) * interface Refactored the Emoji handling code to be more efficient, simpler to work with, and allow rendering native emojis instead of the Twemoji SVGs, depending on the user browser and preference. * admin Added granular settings for the various live feeds. — PR #36338 (by ClearlyClaire) — PR #36607 (by ClearlyClaire) * interface Improved display of CWs, link previews and quote posts in the admin UI. — PR #35958 (by ThisIsMissEm) — PR #35935 (by ThisIsMissEm) — PR #35964 (by ThisIsMissEm) * new feature Small fixes and improvements to the ‘fetch all replies’ widget, and periodic checks for new replies. — PR #36334 (by diondiondion) — PR #36383 (by diondiondion) — PR #36547 (by diondiondion) * developer Changed the identifiers used in ActivityPub URLs for new users to not contain the username, which will enable account renames (for these accounts) in a future version. — PR #36316 (by ClearlyClaire) — PR #36365 (by ClearlyClaire) * new feature Added a new setting to allow one-click boosting, which moves the quote option into the status three dots menu. — PR #36516 (by diondiondion) * new feature Changed the minimum characters required for a logged out account search from five to three. — PR #36487 (by Gargron) * api Enabled receiving “modern” RFC 9421 HTTP signatures for all servers. — PR #36610 (by oneiros) * api Added support for `Update` to non-natively handled ActivityPub object types. — PR #36322 (by ClearlyClaire) ## Android There were two small updates fixing some crashes during October. ## iOS We shipped an all-new timeline layout and support for quote posts in the 2025.06 release at the start of October, and followed up with several important bug fixes in 2025.07. More coming soon! ## Community On the community side of things, the project now uses the Contributor Covenant version 3 as the Code of Conduct for contributors and community members. As usual, we wanted to highlight a few fun things we’ve seen on the internet this month, built using the Mastodon API. * The Hall of Toots is an immersive way to explore your Mastodon feeds! * TootSDK continues to follow our API updates closely, and has been updated to support quote posts and timeline visibility options. Thanks to Dale Price and other contributors. _Important note_ there are a range of other libraries available for the Mastodon API - let us know if we are missing something 🙂 * The prolific Stefan Bohacek continues to impress, with a game to see how well you know your Fediverse Follows (there’s a brief explanation on his projects page). Stefan also has a collection of typographical experiments around the Fediverse. ## Onwards, with thanks The Mastodon team is deeply grateful to everyone for their support of what we’re building. We do this thanks to your donations. If you’re able to help us, please consider adding a recurring donation. Thank you! ### Thank you for supporting Mastodon We develop and maintain the free and open-source software that powers the social web. There is no capital behind this—we rely entirely on your support through platforms like Patreon. Donate on Patreon Donate directly View our sponsors

Your self-hosted, globally interconnected microblogging community - mastodon/mastodon

Your self-hosted, globally interconnected microblogging community - mastodon/mastodon

Welcome to the 17th edition of Trunk & Tidbits: your monthly update from inside the Mastodon core engineering team. Let’s get into what we were working on in August 2025. It has been summertime in the northern hemisphere, and various team members have been taking time away. As a result, things were a little more quiet than usual, but progress continues. ## Events The main event during August was FrOSCon, held in Sankt Augustin, Germany. Andy and David attended and spoke at the event. * Andy’s keynote: Decentralising Freedom - Open Source for Sovereignty * David’s talk: Taking a Fresh Look at the Fediverse If you are interested in new features in Mastodon, and our upcoming plans, David’s talk is particularly worth watching. You can also read Andy’s personal blog post about the event. In addition to our own team, shout out to Georg Lukas, who gave a great talk (based on his blog post) about creating a bridge from Samsung NX cameras to post to Mastodon. Pretty detailed, and also very interesting and entertaining! ## Releases There were no new backend software releases since the previous Trunk & Tidbits ⛱ the current releases of the Mastodon server software are 4.4.3, 4.3.11 and 4.2.24. It is always best to keep your server up-to-date with the current code, as this ensures that you keep up with patches for any pesky bugs, and the community can enjoy the latest features. ## Backend and Web In August, we reviewed and merged 176 Pull Requests (117 with translation and dependency updates removed) from 14 contributors. Thank you! * new feature Lots of work on Quote Posts, now with the ability to create them, change the related settings and retract them. The feature is nearly finished, and you can expect a full blog post on it very soon! If you are a Mastodon client developer, you can already look at this draft implementation guide. * performance Our FASP implementation now track the status of every provider, and stops trying to send data to them if they are not responsive — PR #35723 (by oneiros) * interface The refactor of the web UI theme colours (implementing our new theme tokens) is well underway. * container Our container image is now using the latest Debian release — PR #35768 (by vmstan) ## Android We finished working on displaying quote posts, and fixed some more minor bugs and crashes. Released version 2.10.1. ## iOS Furious paddling beneath the surface continues! The new post layout is in good shape, and we are pushing through the todo list to deliver quote posts, as well. ## Documentation We’d like to say thanks to several folks for their contributions to the documentation repository last month. The docs can be a good place to help out if you’re looking to get involved, but have less knowledge of Ruby or other coding areas (for example). We recently updated the README, and added a DOCSTYLE guide, to work towards better consistency in the documentation. Thanks to iioflow, Tak, cobrachili and joshuajung for helping to improve things for everyone. ## Community There have been a lot of releases from projects across the developer ecosystem lately 💗 There’s a new release of Mastodon for the Apple II! (and, if you love retro computing, check out the Retro computing category on the third-party apps list) > Post by @[email protected] > > View on Mastodon If you’re into more modern platforms, the Android app Tusky reached version 30! (and version 31 was just published as well) 👏🏻 > Post by @[email protected] > > View on Mastodon Here are just a couple more highlights of other recent releases: * TootSDK, a Swift library, made a number of releases during August. * Mastodon.py, a Python library, brought functionality up-to-date with Mastodon 4.4.3 (and made a few more releases in August, as well). ## Thanks First and foremost: Thank You for using Mastodon, and for believing in a better social web, one outside of corporate interests and without obscure algorithms. We recently ran a small experiment with an in-app donation banner (visible to people on our own Mastodon servers), and appreciated the financial support that it generated. Even without that banner though, you can support us any time: we find recurring donations particularly helpful. If you become a Patreon supporter, you can also follow our updates over there, for even more news about what the team is doing to support the Fediverse! ### Thank you for supporting Mastodon We develop and maintain the free and open-source software that powers the social web. There is no capital behind this—we rely entirely on your support through platforms like Patreon. Donate on Patreon Donate directly View our sponsors

It’s time for another recap of project progress, particularly from the engineering side of the team. Welcome! ## News In July, we announced that we’d be running a donation campaign in our mobile apps, visible to people on the `mastodon.social` and `mastodon.online` servers. This is an exploratory step, as we look at different ways to grow our funding. In the future we plan to extend this to the web, and (longer term) we have a plan to make this banner feature available to the operators of other Mastodon servers as well. ## Releases At the start of August (just before publishing this update) we released version 4.4.3, along with 4.3.11, and 4.2.24. These are the _current, recommended releases_. These releases contain bugfixes, a fix for a moderate severity rate limit issue, and a fix for a security issue if you use SAML. In version 4.4.3 there are also changes to how quote posts are handled, as we continue to work towards full support for quote posts in the next main release (see below for more on this). During July we also released version 4.4.2, 4.3.10, and 4.2.23. You can find the full list of changes for these by checking their entries in the release notes. We recommend that all server operators upgrade to the latest point release for the main version they are running, to stay up-to-date with fixes and to provide people with the best available experience. We announce new version releases via our @MastodonEngineering account. ## Backend and Web This month, we made a lot of progress on quote posts. We finalised designs for quote post authoring and settings, considering ways to provide both creative freedom and privacy with this new feature. Backend work on quote posts authoring is underway. We are also working on adding Starter Packs to Mastodon, with early interface and ActivityPub exploration done in the last few weeks. We are planning to publish a feature explainer detailing our decisions (for example, how to let users control if they want to be included in a Starter Pack) in the coming weeks, and will share a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal (FEP) so that they can be implemented in other ActivityPub-based software. Other technical work is moving along. We are refactoring our Emoji code, and beginning a rework of the way we write stylesheets, to make them more tuned for performance, and more future-proof. * interface Work is in progress to replace Mastodon’s emoji handling code to improve performance and avoid loading a lot of unused emoji data — PR #35229 (by ChaosExAnima) — PR #35282 (by ChaosExAnima) — PR #35253 (by ChaosExAnima) — PR #35424 (by ChaosExAnima) — PR #35505 (by ChaosExAnima) — PR #35568 (by ChaosExAnima) * interface Rewrote the keyboard shortcut code to remove an unmaintained dependency — PR #35425 (by diondiondion) * interface Added the ability for the web interface to automatically fetch replies from other servers and show a button if there are new ones — PR #35210 (by Gargron) — PR #35575 (by Gargron) * interface Started to add quote posts authoring (behind a feature flag). This is API-only for now, and still being worked on. — PR #35355 (by ClearlyClaire) — PR #35578 (by ClearlyClaire) * interface Updated the design of quote posts to align with our latest design — PR #35584 (by Gargron) * backend Updated trending statuses criteria to account for quote posts (a post with a quote can only trend if the quoted post is allowed for trending) — PR #35507 (by ClearlyClaire) * admin Added the ability to block specific usernames from registering. This handles homoglyphs, partial matches, and either require approval, or deny registration entirely. — PR #35407 (by Gargron) — PR #35614 (by ClearlyClaire) ## Android Fixed some minor bugs and started working on displaying quote posts. ## iOS Finished work on 2025.04, including: * Navigations should no longer look broken (fixes #1448) * Editing a post now gives the same progress indication as publishing a post for the first time (filling up the button) * Efficiency improvements to avoid the “too many requests” error (fixes #1449) Behind-the-scenes, there is work in progress to completely rework the way posts and timelines are handled. ## Community We spotted a couple of interesting new app releases this month. * toot, a text-based UI (TUI) for Mastodon, hit version 0.49.0 * Tuba, a GNOME / GTK client (Linux), had what OMG Ubuntu called “a huge update” As a reminder: if you’re building something cool, fun, unusual, or useful on Mastodon or using the Mastodon API, let us know, so we can share it here! ## Wrapping up That’s all for another month of progress. We’re very grateful to everyone supporting us, as we work to make the social web a better place to be. Thank you. ### Thank you for supporting Mastodon We develop and maintain the free and open-source software that powers the social web. There is no capital behind this—we rely entirely on your support through platforms like Patreon. Donate on Patreon Donate directly View our sponsors