The ActivityPub Fuzzer is a small program to help developers build social media software on the Fediverse with the ActivityPub protocol. It emulates known Fediverse software, helping solve the prob...

moderation defed

Here’s a thing I’m genuinely curious about, relevant to a lot of recent discussion. What happens if Bluesky, the main app owned by the company, goes down tomorrow? Like imagine it’s just removed from the internet; no backups, all assets removed from the face of the earth. Does blacksky keep running? Does any other part of the network? Can we ever get that data back?

I grew up in Wales during a time when our language and culture were under pressure. That experience shaped my belief in the importance of digital spaces where people can speak their own language, c…

Hello again! Thank you for reading our monthly engineering team update, we’re happy to share what we’ve been working on. ## Events We had a busy May, with several events that we participated in, or organized. The biggest one was re:publica in Berlin, where several members of the Mastodon team were able to meet with the community, talk about the project, and share our plans for the future. In particular, the team hosted a community meetup at the Wikimedia offices, to discuss the latest developments in Mastodon. At re:publica itself, Philip was on stage for a conversation about Mastodon as open infrastructure, and Felix joined a discussion about large scale adoption of independent social media platforms. There is a range of very active conversations about the Fediverse happening right now, particularly (but not exclusively) in Europe, and we are grateful to be taking part in them. ## Releases At the very beginning of May (just before last month’s blog post) we released Mastodon versions 4.3.8 and 4.2.21 - hopefully you’ll already have updated to one of these stable versions. We’ve now released the first beta of Mastodon 4.4.0. > Post by @[email protected] > > View on Mastodon The plan is to release a second beta in the next few days, with a release candidate to follow. We hope to make the final release by the end of June. There are a lot of great new features in this release, so take a look at the release notes. We will be sharing more details for developers and for users in the coming weeks as we get towards the final release. ## Backend and web In May, we reviewed and merged 180 Pull Requests (114 with translation and dependency updates removed) from 17 contributors. * interface New pinned / featured content design for user profiles, with carousel. — PR #34858 (by ChaosExAnima) — PR #34754 (by ChaosExAnima) * interface New Followers you know widget, and relationship info on hover cards. — PR #34652 (by diondiondion) — PR #34792 (by diondiondion) — PR #34769 (by diondiondion) * admin Server owners can now set whether a Referer header should be set — PR #34731 (by ChaosExAnima) * Multiple compatibility updates ahead of 4.4 beta release: * devops Bumped minimum Redis version to 6.2 — PR #30413 (by ClearlyClaire) Also dropped Redis namespace support. See the migration details if your instance is using Redis namespaces. — PR #34581 (by ClearlyClaire) — PR #34664 (by ClearlyClaire) — PR #34665 (by ClearlyClaire) * devops Update to Sidekiq 7 — PR #34745 (by mjankowski) * devops Drop support for PostgreSQL 12 — PR #34744 (by ClearlyClaire) * devops Update rack to version 3 — PR #34816 (by mjankowski) * devops Change minimum Node.js version to Node 20 — PR #34390 (by renchap) * devops Libvips is now the default image processing library. ImageMagick support is deprecated,and will be removed in a future version. — PR #34741 (by ClearlyClaire) * interface Major migration from Webpack to Vite — PR #34469 (by ChaosExAnima) — PR #34454 (by ChaosExAnima) — PR #34450 (by ChaosExAnima) * new-feature Add initial support for sharing data with Fediverse Auxiliary Service Providers (i.e. Fediscovery) — PR #34415 (by oneiros) * admin Legal feature updates as described in a recent blog post - ability to set Terms of Service, create rule translations, and set age requirements. — PR #34527 (by ClearlyClaire) — PR #34494 (by ClearlyClaire) * backend Support for displaying incoming quote posts based on FEP-044f — PR #34584 (by ClearlyClaire) — PR #34773 (by ClearlyClaire) — PR #34772 (by ClearlyClaire) — PR #34771 (by ClearlyClaire) — PR #34738 (by diondiondion) * interface Refreshed audio player design for the web UI — PR #34520 (by Gargron) ## Android No significant updates shipped in May. ## iOS On iOS, work continues on overhauling the basic post layout (currently only available to beta testers). A few smaller fixes will likely be coming soon. ## Fediscovery We implemented the `follow_recommendation` capability in our discovery provider reference implementation, fediscoverer. In May, work began to get fediscoverer closer to production readiness. There is still a way to go, but we are making steady progress. ## Community news We are always happy to see the community building on Mastodon, and this month we have a few interesting tidbits to share: * Tom Casavant shared a post about using Meshtastic to post to Mastodon from over a mile away! * Oliphaunt is a native macOS app for Mastodon that can be tried via TestFlight. * Splinter is a tool for Mastodon threads - it turns long articles into threads and posts them for you automatically. * Beej shared a blog post with a method for using Mastodon to add comments to a static blog. * Masto2RSS creates RSS feeds containing links shared on Mastodon timelines. ## Thank you - and, we need your help If you appreciate the work we do, and want to support the project, consider becoming a patron or making a donation. We are a non-profit organisation, and we rely on your contributions. The team is grateful for your support. ### 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

I don't think it's possible to be where we are in #uspol (and in the global authoritarian slide) without our information ecosystems being such a mess. There's a ton of work to do on the distribution side of the problem, but also on the info-making side: Even great newsrooms aren't built to make the kind of knowledge we need in this moment, bc what they make are endless streams of atomized stories. And we ordinary people are all out here in the feeds trying to piece it together in our heads.

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Principal @ Very Little Gravitas. Make friends, break silos, build bridges. Alignment is chaotic good. Maintainer of @starfleetjobs and @breakinggovtech.

Bridgy Fed bot user for Bluesky. To bridge your fediverse account to Bluesky, follow this account. More info here. After you follow this account, it will follow you back. Accept its follow to make sure your fediverse posts get sent to the bridge and make it into Bluesky. To ask a Bluesky user to bridge their account, DM their handle (eg snarfed.bsky.social) to this account.