This release of Mastodon focuses entirely on technical improvements that are not necessarily visible on the user side, ahead of the ambitiously user-focused Mastodon 5.0 release later this year. Our goal is to improve compatibility with other fediverse platforms, improve per...
Two weeks ago, we shared insights from Mastodon’s first Discovery Week and how it’s informing our roadmap. Today, we’re offering a deeper dive on what’s in store for Mastodon 5.0 – not an exhaustive list of changes, but a glimpse into major decisions and the thoughts behind ...
Recently, members of the community informed us that our Trade Mark Policy isn’t clear enough when it comes to when, where, and how servers and developers can use our brand name (Mastodon), particularly in the URL of a server. We heard you! Our team has worked to improve our ...
Welcome to the 28th edition of Trunks & Tidbits!
This is the summer here in Europe, but while some of the team is enjoying some well-earned vacations, the work on Mastodon continues and we made a lot of progress this month.
The team is continuing to grow, and we are very...
I joined Mastodon in the summer of 2025 as the first full-time design hire. I have an extensive background in improving software usability, diversity and belonging for online communities, but I was new to Mastodon and the fediverse.
Immediately, I was impressed with the rich...
Today, we’re announcing new User Terms of Service (ToS) for the two Mastodon servers we run, mastodon.social and mastodon.online. The new ToS will go into effect on August 31, 2026. Read on to learn what’s changing.
What has happened so far?
We launched a first version of ou...
Welcome to the 27th edition of Trunks & Tidbits!
Releases
The big release for this month is Mastodon 4.6! You can read more about it in our announcement. If you work with the Mastodon API, you will also want to read our specific article.
We released patch versions for al...
Welcome to the 26th edition of Trunks & Tidbits!
It is a bit later than usual, but a lot happened in May.
First of all, we welcomed Pia into the team as a backend developer. This new hire was made possible by our recently announced contract with the Sovereign Tech Agency...
In case you missed it, a lot has happened in the European social web community over the last few weeks. We’re thrilled about these developments and wanted to share our perspective on what ties them together.
Until now, many have thought of the open social web as a technical ...
After many months of design, development, gathering feedback, and testing, today we’re releasing a big update with Mastodon 4.6. The headliner of this release is Collections, a way to create and share curated collections of profiles. Part of Mastodon’s work ethos is our comm...
We just published the first release candidate for the next version of Mastodon, and the final release isn’t far off. Version 4.6 brings a number of exciting new features, including the highly anticipated Collections. and a fresh, more consistent approach to profile pages (no...
The European Commission has just released a major strategy on technological sovereignty, and it’s placing open source software squarely in the spotlight. The message is clear: open source is key to true digital independence.
Right now, Europe depends on non-EU tech providers...
Welcome to the 25th edition of Trunks & Tidbits!
Product & Community Updates
Looking back at April:
We made an exciting announcement about how we’re improving the server admin experience thanks to generous funding from the Sovereign Tech Agency. The funding will ena...
When people think about running a Mastodon instance they often picture servers, code, and technical infrastructure. They’re right! That’s important and non-trivial work, but it’s not the only kind of work involved in building a Mastodon community. The “people” work is just a...
We are delighted to announce that Mastodon has been awarded a €614k service agreement by the Sovereign Tech Fund (@SovTechFund) to support improvements and updates to Mastodon and the broader software ecosystem. Out of the total amount, €90k is set aside to be shared with ot...
We’ve just released two new t-shirts on our shop, based on slogan suggestions from the community, and featuring lovely artwork from our artist Dopatwo. One is “My friends are not for sale”, and the other is “I write ALT text”. We’ve chosen quality over quantity, as we often ...
Welcome to the 24th edition of Trunk & Tidbits 🎉 We’ve been publishing this monthly series, “behind the scenes of the code” from the Mastodon team, for a whole two years now!
We’re getting close to the release of Mastodon 4.6. In the past few weeks we published two featu...
People come to the Fediverse to connect with others around communities and topics of interest. We’ve seen people enjoy their time on Mastodon the most, when they can follow and engage with individuals and organisations that have interesting things to share. We want to help t...
Profiles are the primary way for people using Mastodon to ‘meet’ one another on a deeper level – beyond a threaded conversation or search results. You might have noticed that the overall design of Profiles hasn’t been explored in a while, and in the meantime, we’ve heard req...
Welcome to our monthly engineering update. The team is continuing to work on the next major version of Mastodon (4.6), as well as maintaining the current stable releases.
Before we dive in to our regular review of code changes and updates from the past month, there are a num...
Have you ever wondered why news articles around the web have buttons to share to some of those other social sites, but not on Mastodon? There used to be a legitimate reason for this: unlike legacy social, Mastodon isn’t a single monolithic website you can link to; there are ...
Hi, I’m Hannah. I’m a community builder and long-time professional social media poster, though most of my “greatest hits” weren’t under my own name. I’ve managed and contributed to social accounts for a blowtorch manufacturer, a fancy hand soap maker, a Chicago-based foodser...
Hello everyone! I’m Renaud, and I’m the Technical Director at Mastodon. I’ve also been the technical lead for delivering Mastodon releases for several years now. This post is co-written with Imani, our lead product designer.
Mastodon continues to grow as more people seek alt...
Over the past couple of decades, the concept of the “social” internet has come a long way - from the first interactive websites and the Web 2.0 era, blogs and self-publishing, the ability for people to create and share their own content online, through microblogging to broad...
In November 2025, we shared our new organisational structure, and explained that the process to establish a new, non-profit, home for the project in Europe is well underway.
In the same post, we also mentioned that our German-based organisation has had its former charitable ...
This year, the Mastodon team returned to FOSDEM for the third time. FOSDEM is an annual gathering of open source developers, held in Brussels. We’re excited to report that the Fediverse is feeling vibrant!
FOSDEM has become a central element of EU Open Source Week - a series...
Intro
Welcome to Mastodon’s monthly product and engineering update, looking back at January 2026.
Events
We’ve just published a recap of our visit to FOSDEM 2026. We’ve had feedback that some event updates were a bit buried in the Trunk & Tidbits posts; and, that the res...
Welcome back, friends: and, happy 2026. Our team is anticipating a lot of exciting developments this year!
As we write this update in early January, FOSDEM is just a few weeks away. We will have a stand at the event for the third year in a row, where you’ll be able to talk t...
We are happy to release our 2024 Annual Report. We’re a non-profit, and open-source; we value transparency, and we are committed to informing our users and supporters about how we operate.
Our 2024 was transformative in ways we didn’t anticipate, and we wanted to capture the...
Elon Musk’s X platform has blocked the European Commission from making advertisements, presumably in response to the €120 million fine for its misleading verification system and overall lack of transparency. We’re grateful to Elon Musk for proving once again why the world ne...
