Update October 31: Added a missing section about new timeline settings.
Mastodon 4.5 is almost ready. We just released the first (and hopefully only) release candidate, and the final release should be coming along very soon. This is once again a good time to highlight some o...
Last year, we launched our first batch of plushies, and our community has embraced the #Plushtodon literally and figuratively. It sold out in Europe within a few weeks. Sadly, that means a lot of you missed out on the chance to get one. We’ve listened to your feedback and de...
Hello! September was an exciting month, as we started to enable the ability to create Quote Posts on mastodon.social and mastodon.online (and, they also started to show up on other servers that run nightly builds of Mastodon). Coming to stable releases, very soon now!
Releas...
Background
Mastodon’s timeline doesn’t rely on dopamine-driven algorithms – it is chronological and consent-based, showing only posts from accounts you (the person using Mastodon) have followed.
This focus on privacy and conscious consumption is what leads many people to joi...
In a recent post, we shared that one of our priorities for 2025 is to establish a more sustainable financial base for the Mastodon organisation.
In 2024, Mastodon gGmbH took over hosting of the European Commission’s Mastodon service. We also signed a support contract with th...
Over the years, we’ve learned just how essential quoting is to many of you. When done responsibly, quoting allows us to expand discussions, make new connections, and amplify underrepresented voices.
Quoting is a powerful tool, and like any tool, it can be misused. That’s why...
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 aw...
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...
For too long, the internet has been shaped by platforms funded by venture capital and advertising. The Fediverse is testament to a different kind of social media: one built for its users, not corporate interests. This independence is what makes Mastodon and the wider Fediver...
It was another busy month in June, as we moved into the final stretch of the 4.4 release process. We also covered a lot of events during the month. Here’s what was happening.
Team
We welcomed Imani to the team, as our new designer. Very excited to have Imani join us!
We also...
Mastodon 4.4 is here, bringing you new ways to showcase yourself, manage your growing network, and enjoy what’s in your timeline. Administrators and moderators also gain new tools for keeping communities safe.
As always, if you use mastodon.social, you may already have seen ...
Mastodon 4.4 is just around the corner: the release candidate is now available, and the final release should be coming along very soon. Just before the final version arrives, we wanted to shine a spotlight on some of the new features and changes that will be particularly imp...
This week is UN Open Source Week, and we’re happy to share that today, Mastodon was added to the Digital Public Goods Alliance’s DPG Registry.
A goal of the DPGA is to promote digital public goods in order to create a more equitable world. Being recognised as a DPG increases...
We’re already well into 2025, and it has been a huge start to the year for Mastodon. We want to bring you an overdue update on exactly what we’re working on, from a strategic perspective.
Mastodon’s mission is to ensure that our online social spaces belong to the people fore...
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 th...
Mastodon’s core purpose is to connect you with your friends and communities, to have conversations that matter to you.
Communities need some ground rules; and, on the internet, we also need to be aware of any regulations that are relevant where our services are being operate...
This edition of Trunk & Tidbits marks the one year anniversary of our monthly development updates 🎉
Back at the beginning of 2024, we discussed how regular communication needed to be a part of our team’s culture, as a commitment to the people who help to make Mastodon wh...
As Mastodon continues to evolve and grow, we’re excited to announce several changes to our team (and also, to offer a brief update on our restructuring).
Restructuring Progress
We’re currently forming a new foundation in Europe as a new home for the project and its assets. T...
Greetings! We’re back, with our monthly update from the Mastodon engineering team.
Remember how last month was a bit lighter for news? Well, this time, we are making up for it and have a lot to share! Take a look below for team updates, some significant new features, and upd...
Hello again. Thanks for checking out our latest engineering updates. We hope that our monthly updates help you follow what we’ve been working on, and where we’re headed. This is a slightly lighter entry in the series, although there was plenty happening. At the start of the ...
Quote Posts are a popular feature of many social media platforms. They offer the ability to share another person’s post to one’s own followers, while adding a comment.
We want to share our thinking process in implementing Quote Posts in Mastodon, and explain why it has taken...
Welcome back to our technical blog series: Trunk & Tidbits. This is where we share updates on what the development team has been working on, and what we have planned for the future. This month we have a lot to tell you about, including a brief recap of our time at FOSDEM...
For any enquiry regarding this announcement, please contact press@joinmastodon.org
Mastodon was founded on the principles that people should be able to control their social circle online, curate their own timeline, and convene freely with any community of their choosing. We ...
A belated “happy 2025!” wish, from the Mastodon team (although, if you’ve been paying attention, there has been some important news already this month). We’re a little later than planned in posting a summary of the work that happened during December, but let’s get into it.
L...
If you’re curious how Mastodon is doing by the numbers, the 2023 Annual Report is finally here. A bit late in the year, perhaps, but we’ve got a lot more numbers to share this time! Mastodon is a non-profit, and open-source, so we revel in the transparency.
How large is our budget, and where does it go? Who works on Mastodon? What have we accomplished, and where are our priorities for the future? For all of this and more, we’ve got an answer–at least as far as 2023 goes.
We have already started work on the 2024 one, though!
Thank you to Pierre Vincent for designing our annual report and to Dopatwo for such a quick turnaround on new illustrations, and thank you to the team, especially Inga and Philip, for headlining the efforts to put this together.
Hi everyone! We’re back with our monthly engineering update, looking back at a busy November.
General news
We were pleased to see our friends at NGI (Next Generation Internet) announce a major transition to using Mastodon and PeerTube as primary communication channels for ma...
Welcome back to our monthly engineering series. In October, our long-anticipated plushies got out into the wild (mostly in Europe, for now), and we were busy tuning the code and planning what’s next.
This is also a larger entry in our blog series, for updates from around our...
Hello, friends! It’s time for another installment of our engineering updates series. Here’s what’s been happening in the code this past month.
Releases
Mastodon 4.3 is here! After 12 months of hard work, several beta versions, and a release candidate for testing, we’re excit...
Mastodon 4.3 just landed! If you’re a mastodon.social user, you might have already seen some of this in action as we’ve been gradually rolling out these updates over the course of the last 11 months in nightly releases, but we’re finally making a new stable release available...
It was a big month for the Mastodon team, with a lot of work going into getting the first beta release of version 4.3 ready - but that’s not all that we’ve worked on. Here is our monthly update on what we’ve been up to.
Releases
During August, we released versions 4.2.12 (as...
