Hey, friends - here is another instalment in our engineering updates series. This is what has been happening in the code lately.
Team Updates
At the very end of July we opened a role for an iOS developer to look after the official Mastodon for iOS app. If you are interested,...
The European Union must keep funding free software
The Next Generation Internet (NGI) program from the European Commission has been crucial for the development of many open-source products, including Mastodon. They are one of the best initiatives worldwide to finance work on...
Looking back at June (and just sneaking in to the start of July), we have a lot to share with you. Let’s dive in!
Growing the team
First of all, we are delighted to announce a new member of the core development team - David Roetzel joined us as a core web developer. Welcome,...
To reinforce and encourage Mastodon as the go-to place for journalism, we’re launching a new feature today. You will notice that underneath some links shared on Mastodon, the author byline can be clicked to open the author’s associated fediverse account, right in the app. Th...
Welcome again to Trunk & Tidbits, our engineering updates blog series. Let us fill you in on what we’ve been focused on during this past month.
Releases you should know about
During May, we released some important updates for the 4.2 and 4.1 releases, and nightly builds....
Welcome to the first in a planned ongoing series of updates from the core Mastodon engineering team. We’ll also take a quick look at what’s been happening around the broader community.
What we’ve been working on
The Mastodon 4.3 release is around the corner - we only have on...
As part of our commitment to supporting the growth and operational capabilities of Mastodon, we have established a 501(c)(3) non-profit entity in the United States aimed at facilitating our efforts, including being able to receive tax-deductible U.S. donations and in-kind su...
After we’ve released our new line of merch last year, we’ve heard a lot of questions about a potential stuffed toy. After all, our official mascot is so suitable. But it is, problematically, a two-dimensional character.
We sat down with our artist, Dopatwo, to try and imagin...
At the beginning of February, our team attended our very first conference at FOSDEM in Brussels. As a remote-only company, it was also the first time a lot of us met each other in real life. It was a very fun time, and a lot of people came up to take selfies in front of our ...
In our most recent Mastodon for Android release, we’re testing a new feature aimed to curb unneccesary negativity that comes from being on the Internet. Complete strangers using an overly familiar tone, offering unsolicited advice, or starting arguments that are completely b...
Today we would like to thank Sujitech for kindly donating $100k USD to Mastodon, by far the largest single donation to our non-profit so far. Building Mastodon, which encompasses the core software on one end, and two native mobile applications on the other, is not cheap, and...
The most recent update of Mastodon for Android introduces a highly anticipated feature–lists. With the new update, you now have the ability to create custom lists and categorize your follows based on specific topics or interests, while removing them from your home feed.
This...
Some of your were asking for it, some of you had no idea it was coming. The 2022 Annual Report is ready! As a non-profit organization supported exclusively by donations, we like to keep our community updated on our yearly progress, and 2022 was an interesting year to say the least. Keep in mind though that we’re already more than halfway through 2023, and a lot of things have evolved and changed since then! You’ll be able to read about that in the 2023 report, which, fingers crossed, you won’t have to wait half a year for.
As Mastodon continues to grow, we’d like to make sure we’re doing all we can to help you connect with your friends and your interests. Most importantly, we want to bring you features that make it much easier to connect with people that matter to you.
In this version we overh...
To help us raise more funds for our development efforts, we are launching a new line of merchandise for Mastodon including t-shirts, mugs, enamel pins, and stickers. Our artist, Dopatwo, has come up with brand new, exclusive designs for each item, and we’ve partnered with FR...
Today, Meta is launching its new microblogging platform called Threads. What is noteworthy about this launch is that Threads intends to become part of the decentralized social web by using the same standard protocol as Mastodon, ActivityPub. There’s been a lot of speculation...
While usually our app updates don’t get a dedicated blog post, this one is a bit bigger and provides a good opportunity to reflect on how the Android app changed since launch roughly a year ago. Today, Mastodon for Android has received a complete Material You redesign. We le...
Today we’re making signing up on Mastodon easier than ever before. We understand that deciding which Mastodon service provider to kick off your experience with can be confusing. We know this is a completely new concept for many people, since traditionally the platform and th...
On Dec 16, Twitter suspended our @joinmastodon account after we shared a link to the newly registered Mastodon account of @ElonJet, an account that broadcasts public flight path data of Elon Musk’s private jet, which was previously suspended from Twitter itself. At the same ...
I’m pleased to announce that our new joinmastodon.org website is now live. We teamed up with the design agency Oak to give our project a modern and professional presence. The website is responsible for explaining what Mastodon is, why it is better than other social media pla...
We’re teaming up with the design agency Oak to update our homepage and our brand. We’re leaving the ubiquitous blue that every social app seems to have behind in favour of a vibrant purple. Our logo also gets some subtle shape fixes that makes it look more precise.
I origina...
The news of Elon Musk buying Twitter has put Mastodon into the public spotlight as an alternative social network, rapidly exploding our growth with over 30,000 new users in just a single day. This is because at Mastodon, we present a vision of social media that cannot be bou...
With the release of our Android app on the Play Store we are now present on both major mobile platforms. The apps are gaining overwhelmingly positive reviews, some even going so far as to claim that our onboarding is smoother than any other social media platf...
Work on multiple features in this release has been kindly sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research through the Prototype Fund.
We’ve added one of the most requested functions among our competitors, the ability to edit posts. Since older Mastodon ver...
Following the successful launch of our official iOS app, in January we’ve begun the development of an Android version. We continue working with the NYC design agency Lickability and welcome Gregory Klyushnikov, better known as grishka on the fediverse, as the lead Android de...
Disclaimer: Since Mastodon is decentralized, different Mastodon servers have a different view of the network depending on user activity, and providing an objective data summary across the entire network is not currently possible. Data provided in this blog post is provided ...
From media reports and individual findings that various people have presented to us, it seems that the new social media platform owned by the former president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, so-called Truth Social, is using Mastodon’s source code with various visual a...
On behalf of the EUNOMIA project, in which I represent Mastodon, I am happy to announce that after nearly 3 years of development there is now a public pilot for the Mastodon community.
But first, what is EUNOMIA and who is EUNOMIA? EUNOMIA is a “digital companion” for social...
In June, I was able to officially register Mastodon gGmbH after nearly 8 months of legal work (“gGmbH” means “non-profit limited liability company”). A non-profit limited liability company in Germany is structered and operates similarly to a for-profit limited liability comp...
One of the ways Mastodon sets itself apart from current-day Twitter is its API-first approach (every function available through the web interface is available through the API, in fact, our web client is just an API client that runs in the browser). A third-party app ecosyste...
