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 many of their projects. 🎉

Our application for a stand at FOSDEM 2025 was accepted. We’re excited to be taking part in FOSDEM for the second year! We’ve started to plan what we will bring to share and talk about. We’re also going to be engaged in this year’s Social Web Devroom. The Fediverse is growing, and we are happy to be a part of it.

After the U.S. celebrates Thanksgiving, they’ve historically had so-called Black Friday and then Cyber Monday… there’s also a more recent tradition of Giving Tuesday. This year, the Mastodon 501(c)(3) organisation - our U.S. non-profit entity - launched a fundraising campaign to help us to fund a Trust & Safety Lead. We’re super grateful and happy that the campaign has started to raise these funds (also, the campaign remains open!).

Releases

In November, we released updates for each of the currently-supported Mastodon versions - 4.3.2, 4.2.14, and 4.1.21. These contain a mixture of small fixes, and in the case of 4.3.2 and 4.2.14, a new administrative tootctl feeds vacuum command for retroactively removing feeds that may have been left behind from deleted accounts.

As a reminder, Mastodon 4.1.x is now deprecated, which means that it will reach End of Life and no longer receive updates on April 8, 2025 - this will be six months after the release of 4.3.0.

We recommend that owners / administrators of Mastodon instances upgrade to the latest available versions, as appropriate to their environments.

Code updates

In November, we reviewed and merged 194 Pull Requests (133 with translation and dependency updates removed) from 18 authors.

We always appreciate contributions. If you would like to get involved, we have some issues tagged “help welcome”, including this one for Rails/backend. There are also a small number of “easy” (?) unmaintained React library replacements needed: react-notification, react-motion and react-hotkeys.

Backend

We’ve also been busy working on bug fixes (which rolled up into the point releases), and are also working on Fediscovery and on quote posts.

Among other contributors, we’d also like to say Thank You to Matt @mjankowski for tirelessly triaging PRs and Issues and helping us to get our backlogs into better shape - for a popular project like this one, it can be a lot of work 🙏🏻

Android

The most recent Android release had a number of visual updates: the ability to use a default Material palette; a redesign of the media viewer; and the ability to crop avatars are probably the most noticeable ones.

iOS

Just in time for Giving Tuesday, our update 2024.11 shipped with the ability to show members of mastodon.social and mastodon.online a banner at the bottom of their timeline inviting support for Mastodon’s continued development.

This version also made several improvements to filters and content warnings, most importantly that filtered posts now take up less space and tell you which filter they triggered! Also, filters with the “hide” action now really do remove posts from your feed completely. Finally, content warnings now function as they do on the web, blurring only the attached media if the content warning message is empty.

We’ve fixed a few longstanding privacy issues, so that when you log out of an account (or delete the app from your device and reinstall it), you will be required to re-enter your username and password to regain access to the account. And we’ve made a few improvements to the experience of using the app with a brand new account: “Find people to follow” is now easier to exit from, and posts from anyone you’ve just followed will show up in your feed immediately.

Finally, there are a few small visual improvements, including that the Dark Mode icon now has a dark ‘m’, and a large amount of code change that will hopefully mean fewer crashes right away and make further stability improvements in the future easier to achieve.

Fediscovery Project

In case you missed it: Fediscovery (full title, Fediverse Discovery Providers) is a project to explore decentralised search and discovery for the Fediverse as a whole. This is a new service for ActivityPub-compatible platforms.

Work on establishing a solid base for providers is ongoing, and we have been able to publish the first draft for a provider to register to data updates from a configured instance. This will allow discovery providers to know when there are new (or updated, or deleted) posts or accounts so it can index them. No data is directly sent to the provider, but only references that the provider can fetch over ActivityPub, using it’s o Continue reading at the publisher's website.

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 community.

New arrivals

We are really excited to welcome Shannon Hughes to our core development team, to work on our iOS experience. Big thanks to our friends Marcus and Nathan for looking after the app over the past couple of years, as well. Shannon has already started to get to work on improvements, so look out for more in the coming months!

Post by @MastodonEngineering@mastodon.social

View on Mastodon

Shannon was not the only newcomer! We aim to keep this blog series focused on the code, but we were excited that the initial batch of #Plushtodon took the world by storm in October - check out the hashtag, for photos of happy Mastodons finding their new homes! We’re working to help them reach the UK and the US, as well; stay tuned to our Mastodon posts and merch store for more on this.

A wild #Plushtodon appeared!

Releases

We released version 4.3.1, which mostly features a number of smaller fixes and polish to the main 4.3.0 release. Instance administrators are encouraged to upgrade (if you have not already done so).

Recent work

In October, we reviewed and merged 234 Pull Requests (167 with translation and dependency updates subtracted from the total) from 24 authors.

We really appreciate the contributions and support. If you would like to get involved, we have some issues tagged “help welcome”, including this one for Rails/backend, and this one for React/frontend.

Backend

The month started with a focus on small bug fixes following the 4.3.0 release, that made it into 4.3.1.

Here is a list of the notable changes that were merged in October, and will appear in the next Mastodon release:

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 excited to share version 4.3 with you. Check out the full details in our launch blog post.

Additionally, we’ve released patch versions 4.2.13 and 4.1.20, and we recommend that all instances upgrade to these latest updates.

Please note, the Mastodon 4.1.x series is now deprecated and will reach End of Life on April 8, 2025 (six months after the release of 4.3.0). We recommend updating to 4.2.x or 4.3.x as soon as possible.

Recent work

This update covers changes since the last edition of Trunk & Tidbits, so there may be some overlap with the 4.3 release notes.

In September, we reviewed and merged 298 pull requests (224 excluding translation and dependency updates) from 14 contributors.

Interested in getting involved? Start here for issues covering both bug fixes and new features for the backend and frontend.

Web and Backend

Here’s a look at some key updates:

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 to the community. If you use a different server, you will get access to these improvements once your server operator upgrades.

Notifications

On Mastodon, your experience depends a lot on the moderation style of the server that hosts your account, but your unique ability to choose a server that suits your needs the best is useless if you don’t have much insight into how moderation decisions impact you. If a moderator decision results in you losing followers, or no longer being able to follow people from another server, you will now be notified and have the ability to export a list of the affected profiles.

Also, if a moderator decision targets your account specifically, you will now receive an in-app notification so you can’t miss it.

We’re also bringing two new major features to help people deal with unwanted attention. Notification grouping has arrived in Mastodon, allowing you to make sense of your notifications even if your posts are going viral. Instead of inundating your screen with hundreds of individual notifications for the same post, you’ll see a summary of how many people boosted or favourited it.

We’re also introducing a brand new system for filtering unwanted notifications. You get to decide what happens to notifications from people you don’t follow, who aren’t following you, recently created accounts, or unsolicited private mentions. You can either send them to the void immediately, never to be seen again, or put them into a special inbox you can peruse when you want.

Design

One of the ongoing efforts is to make Mastodon easy and delightful to use. We’ve invested a significant amount of money and time into working with professional designers and performing user testing over the last few years, but we really ramped up our efforts in 2023. Mastodon is quite a large application, and our resources remain very constrained compared to our corporate competitors, but we’ve made significant progress on improving the look and feel of Mastodon across the board.

We have redesigned the new post composer to be much more intuitive to use, to make sure you get your post right the first time. Not only does it look better, but you can now re-arrange media you’ve uploaded as you see fit, and see exactly what layout it will be displayed in. We’ve also made content warnings and word filters easier to notice and expand.

Across the web app, our iconography and color palette got a refresh, link previews look even better, and you can now hover over anyone’s name to peek at their profile and quickly follow or unfollow them. We also redesigned all of the “utility” emails (password resets, follow notifications, etc.) as well as the first welcome email to help you identify what’s most important.

Among various redesigned dialogs, new confirmation dialogs for muting and blocking describe exactly what effects muting and blocking will have. If you are about to block another server, we’ll show you exactly how many followers you would lose to help avoid potential mistakes. In the spirit of surfacing product education in more areas, clicking the domain on someone’s profile now brings up information about Mastodon’s decentralized nature.

Onboarding and discovery

Helping new users get started on Mastodon has been a key focus for us over the past few years. We found that people would skip follow recommendations during onboarding and end up with a boring feed that doesn’t offer anything new for hours or days.

We value the user’s agency over what is shown in the home feed, and pride ourselves on being a reliable platform to keep up with the people you care about without opaque algorithms randomizing which things you see in which order. This presents a challenge when other platforms have created an expectation that the user only has to passively consume what is generated for them instead of actively curating what they want to see.

On Mastodon, you need to follow people or hashtags to see them in your home feed. To bridge the gap for people who fly past the onboarding, we’ve introduced a little carousel with follow recommendations that will appear above the first post older than four hours on the first page of your home feed.

We’ve also significantly improved the system of follow recommendations as a whole, mixing generalized results like profiles popular in your language with personalized ones like profiles that a lot of the people you follow, follow. For added transparency, the reason for the recommendation is displayed along with it.

Helping writers and journalists

In this version we’re introducing a new way to highlight writers and journalists on the fediverse. By adding a single line to their HTML, publishers can feature the fediverse profile of the page author in the link previews on Mastodon. That way, when lots of different people are sharing the link, or the link is trending in the News tab, you can easily navigate to the author’s fediverse profile and follow them right from within Mastodon to receive future updates. Publications like The Verge and TechCrunch are already using this.

We’ve also put a fresh coat of paint on our website embeds. You’ve always been able to embed a Mastodon post on your own website, but we’ve made them look a lot better and gave them a more graceful fallback when the source is slow to load or no longer available. Of course, the dialog for embedding a post now looks a lot better as well, offering a simple click to copy button. Keep in mind that you can only embed posts that are public!

What’s next?

Now that 4.3 is done, our focus for the next release will be on implementing the highly requested features of quote posts, as well as the ability for server operators to subscribe to managed blocklists, which along with our new initiative of pluggable fediverse discovery providers should make running small and medium-sized fediverse servers much more viable; and with Ghost entering the fediverse, further improving how long-form content from other fediverse platforms is displayed within Mastodon.

We are extremely grateful to everyone who supports Mastodon through Patreon, our 501(c)3 in the US, and other means. Unlike our competitors, we don’t take venture capital, don’t sell ads and don’t sell your data. While other social media platforms have teams of hundreds of engineers working on them, we operate on less than 500K USD annually with a team of only 4 full-time employees, and a number of contractors. If you’d like to see the pace of development increase, please consider chipping in so we can hire more people!

In other news

The Mastodon stuffed toy is almost ready to go on sale. We’re waiting for the shipments to arrive at the warehouse. Find out more in the original announcement.

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 well as a short-lived 4.2.11) and 4.1.19, with many bug fixes. If you are running the 4.2.x or 4.1.x series, we recommend that you upgrade to these latest versions.

We also released the first beta of Mastodon 4.3! This release includes a number of new features and improvements, including a new notifications screen, a new way to filter notifications, and a number of new APIs. Take a look at the full release notes here. You will want to take a look at the requirements for upgrading to the new version, as many dependencies have been updated.

We are already running the latest code on our own instances (mastodon.online and mastodon.social), but it is important to get input from elsewhere. We appreciate all the feedback we can get from those upgrading to and running 4.3.0-beta.1 with their Mastodon communities - you can help us to make the release version even better.

Current work

Our current plan is to release a second beta (i.e. 4.3.0-beta.2) in mid-September, with the final version of 4.3.0 coming 2-3 weeks after that.

Web and Backend

In August, we reviewed and merged 242 Pull Requests (163 with translation and dependency updates removed) from 18 authors. If you’re looking to get involved, here is a great place to start - a list of issues covering bug fixes and features, for both the backend and frontend.

Again, there have been lot of bug fixes and refactoring from our recurring (and new!) contributors - thanks a lot!

One more thing: the Azure storage support is likely to be removed in the future, as Microsoft is abandoning their Ruby SDK. More information here.

We are currently working on:

Mobile apps

There has not been a lot of activity around the mobile apps in August, due to th Continue reading at the publisher's website.

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 details of the role are available here.

Current work

We continue along the road to Mastodon 4.3, our next major release. We really hoped to release a beta in July, but we got some feedback about the filtered notifications feature, and we are making a few changes to address some issues before releasing it more widely. It should be really close now!

The changes described here are already available to users of instances that are running a recent “nightly” version (for example, mastodon.social or mastodon.online), and will come to others as part of the 4.3 release.

Web and Backend

In July, we reviewed and merged 186 Pull Requests (110 with translation and dependency updates removed) from 14 authors. We appreciate the contributions. If you would like to help, we have a list of issues that you can start from.

We are currently working on:

Mobile apps

Android

This month, we released a new version of the app that adds a way to support Mastodon by making a donation to us. It will also allow us to experiment with a small, dismissible, one-time donation banner in the app, and see whether this is effective. This is only enabled for users on Continue reading at the publisher's website.

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 OSS projects. The Mastodon project is supporting this open letter in favor of the NGI programs, and is calling on the European Commission to not shut them down.

Open Letter to the European Commission

Since 2020, Next Generation Internet (NGI) programmes, part of European Commission’s Horizon programme, fund free software in Europe using a cascade funding mechanism (see for example NGI0 Commons Fund). This year, according to the Horizon Europe working draft detailing funding programmes for 2025, we notice that Next Generation Internet is not mentioned any more as part of Cluster 4.

NGI programmes have shown their strength and importance to supporting the European software infrastructure, as a generic funding instrument to fund digital commons and ensure their long-term sustainability. We find this transformation incomprehensible, moreover when NGI has proven efficient and economical to support free software as a whole, from the smallest to the most established initiatives. This ecosystem diversity backs the strength of European technological innovation, and maintaining the NGI initiative to provide structural support to software projects at the heart of worldwide innovation is key to enforce the sovereignty of a European infrastructure.Contrary to common perception, technical innovations often originate from European rather than North American programming communities, and are mostly initiated by small-scaled organisations.

Previous Cluster 4 allocated 27 million euros to:

In the name of these challenges, more than 500 projects received NGI funding in the first 5 years, backed by 18 organisations managing these European funding consortia.

NGI contributes to a vast ecosystem, as most of its budget is allocated to fund third parties by the means of open calls, to structure commons that cover the whole Internet scope - from hardware to application, operating systems, digital identities or data traffic supervision. This third-party funding is not renewed in the current program, leaving many projects short on resources for research and innovation in Europe.

Moreover, NGI allows exchanges and collaborations across all the Euro zone countries as well as “widening countries” 1, currently both a success and an ongoing progress, likewise the Erasmus programme before us. NGI also contributes to opening and supporting longer relationships than strict project funding does. It encourages implementing projects funded as pilots, backing collaboration, identification and reuse of common elements across projects, interoperability in identification systems and beyond, and setting up development models that mix diverse scales and types of European funding schemes.

While the USA, China or Russia deploy huge public and private resources to develop software and infrastructure that massively capture private consumer data, the EU can’t afford this renunciation.Free and open source software, as supported by NGI since 2020, is by design the opposite of potential vectors for foreign interference. It lets us keep our data local and favors a community-wide economy and know-how, while allowing an international collaboration.

This is all the more essential in the current geopolitical context: the challenge of technological sovereignty is central, and free software allows to address it while acting for peace and sovereignty in the digital world as a whole.

In this perspective, we urge you to claim for preserving the NGI programme as part of the 2025 funding programme.

The Mastodon team supports this open letter, initially published by petites singularités. The English translation has been provided by OW2. You too can support this campaign by publishing this letter and adding yourself on this page.

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, @dave!

Keeping things secure

During June, we investigated and fixed (and tested the patches for) 3 security issues. They were part of our most recent security releases at the start of July. These are important updates for the 4.2 and 4.1 releases, and nightly builds. Please make sure you are running the latest version of Mastodon to keep your instance secure.

We care about the maintenance of our supported versions, so there is always a portion of work that goes into this strand of the team’s activities. We’re excited to bring you the new features mentioned below - but, making sure that Mastodon is secure and reliable is always our top priority, so that comes first.

As a reminder, you can follow @MastodonEngineering to keep track of new releases and other important technical updates.

Current development work

We are aiming to make the first beta of Mastodon 4.3 available during July.

The changes list below are now available to users of instances that are running a recent “nightly” version (for example, mastodon.social or mastodon.online), and will come to others as part of the full 4.3 release.

Web and Backend

In June, the team reviewed and merged 237 Pull Requests (162 when translation and dependency updates are taken out of that larger total), from 20 authors! Thank you to our contributors. If you would like to help, there are bug fixes, features, and improvements to be made across backend and frontend - start here.

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. This highlights writers and journalists that are active on the fediverse, and makes it easier than ever to follow them and keep up with their future work—potentially across different publications. Writers often work with different publishers over the span of their careers, but Mastodon is the perfect platform to amass a loyal audience that you, as the author, truly own, and can take with you across the fediverse.

Some of the first websites adopting this feature are The Verge, MacStories, and MacRumors. If you have an account on mastodon.social and use the web version or one of our official mobile apps, you will see associated fediverse accounts underneath their articles, no matter who posts them. Of course, it’s also part of Mastodon’s API, so we expect to see support among the vast array of third party apps for Mastodon as well. All Mastodon features are always available to all third-party apps since the API that powers the web version and the official mobile apps is the exact same for everyone.

The technical

We’ve decided to create a new kind of OpenGraph tag—the same kind of tags you have on your website to determine which thumbnail image will appear on the preview for the page when shared on Discord, iMessage, or Mastodon. It looks like this: <meta name="fediverse:creator" content="@Gargron@mastodon.social" />.

The handle can be any fediverse account, not just Mastodon. That includes Flipboard, Threads, WordPress (with the ActivityPub plugin installed), PeerTube, Pixelfed, and many others. It will work with and without the leading at-symbol for the handle. If multiple tags are present on the page, the first one will be displayed, but we may add support for showing multiple authors in the future. We intend to propose a specification draft for other ActivityPub platforms in the coming weeks.

The support for this tag is currently rolled out on mastodon.social and any other server that uses a recent Mastodon nightly release. To enable it for your own Mastodon account, navigate to the Verification tab on the Edit Profile page, and add the website domains from which you want to be credited in the Author Attribution section. E.g. if you’re a journalist for The Verge, you would add theverge.com to the list. This extra step is meant to prevent malicious websites from framing users in link previews.

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. They contain minor security fixes, as well as bug fixes. Thanks to the BSI for sponsoring a pentest of our codebase, which helped us find and fix some of these issues.

As a reminder, you can follow @MastodonEngineering to keep track of new releases and other important technical updates. If you are a server administrator or you want to pay special attention to these releases, you can also choose to be notified when that account posts an update.

Code changes and work in progress

We are continuing to drive towards Mastodon 4.3, our next major release.

The changes below are available to users of instances that are running a recent “nightly” version (for example, mastodon.social or mastodon.online), and will come to others as part of the 4.3 release.

Web app and Backend

iOS

The focus for June on the iOS side is on continuing the stability improvements, fixing some issues regarding the timeline posts loading, and adding support for Lists and the new grouped notifications feature coming in 4.3.

Documentation

We have had a lot of helpful contributions to the documentation over the past few months. This month, we particularly want to give shout-outs to adrian2793, MahanRahmati and progval for helping to keep things updated. We appreciate you!

Looking ahead

These are the key things we are actively working on for June:

Those are the 2 remaining major features planned for 4.3 that need to be completed. Once they are merged, we will focus on releasing the first 4.3 beta.

Additionally, work is still in progress to convert our frontend to modern React / Redux and TypeScript. For example, this PR defined a modern and 100% typed way of defining Redux actions. If you know React, Redux and TypeScript, you can help! Here is a good place to start.

Other news

We are excited to report that we filled our new core developer position! Our new team member will start in early July, and we will have more to share nearer to the time.

We have fully re-written and clarified the contribution guide, across the whole project. It now includes explanations about how the project works, and where we are most able to accept contributions (not just code contributions). We also have an issue to visit on the main repository with pointers to help you get started. We hope this will make it easier for new contributors to get involved.

Finally, a huge thank you to our triage team for keeping the issue tracker clean and organized. We appreciate all the work you do to help us stay on top of things.

Thank you for using Mastodon

That is it for May 2024. Spread the word to others, and get them to join us all in building better social media!

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 one big feature (grouped notifications) to finish before the first beta release! Let’s dive in on some of the most important things that have been merged lately.

Changes below are available to users of instances that are running a recent “nightly” version (like mastodon.social or mastodon.online), and will come in the 4.3 release.

Web app and Backend

As always, many bug fixes or refactors to make the code cleaner and improve our test coverage have been merged. Shout out to Matt Jankowski who has been driving a lot of upgrades, modernisation, test improvements and other refactors to the backend.

iOS

Android

What’s coming

These items are actively being worked 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 support.

We’re excited to announce the Board of Directors governing this newly formed entity:

The board was selected based on the values they share with Mastodon, their valuable experience and their commitment to helping build and grow the fediverse.

With additional guidance of this Board and the incredible support of our growing communities, Mastodon will remain firm in its mission of offering free, open-source decentralized social media.

Mastodon’s non-profit status in Germany

We’ve always been worried that developing Free and Open Source Software would not be recognized as a charitable cause by the German tax system, so we were glad when the tax office originally approved our non-profit status in 2021. But now we have received a notice from the same tax office that our non-profit status has been withdrawn. This came with no advance warning or explanation. Earlier this year we went through a successful tax audit, which in fact resulted in some favourable adjustments as we’ve been paying too much tax. Our tax advisor immediately submitted an appeal to the decision, but so far, we have no new information.

We can only guess as to the cause. Our activities have been the same since 2016: We produce Free, Open Source Software and run a free service for the public in the form of mastodon.social. We pay employees, developer and designer contractors, and hosting and service fees for tools necessary for company operation. We further the cause of decentralized, privacy-friendly social media. Our income flows largely from the crowdfunding platform Patreon.

Our day to day operations are largely unaffected by this event, since Patreon does not presuppose non-profit status, and Patreon income does not count as donations. We have in fact not had to issue a single donation receipt since 2021. The significance of the non-profit status is in communicating our commitment to the cause of creating social media that serves the interests of its users instead of its shareholders. We now have the 501(c)(3) in the US to fill the gap. However, it’s also important for us that Mastodon is one of the few, if not the only social media platform that operates out of the EU, and we would like to keep it that way.

Looking onward

In summing up this round of news, 2024 has both been extremely busy and exciting as Mastodon’s governance and legal structure evolves. We see these changes as necessary developments to reach Mastodon’s ambitious goals. In realizing Mastodon’s potential, we are deeply grateful to Jeff Atwood and Mozilla for contributing $100K each this year to support Mastodon’s growth.

We hope to continue fundraising throughout the year so we can move past simply sustaining Mastodon’s current operational and development capacity and focus on growth and greater impact. Most people don’t realize the core developer team of Mastodon is still just two people, and it is these last donations that have allowed us to open a third full-time developer position.

The interest in the fediverse is unprecedented this year, and it will mark a huge milestone in Mastodon’s journey. If you’re interested in being involved in any fundraising efforts or if you’re a funder interested in making a contribution, please reach out! We’re always happy to hear from anyone with as much passion for the open social web as we are.

US entity name: Mastodon, Inc.
EIN: 92-3333630

FAQ

Why found a 501(c)(3) instead of doing ____?

Long story short, it has been cited as a prerequisite by every non-profit foundation or fund that we’ve spoken to about supporting Mastodon development. This is important because in order to do what we want and need to do, we need funding. We do not want VC funding and we do not want to sell any part of the code or operations to anyone. Mastodon is vastly under-resourced. This is a considerable threat to being able to maintain the code base and the services we offer. Seeking funding from the US is one of the avenues we are exploring, and without a 501(c)(3) this would not be viable.

Is the 501(c)(3) a response to losing non-profit status in Germany?

No, the timing is a mere coincidence. Founding a 501(c)(3) entity, interviewing and assembling a board, and getting the tax exemption as a recognized non-profit from the IRS is no quick process and has taken us close to a year. It was just lucky timing that we got our approval from the IRS now, as this helps with a backup plan for any urgent operational or financial needs that we can’t fulfill through the German entity. If we don’t regain non-profit status in Germany through any appeals, we will explore alternative structural options in Germany, or in other European jurisdictions, as needed.

What is the relationship between the US structure and the German one?

Mastodon is bigger than any single entity, but it does need formal structures to operate effectively. The first of these was the Germany-based non-profit (Mastodon gGmbH). The second is now the U.S. non-profit (Mastodon, Inc.). Mastodon product development, user data, trademarks and copyright are in the hands of the German Mastodon gGmbH. Mastodon, Inc. creates the opportunity to raise funds from U.S. sources for the project at large, as well as build relationships and explore partnerships beyond Europe. While Mastodon is firmly based in Europe, we do not want to limit our engagement potential.

Will the operations continue from Europe, or move to the US?

Primary operations will remain led by the Germany-based entity.

What power do the Board have over the project?

The Board of the U.S nonprofit does not have the legal powers to make or enforce product-level decisions. They do not oversee day-to-day operations and development of the project. The board oversees the activities specific to the U.S. entity, while advising and supporting the team on key strategic issues.

Why did you choose these Board members?

We have carefully selected people who would be most helpful to the Mastodon project. Felix Hlatky has been the Chief Financial Officer of our German entity for a few years and has played a key role in turning the single-person Patreon project into a non-profit with multiple employees. Amir Ghavi has provided pro-bono support for Mastodon on multiple legal matters over the course of a year and brings a lot of expertise in open source licensing, as well as connections in the tech industry thanks to his prominent position at Fried Frank. Biz Stone as a Twitter co-founder has invaluable experience scaling a social media platform to its first few million users and many connections to experts who are familiar with the problems Mastodon is facing, and Mastodon to him represents the vision of social media as a protocol th Continue reading at the publisher's website.

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 imagine what a character like that could look like in three-dimensional space. We had only three requirements: He would have to be cute, he would have to be cuddly, and he would have to be round. And Dopatwo delivered.

We created a stuffed toy of the highest caliber. Deliberately friend-sized and friend-shaped, with a soft surface material and soft, squishy stuffing, the toy measures a height of 35cm. Perfect as a travel companion you can rest your head on, or to fill in for you at business meetings.

Visiting one of our sponsor’s office

While some people would be more interested in a smaller size that can be put on display, the goal of the toy is to be a friend to those who need it, rather than simply collect dust.

The toy does not have a predefined name or gender. My prototype has received the name Mr. Mastodon from a friend, and is sometimes referred to as “The Boy” in the household. But everyone is free to pick for themselves.

Mr. Mastodon (left) and my wife (right)

After running a few polls on Mastodon, we’ve settled on manufacturing 1,000 units. After all, it would be better for the toy to be sold out, than for any of the adorable Mastodons to end up without a home.

We’ll divide the stock between a warehouse in Europe and a warehouse in the US to provide the cheapest possible shipping to the parts of the world where we believe most of the buyers would be. At this rather small scale, that is the best we can do.

We expect the price to be no higher than 30 USD, which is customary for a toy of this size. We do not expect to do meaningful fundraising from the profits as they would be very thin at these quantities. Our goal is to just get the toy to people who want it.

Here are a few more facts to tick off some boxes:

The toy is not available for sale yet. The manufacturing time is 20 weeks, so we expect it to go live by August 2024. You can subscribe to the below mailing list to be notified when the toy becomes available. Of course, if you follow us on Mastodon, you won’t miss the news either, especially if you hit that bell button which notifies you when we post.

Join the mailing list

Get notified when the toy becomes available for sale

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 company roll-up, buy our mugs, and tell us what they’d like to see in Mastodon. One thing became obvious: Sharing Mastodon handles in a loud hallway with a dozen conversations happening around you at all times is way too difficult. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just scan a QR code on the other person’s phone? Well, this is what we’ve launched in our most recent Mastodon for Android release!

Simply navigate to your profile (or anyone’s profile, actually) and click on the QR code icon next to the name to bring up a QR code that will allow others to open the profile on their device. There is quick access to a QR code scanner from that screen too. Scanning the code from our app will always open the profile in the app.

We want to make Mastodon as intuitive as possible, and a part of that is making sure you don’t need to read documentation to understand what the different functions in the app do. We’ve updated the design of profiles to solve a common question that newer users tend to have, which is “what does the domain name in a Mastodon handle mean?”. You can now tap the domain on a profile to bring up an information sheet that explains that decentralized nature of Mastodon.

In a similar vein, we’ve updated confirmation dialogs for all muting and blocking functions to explain what effects each action will have and what behaviours you can expect from the app as a consequence.

Other changes

Other recent improvements to our app include:

If you enjoy the app, please consider leaving us a review on Google Play Store!

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 besides the point—these should be familiar to all who use social media.

While we’re exploring multiple different avenues to tackle this issue, the idea we’re experimenting with today is simply reminding people when they’re about to respond to a stranger. We also believe that by showing a bit of information about the person you’re about to talk to, we can prevent some awkward situations, such as explaining something to an expert in a given field.

We’re also going to remind people when they’re about to reply to a post that’s over 3 months old. Posts from long ago are rarely a part of an active discussion, so such replies usually happen by mistake. These features will be coming to our iOS app soon, where we’re currently working on a big performance update. If they prove successful, we’ll be bringing them to the experience on the web as well.

Overall, we’re committed to ensuring folks on Mastodon have a pleasant experience posting. We hear time and time again how much people enjoy coming to Mastodon to have real conversations with real people. And we want to ensure it stays that way. We look forward to hearing what you think of the new prompts!

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 we can only afford a handful of full-time positions right now, relying in many ways on volunteer work.

Sujitech is a Japanese tech company whose mission is to achieve a truly free and open internet, and that has supported Mastodon in various ways for many years. They have saved multiple Mastodon servers from shutting down by taking over their maintenance when the original owners were unable to continue to operate them, and in 2021, we had teamed up to build the first prototype of the official iOS app for Mastodon.

We believe that to make the social web succeed it is crucial for Mastodon as an organization to be able to offer full-time roles with market-based salaries, and continue to invest heavily in design and usability. As a non-profit, we rely primarily on your donations through Patreon to achieve this goal. Thanks again to Sujitech to bringing us a little closer to it.

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 not only helps in decluttering your home feed but also allows you to engage with certain topics on your own terms, when you are ready. Additionally, we reworked the home tab to provide easy navigation between your home feed, lists, and followed hashtags, so you can get the most out of your experience on Mastodon.

We’ve got more updates in the pipeline as we aim to make Mastodon the most beautiful and delightful social media app on Android. Our iOS and web teams are also working steadily on new features and improvements, so stay tuned!

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.

Thank you to Pierre Vincent for typesetting our annual report and to Dopatwo, as always, for the illustrations.

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 overhauled search. The interface for searching is completely new and inspired by the app Ivory—as you type, a popout provides you with quick actions, such as, go directly to hashtag, search only for profiles, or, when writing or pasting a URL, open URL in Mastodon. Your recent searches are now available for quick access, and search results use infinite scroll. That’s only the surface—we reworked and fine-tuned all of the data indexes to make searching for people’s profiles more intuitive, so you can now find people by words in their bio and not only their name. In order to make it easier to distinguish the results you’re looking for from impersonators or third-party bots, we’re now surfacing verified links prominently in the search results. The most exciting news is that for the first time, you can now search for posts. We support a wide variety of operators to help you narrow down your search, such as only retrieving posts that have an embedded link, or a poll, or is from a specific user, or posted between specific dates. Correspondingly, we’ve reworked settings to assemble all privacy choices in one place to provide an easy overview, so you can control if you want your posts to appear in search or on the Explore page—both are opt-in.

Speaking of overhaul, we’ve also polished and adjusted many details in Mastodon’s web interface, such as adding more thread indicators, making article previews more beautiful, and removing cropping from image previews. By far the biggest changes are to the sign-up flow and what users see the first time they login after sign-up. User tests have helped us to identify areas where people lose their way during sign-up, so we’ve added progress indicators to guide people through the multi-step sign-up process and rewrote copy and labels to be more intuitive. Upon login, you are pointed to recommended first steps that include filling our your profile, following people, making your first post, and sharing your profile outside Mastodon. After deploying these changes on our own servers, we’ve noticed an increase in the average number of profiles a new user follows from 2.6 to 6.8. This number is one of primary indicators of a successful onboarding, as the home feed is the center point of Mastodon. For comparison, the average number of profiles a new user follows after signing up through our official Android app is around 8.

We’ve also revamped the interaction experience when you’re logged out. When people land on a Mastodon server other than their own—for example, when following a link shared through an instant messenger—they find themselves on a website that does not know who they are, and therefore cannot allow them to perform certain actions they can perform through the logged-in interface. To perform those actions, we must take them back to that logged-in interface. Previously, we overestimated how often such a scenario would occur to someone who’s on their own Mastodon server but isn’t logged-in, and overemphasized the login option. At the same time, we offered instructions on how to get to the given profile or post in the user’s own Mastodon server or app using copying and pasting URLs to the search box, which ended up being confusing, and perceived as overly complicated. In the new experience, you are asked to type in the domain of your Mastodon “home” while being offered autocomplete as you type, and are then redirected to the given post or profile in your logged-in interface.

All of these changes will be available to you once your Mastodon server operator upgrades to this new version. If you’re new to Mastodon, there is no easier place to start than simply signing up on mastodon.social, either from the web, or by downloading our official app for iOS or Android.

We’re excited to bring you these major improvements today and have much more we’d like to bring in the future. Thanks to all of you who have supported and continue to support our Patreon. You make it possible for us to continue to invest in and build more new experiences on Mastodon.

Other changes

We’ve changed so many things, but here are just some of our favourites…

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 FRESH Merch to manufacture these items from responsibly sourced materials to the highest degree of quality.

Despite our impressive accomplishments in building out the new social web, Mastodon is a non-profit with a very small team and limited resources–the core team is just two developers. 100% of the revenue after recouping manufacturing costs will go to us and help us put more resources into developing your favourite decentralized social media software.

We’ve just completed the photo shoot and we expect the products to be ready for sale in the next few weeks. To be notified when the store launches, you can subscribe to the mailing list below (or keep an eye out on our Mastodon account–did you know you can get notified when we post if you click on the bell button after following?).

When we initially polled you on Mastodon to see what kind of demand there is for merch, over 6,700 of you said you would buy something. Of course, social media polls can’t entirely be trusted, so we went for a far more conservative initial batch. Only 250 units of each item will be available at launch. So they might sell out quick!

Join the mailing list

Get notified when the merch becomes available for sale

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 around what Threads will be and what it means for Mastodon. We’ve put together some of the most common questions and our responses based on what was launched today.

What we know

Threads is a separate app from Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. This means Threads’ user base will be separate from their existing platforms. Instagram users however can sign-in using their Instagram accounts. It will not be available in the EU and will not support federation at launch.

What you may be asking

Will Meta get my data or be able to track me?

Mastodon does not broadcast private data like e-mail or IP address outside of the server your account is hosted on. Our software is built on the reasonable assumption that third party servers cannot be trusted. For example, we cache and reprocess images and videos for you to view, so that the originating server cannot get your IP address, browser name, or time of access. A server you are not signed up with and logged into cannot get your private data or track you across the web. What it can get are your public profile and public posts, which are publicly accessible.

Will Meta be able to show me ads?

Nobody on Mastodon can insert advertising into your user interface except the server you are signed up with and logged into. By default, Mastodon does not include any functionality to display ads. Unless you use Threads, you will not see any ads from Threads. It is also not possible for any third party server to insert ad-like posts into your home feed, since your home feed is calculated by your own server from the people (and hashtags) that you choose to follow. If someone you follow posts an ad and you do not want to see it, you can unfollow or mute that person.

Will a large platform like Meta joining Mastodon overwhelm smaller servers?

Mastodon works primarily through follow relationships. When you follow a user on another server for the first time, your server subscribes to that user specifically. That means even if there is a server with millions of people in the network, unless you follow millions of people, you will not be receiving updates for millions of people. This keeps traffic and storage manageable across the network. As such, small servers will not be affected, and may not even notice the presence of Threads, except when they decide to follow specific users.

Will Meta embrace-extend-extinguish the ActivityPub protocol?

There are comparisons to be made between Meta adopting ActivityPub for its new social media platform and Meta adopting XMPP for its Messenger service a decade ago. There was a time when users of Facebook and users of Google Talk were able to chat with each other and with people from self-hosted XMPP servers, before each platform was locked down into the silos we know today. What would stop that from repeating? Well, even if Threads abandoned ActivityPub down the line, where we would end up is exactly where we are now. XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.

Based on its App Store listing, it collects a lot of data. How does this affect me?

According to the App Store listing for the Threads app, it collects a variety of data, which stands out in comparison to the Mastodon app, which collects none. However, this affects only those who download and use the Threads app, or become users of Threads directly through other means. Even if you follow or send a message to a Threads user from your Mastodon account, Threads will not be able to collect any of your private information except the message you sent.

When Threads adds federation, will I be able to communicate with people there?

We expect that eventually Mastodon and Threads will be interoperable, and from a technical standpoint, users will be able to follow each other and exchange messages. However, it is up to the operator of the Mastodon server you’re are using to decide whether to allow communication with Threads or not. If you are not happy with their decision, you can move your account to a different Mastodon server while keeping all of your followers. Since Mastodon is open-source, you can even host your own server and be entirely in charge.

Will Meta enforce content moderation policies on other servers?

Just like any Mastodon server, Threads will have their own moderation policies and tools, and just like any Mastodon server, they will be able to choose which content to block on their platform. However, their decisions can only affect their own platform. The only people who can set rules for and moderate your Mastodon server are the moderators of said server, and if you self-host, that continues to be just you. Different Mastodon servers don’t have to agree on all moderation policies to interoperate, as they can simply granularly block specific content, and there is no indication that Threads will be any different in this regard.

Our stance

We have been advocating for interoperability between platforms for years. The biggest hurdle to users switching platforms when those platforms become exploitative is the lock-in of the social graph, the fact that switching platforms means abandoning everyone you know and who knows you. The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide better, less exploitative services. This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.

Mastodon is a non-profit headquartered in Germany and fully crowd-funded through donations. If you enjoy using mastodon.social, or our official apps for iOS and Android, or want to support the development of the server software itself, you can donate to our non-profit on Patreon.

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 left no stone unturned—tab bars, settings, composing—everything is refreshed and reflects your color palette.

We’ve entirely revamped the previously sparse settings section with dozens of new ways to customize your experience, as well as the ability to access information about the server you’re connected to and view its rules. You can choose to hide boost/favourite counters, remind yourself to add alternative text for media uploads, change your default posting language, hide all content warnings and much more.

When developing our native apps, we don’t just copy how everything works in the web app, but deliberately take the opportunity to have our professional designers work out the best user experience from first principles. As a result, profile screens now ergonomically display all the featured content that was previously missing from the app—like pinned posts, featured hashtags and endorsed users.

We’ve also finally added filters management into the app. You can now view, edit and create filters for specific phrases or keywords, and customize how and where exactly those filters apply, so if there’s some topic you never want to hear about, you can just tune it out. For more peace of mind, we’ve also added the ability to temporarily pause all notifications.

One subtle but important change is where and how we show verifications. If a profile has a verified link, we’ll surface it in search results and other lists so you can more easily tell different profiles apart. All in all, this is just scratching the surface of all the changes in this redesign. There are so many more features, bug fixes, and easter eggs we didn’t cover. Try it out!

Mastodon is a non-profit headquartered in Germany and fully crowd-funded through donations. If you enjoy using mastodon.social, or our official apps for iOS and Android, or want to support the development of the server software itself, you can donate to our non-profit on Patreon.

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 the service provider are one and the same. This choice is what makes Mastodon different from existing social networks, but it also presents a unique onboarding challenge. To make this step easier, we now have a default sign-up option that works with a server we operate. If you wish to leave or join a different server, you can do so at any time.

Decentralization is a big part of Mastodon’s DNA and is at the forefront of our mission. You may be asking, how a default server option furthers decentralization. We believe it’s important for Mastodon to be good as a product on its own merits, and not just because of its ideology. If we only attract people who already care about decentralization, our ability to make decentralization mainstream becomes that much harder. Making the onboarding process as easy as possible helps new users get past the sign-up process and more quickly engage with others. This gives us a far better chance of showcasing what decentralized social networks have to offer instead of having that person bounce and never hearing from them again. We’ve made strides in upgrading our infrastructure and growing our moderation capabilities to hopefully provide a great first experience to everyone who joins. Of course, if you know what server you want to join, you can still go through advanced server selection from the beginning.

Mastodon has grown so much over the past 6 months even despite some of the perceived onboarding challenges. Our platform has become home to diverse discussions, perspectives, and voices, including artists, writers, journalists, and political organizations. We just surpassed a billion posts per month which validates the very real and engaged conversations happening across Mastodon and the wider Fediverse.

And our work continues. We’re always listening to the community and we’re excited to bring you some of the most requested features, such as quote posts, improved content and profile search, and groups. We’re also continuously working on improving content and profile discovery, onboarding, and of course our extensive set of moderation tools, as well as removing friction from decentralized features. Keep a lookout for these updates soon.

We’re grateful that you’re a part of this community and to be working with you to build Mastodon into a place where you will always have the power to choose your social media experience.

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 time, accounts of multiple journalists from major publications such as CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, as well as various independent journalists, were likewise suspended for either linking to the account itself or talking about the event. We also started receiving reports that users were unable to tweet links to any Mastodon servers, including ones completely unrelated to the @ElonJet account, encountering an error message claiming that the links were identified as “potentially harmful”, among them George Takei, making it more difficult for people to share their Mastodon profiles.

This is a stark reminder that centralized platforms can impose arbitrary and unfair limits on what you can and can’t say while holding your social graph hostage. At Mastodon, we believe that there doesn’t have to be a middleman between you and your audience and that journalists and government institutions especially should not have to rely on a private platform to reach the public. Our free and open-source software enables anyone to run a social media platform entirely on their own infrastructure, entirely under their own control, while connecting to a global decentralized social network. Not only does this allow organizations like the German government or the European Commission to run their own Mastodon servers where they publish important information that gets distributed to thousands of their followers across many different Mastodon servers, but it also gives you the freedom to choose a social media provider the same way you would choose a telephone, internet, or e-mail provider, and to move from one to the other while retaining your followers.

While there is no shortage of social media platforms new and old, this is a radically different approach to social media that offers something traditional social media cannot. This may be one of the reasons why Mastodon has recently exploded in popularity, jumping from approx. 300K monthly active users to 2.5M between the months of October and November, with more and more journalists, political figures, writers, actors and organizations moving over. Understanding that freedom of the press is absolutely essential for a functional democracy, we are excited to see Mastodon grow and become a household name in newsrooms across the world, and we are committed to continuing to improve our software to face up to new challenges that come with rapid growth and increasing demand.

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 platforms, what makes it unique, and how to get started, and I believe that it has never been as good at those things as it is now.

When writing the copy, I focused on the angles that seemed to resonate with people the most on our social media, and tried to pre-empt common misconceptions about the fundamental workings of Mastodon.

Leaning a little too hard into the community and theme-focused server angle in the previous website iteration seemed to lead a lot of people into believing that Mastodon servers were insulated from each other like mere chatrooms or subreddits. While undoubtedly useful for some, that is a lot less unique and exciting than the reality, that Mastodon’s fundamental value-add is being able to follow users from other Mastodon servers and even other compatible software and receive their posts in your home feed from just one account.

Besides explaining Mastodon in a much better way, the new website also provides more information about the project than before. You will find a summary of the project’s origins, our up-to-date numbers, who’s on the team, links to our annual reports and podcast interviews we’ve done on the About Us page, as well as much clearer contact instructions. I’m equally proud of the Branding page, which should ensure much more professional representation of our project in the press.

I hope the new website will help more people understand and become interested in decentralized social media and what it can do for them. And just plain look nicer!

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 originally picked our color palette from a color palette website back in 2016 when I needed something for the interface of my then-hobby project, because it looked nice enough. No deeper thought went into it, and eventually the blue shade of the palette became part of the Mastodon logo.

The new color will give Mastodon some original personality and it will stand out more from competitors, who all use blue.

As for the homepage, our intent is to give it a professional touch and improve how well it communicates what Mastodon is. joinmastodon.org is the face of the software and of the segment of the federated network that is powered by Mastodon, and as such, I believe that a higher quality website will improve public perception of the entire project.

Oak has generously provided a discount on services rendered as a form of sponsorship. We’re about a month in on the work and expect to complete the new website in about two more months.

As for the brand updates, they will be rolled out gradually as we update multiple independent properties–the software itself, the iOS app, the Android app, the homepage, the documentation, this blog… So do not be alarmed if you do not see the purple everywhere at the same time.

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 bought and owned by any billionaire, and strive to create a more resilient global platform without profit incentives. We believe that your ability to communicate online should not be at the whims of a single commercial company.

Mastodon is used to publish 500-character messages with pictures, polls, videos and so on to an audience of followers, and, in turn, to follow interesting people and receive their posts in a chronological home feed. Unlike Twitter, there is no central Mastodon website – you sign up to a provider that will host your account, similarly to signing up for Outlook or Gmail, and then you can follow and interact with people using different providers. Anyone can become such a provider as Mastodon is free and open-source. It has no ads, respects your privacy, and allows people/communities to self-govern.

Funnily enough one of the reasons I started looking into the decentralized social media space in 2016, which ultimately led me to go on to create Mastodon, were rumours that Twitter, the platform I’d been a daily user of for years at that point, might get sold to another controversial billionaire. Among, of course, other reasons such as all the terrible product decisions Twitter had been making at that time. And now, it has finally come to pass, and for the same reasons masses of people are coming to Mastodon.

We’ve been steadily working towards the ultimate goal of providing a viable alternative to Twitter since 2016, and have proven the scalability and resilience of the platform through organic growth over the years. However, without doubt the sudden and explosive success is putting strain on our resources, specifically the public Mastodon servers that we, the non-profit, maintain ourselves: mastodon.social and mastodon.online. While there are over 2,400 Mastodon servers out there operated by independent individuals and organizations, we provide these two servers as a fallback option for those who don’t know which other server to sign-up on.

We have been working non-stop to maintain quality of service on mastodon.social and mastodon.online, but you may have noticed issues such as confirmation e-mails not arriving or home feeds being delayed. We apologize for the inconvenience and continue to work on addressing these issues.

We recommend using joinmastodon.org or our official iOS and Android apps to choose a Mastodon server to sign-up on, and to tell others to do the same when talking about Mastodon insteading of promoting our own servers directly. All Mastodon servers interoperate, allowing you to follow and be followed by other users from other servers seamlessly. And if you don’t like your choice afterwards, you can create another account and move all your followers to it. Distributing users across different servers is what makes Mastodon more scalable, socially and technologically.

In the future, we plan to add end-to-end encrypted messaging and an exciting groups functionality to our software, together with further updates to our well-received official apps.

Mastodon is a German non-profit organization and we create free, open-source software. You can support us through our Patreon, our custom sponsorship portal, or by contributing to the code directly. If you have any questions reach out to hello@joinmastodon.org.

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 platform’s; our iOS app is rising through the ranks of top social networking apps on the App Store; and for the first time in Mastodon’s history, server admins are seeing ever increasing numbers of new sign-ups from mobile apps instead of the web interface.

We hope the trend continues now that people can easily find the app and sign-up by simply searching Mastodon on their app store of choice, and now that Mastodon can take advantage of the app stores’ own discovery features.

We’ve put a lot of care and resources into developing these apps, counter-acting the stigma that open-source projects do not prioritize ease of use and visual design by working with world-class UX designers that had prior experience working on major commercial social networks. As a result, we have apps that are extremely slick and visually pleasing and do not look out of place on their respective platforms.

This is an opportunity to take a closer look at some of the design considerations.

Onboarding

Signing up in the Android app

One of the challenges of Mastodon adoption is the onboarding process, because it’s not enough to capture a person’s desired username and e-mail and let them create an account, which is what people are used to from major websites; instead, you need to first choose a Mastodon server where you will make the account (comparable to e.g. choosing an e-mail provider). The implications of choosing the server are primarily in who is the entity responsible for the server, what moderation policies they enforce, what language and jurisdiction they operate in, and which domain name will be part of your username.

We approached this problem with a multiple-step sign-up flow that begins with choosing a server, then requires to agree to summarized moderation policies of the server, and finally goes on to the more familiar username, e-mail and password form. We maintain our own directory of servers that people submit to us after agreeing to some basic rules that guarantee data and user safety and quality of service; those are the servers we display on the first step by default. Still more consideration has been given to how to display them.

Our user studies have shown that retention drops off dramatically if the user has to wait for moderator approval before being able to log in (exception being experienced Mastodon users who are already invested in the network and know exactly what they are getting into by requesting an account from an invite-only server); people lose interest and never login even after being approved. Therefore we do not show invite-only servers in the app, focusing instead on the ones that allow people to get started immediately.

The determining factor in a user’s experience on a server is the number of other active users on the server. All discovery features are ultimately powered by user activity, and the first user on a server would have to do a lot of exploration off-site (through word of mouth, browsing other servers, or other channels) to fill their home feed. But cultivating a decentralized social network, we do not want power to concentrate on just a few ever-growing servers. Therefore, rather than simply putting the most active servers on the top, our algorithm pushes medium-sized servers higher.

We also provide a search field that allows inputting the server domain directly.

The last step in onboarding, after the user has confirmed their e-mail address, they are presented with the options to follow a selection of accounts popular on the server that predominantly post in the user’s language, or to head to the explore tab to look at what’s trending on the server.

Discovery

Explore tab in the Android app

While designing the official apps we got an opportunity to reconsider some Mastodon features. The federated timeline, also known as the public timeline, firehose, or “whole known network”, is a view into a Mastodon server’s real-time database of public posts; and the local timeline is that, but filtered by only posts originating from your Mastodon server. While some people came to rely on those tools, there were a few reasons to (at least initially) omit them from the apps.

The federated timeline has too low of a signal vs. noise ratio to be effective as a discovery tool. Due to the way Mastodon pulls down content to provide more detailed profiles and conversations, the federated timeline becomes unmanageable on servers of all sizes, even single-user ones. Unsurprisingly, most content is not actually worth looking at, and in some cases, actively undesirable.

This real-time view into everything that’s published on the server is a platform for all sorts of abuse that can only be stopped after the damage has been done. Normally, if someone posts spam or nudity, it would not be seen by anyone but themselves. Local and federated timelines instantly turn that into an issue affecting everyone. This puts extra strain on moderators.

With Apple and Google historically holding apps accountable for content users can access through the app, even when the app could be reasonably classified as a browser, showing unfiltered content is a ticking time bomb for the app’s presence on the major app stores. Especially considering our goal of attracting new users, those users are of-yet less invested in Mastodon as a platform and less likely to use in-app reporting and blocking tools instead of giving up on the app.

Instead, we offer a new explore tab that highlights, among other things, currently popular posts. It is a much more efficient way to find interesting content and follow users on Mastodon without scrolling through many low-quality posts and unfamiliar languages. All data that Mastodon uses for calculating rankings is locally sourced so it’s heavily skewed towards things that are popular on your server, and everything goes through your server’s moderators before appearing on the explore tab, making it much less prone to abuse.

We also have a vision of a new feature to eventually supplant local timelines: groups. We imagine a group as a place with an actually separate timeline that you can post to, without the post also going out to the public, your profile, and your followers’ home feeds. This timeline could be made visible for group members only. You could join it from your account on any other server, thus alleviating concerns of infrastructure centralization while giving people everything they’ve ever wanted from local timelines. We’re set to complete this feature this year.

Going forward

We are not done! While we have decided against including the local timeline in our apps initially, understanding that this feature is important for many community servers on Mastodon in the absence of still theoretical and not yet proven groups, we will be adding it to the explore tab. And while the apps support all core functionality of Mastodon, there are still missing features like lists, pinned posts, new post notifications (“bell icon!”), editing, phrase filters management and so on that will be gradually added as we continue development. Plus the aforementioned groups feature in Mastodon itself!

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 versions would not understand the edits, the function is disabled in the web app until more Mastodon servers upgrade to 3.5, but all parts are already included in the release. The original and previous versions of the posts are saved and remain accessible through a history view. And people who have previously shared the post get notified about any edits, so they can un-share if there’s foul play.

Coincidentally, the order of media attachments in a post is no longer dependent on the order in which they were uploaded.

Discoverability has always been a hot topic on Mastodon. Discoverability makes or breaks a platform, as there is nothing more important to retain a new user than to let them find something interesting to stay for, as soon as possible. In 3.5, we bring a new explore page which features currently popular posts, news stories that people share a lot, trending hashtags and follow recommendations. Furthermore, for the first time, we attempt to bring people content in their own language.

As we value safety, these new features come with their own moderation tools–nothing will show up in trends unless reviewed by one of the server’s moderators first.

A new, multi-step report flow improves the quality of information for moderators and highlights available self-help tools in Mastodon to the user.

On the topic of moderation, any action taken by a server moderator against a user’s account, such as deleting their posts or suspending the account, will now be viewable through account settings, by default accompanied by an e-mail notification, and permit the user to submit an appeal. Since actions such as deleting posts or marking posts as sensitive did not use to generate any kind of notification, this should make them more viable precursors to harsher punishments like suspensions; and being able to handle appeals within Mastodon should reduce the burden of out-of-band e-mail communication for moderators and increase user trust in Mastodon.

There is a brand new moderation dashboard that shows the development of various key metrics over time and shines some light on where new users come from, which languages they speak, and how many of them stay active months later. A completely new look for the report screen reduces the time and effort required to handle reports, and multiple selections on the accounts page offer a way to clean up spam and bot accounts in large batches.

Conclusion

The 3.5 release consists of 887 commits by 23 contributors between June 3, 2021 and March 30, 2022. For line-by-line attributions, you can peruse the changelog file, and for a historically complete list of contributors and translators, you can refer to the authors file, both included in the release.

Contributors to this release: Gargron, ClearlyClaire, tribela, noiob, mayaeh, mashirozx, noellabo, baby-gnu, MitarashiDango, chandrn7, Brawaru, aquarla, zunda, rgroothuijsen, ykzts, HolgerHuo, helloworldstack, r0hanSH, kgtkr, heguro, matildepark, weex, truongnmt

Translators for this release: Kristaps_M, Cyax, Sveinn í Felli, Kimmo Kujansuu, Jeong Arm, xatier, Thai Localization, spla, NCAA, Emanuel Pina, GunChleoc, Xosé M., Hồ Nhất Duy, T. E. Kalaycı, ケインツロ space_invader, e, Jeff Huang, Besnik_b, Nurul Azeera Hidayah @ Muhammad Nur Hidayat Yasuyoshi, koyu, Ramdziana F Y, calypsoopenmail, Alessandro Levati, Bran_Ruz, Tigran, Allen Zhong, Daniele Lira Mereb, Zoltán Gera, Martin, Gearguy, Marek Ľach, Eshagh, Asier Iturralde Sarasola, Takeçi, Roboron, Ihor Hordiichuk, xpil, Tagomago, Rojdayek, Ondřej Pokorný, Kristoffer Grundström, Alexander Sorokin, Joene, ButterflyOfFire, Balázs Meskó, Catalina, Manuel Viens, LNDDYL, Danial Behzadi, Vik, GCardo, enolp, NadieAishi, Just Spanish, bilfri, VaiTon, Frontier Translation Ltd., Mastodon 中文译者, rondnunes, Edward Navarro, ClearlyClaire, Kahina Mess, GiorgioHerbie, ManeraKai, හෙළබස, retiolus, stan ionut, Filbert Salim, ahangarha, Rex_sa, Sokratis Alichanidis, axi, Delta, Ali Demirtaş, Michael Zeevi, SarfarazAhmed, Mo_der Steven, Remito, Maya Minatsuki, Врабац, Dženan, FreddyG, Alix Rossi, cruz2020, Adrián Graña, vpei, Ryo, AlexKoala, 1Alino, Michał Sidor, Vedran Serbu, Yi-Jyun Pan, Y.Yamashiro, al_._, Matthías Páll Gissurarson, KcKcZi, xsml, cybergene, mynameismonkey, Rikard Linde, strubbl, 北䑓如法, Hexandcube, abidin toumi, serapolis, Diluns, 游荡, megaleo, arielcostas3, sanser, Imre Kristoffer Eilertsen, Yamagishi Kazutoshi, MODcraft, Marcus Myge, Yuval Nehemia, Amir Reza, Percy, Marek Ľach, Nemuj, revarioba, Oymate, Ifnuth, 森の子リスのミーコの大冒険, Algustionesa Yoshi, Artem Mikhalitsin, gnu-ewm, Tatsuto “Laminne” Yamamoto, filippodb, Maciej Błędkowski, tunisiano187, Timur Seber, Mélanie Chauvel, Jona, Ka2n, atriix, eorn, Lagash, Chine Sebastien, Exbu, A A, Goudarz Jafari, Cirelli, ギャラ, siamano, Siddharastro Doraku, asnomgtu, Saederup92, damascene, dbeaver, Overflow Cat, rikrise, zordsdavini, ThonyVezbe, Slimane Selyan AMIRI, coxde, Maxine B. Vågnes, tzium, Umi, Youngeon Lee, Nikita Epifanov, DAI JIE, X.M, ZQYD, v4vachan, boni777, Rhys Harrison, Stanisław Jelnicki, iVampireSP, nua_kr, SteinarK, Paula SIMON, CloudSet, Adam Sapiński, Zlr-, papayaisnotafood, Linnéa, Parodper, César Daniel Cavanzo Quintero, Artem, EzigboOmenana, Mt Front, mkljczk, Lalo Tafolla, Yassine Aït-El-Mouden, frumble, ronee, lokalisoija, Jason Gibson, María José Vera, codl, Tangcuyu, Lilian Nabati, Kaede, mawoka-myblock, Mohd Bilal, Ragnars Eggerts, thisdudeisvegan, liffon, Holger Huo, Pukima, HSD Channel, pullopen, hud5634j, Patrice Boivin, Jill H., maksutheam, majorblazr, 江尚寒, Balázs Meskó, soheilkhanalipur, Vanege

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this release, to everyone who sponsors the project through Patreon or through our new sponsors portal, and to everyone who uses the network! 🐘

Mastodon for iOS

P.S. We just released a new version of our official iOS app, adding iPad support and many visual improvements, and just started beta-testing our official Android app with our Patreon supporters.

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 developer. Gregory is a talented developer with a history of working on social apps like VKontakte and Telegram.

Continued development is not limited to Android. Work on the app flows into the main Mastodon software as existing APIs are adjusted and new APIs are added to support new features, and the web app’s UI is improved with ideas from the professional UX designers working on the iOS and Android apps.

We are excited to bring an app that takes usability, new user onboarding and visual design seriously to one of the largest mobile platforms.

The efforts are sponsored by our generous sponsors on Patreon and our custom sponsorship platform, and by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research through the Prototype Fund (BMBF Förderkennzeichen: 01IS21S29). Thanks to everyone who is already sponsoring Mastodon, and stay tuned for updates!

Update: Our iOS and Android apps are now available!

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 as-seen-from mastodon.social, the oldest and one of the more well connected servers, but it is nevertheless biased towards mastodon.social’s demographic and may not represent other parts of the fediverse accurately.

Most shared posts of 2021

“I have encountered more image descriptions on Mastodon […]” (607 reblogs)

"🌐 NeoDB 联邦宇宙书影音站 🌐 正式开张了！" (547 reblogs)

“Delete Chrome. Now.” (572 reblogs)

“SCI-HUB NEEDS YOUR HELP!” (546 reblogs)

"#Tusky has been removed from the PlayStore by Google" (455 reblogs)

Most shared pictures of 2021

“God I love The Register’s headline writers” (236 reblogs)

“The moment when love is first confessed” (243 reblogs)

"[…] #Google keeps records of everything you buy […]" (344 reblogs)

“Irony” (253 reblogs)

“Do not buy NFT made with my art” (441 reblogs)

“I […] turned [lion NFTs] into a mosaic of a person right-clicking” (393 reblogs)

Most liked posts of 2021

“Not on social media?” (559 favourites)

“Police are warning students […] not to access Sci-Hub […]” (559 favourites)

“The official #Mastodon app for iOS is now on the App Store!” (448 favourites)

"[…] Mastodon gGmbH […]" (396 favourites)

“If your cat often […] walks all over your keyboard […]” (362 favourites)

Most intensive polls of 2021

“What’s your primary OS?” (4,382 votes)

“Do you use any Mozilla products?” (2,280 votes)

“Do you use an RSS/Atom reader?” (2,031 votes)

“Let’s make a colour together!” (1,918 votes)

“THE ULTIMATE BATTLE” (1,772 votes)

Top hashtags in 2021

Other numbers

Disclaimer: We collect aggregate statistics by crawling fediverse servers that identify themselves as running Mastodon. We may not be aware of all Mastodon servers, and aggregate statistics can be disabled for some servers. Temporary service outages across different servers may lead to day-to-day disparities between collected numbers.

As for the mastodon.social server, here are some of our numbers for 2021:

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 adjustments. The platform has not formally launched yet, but it was made accessible ahead of time. Users were quick to note that the terms of service included a worrying passage, claiming that the site is proprietary property and all source code and software are owned or controlled by them or licensed to them:

Unless otherwise indicated, the Site is our proprietary property and all source code, databases, functionality, software, website designs, audio, video, text, photographs, and graphics on the Site (collectively, the “Content”) and the trademarks, service marks, and logos contained therein (the “Marks”) are owned or controlled by us or licensed to us, and are protected by copyright and trademark laws and various other intellectual property rights and unfair competition laws of the United States, foreign jurisdictions, and international conventions.

Notably, neither the terms nor any other part of the website contained any references to Mastodon, nor any links to the source code, which are present in Mastodon’s user interface by default. Mastodon is free software published under the AGPLv3 license, which requires any over-the-network service using it to make its source code and any modifications to it publicly accessible.

We pride ourselves on providing software that allows anyone to run their own social media platform independent of big tech, but the condition upon which we release our work for free in the first place is the idea that, as we give to the platform operators, so do the platform operators give back to us by providing their improvements for us and everyone to see. But that doesn’t only benefit us as the developers – it benefits the people that use these platforms as it gives them insight into the functionality of the platforms that manage their data and gives them the ability to walk away and start their own.

As far as personal feelings are concerned, of course we would prefer if people so antithetical to our values did not use and benefit from our labour, but the reality of working on free software is that you give up the possibility of choosing who can and cannot use it from the get-go, so in a practical sense the only issue we can take with something like Truth Social is if they don’t even comply with the free software license we release our work under.

On Oct 26, we sent a formal letter to Truth Social’s chief legal officer, requesting the source code to be made publicly available in compliance with the license. According to AGPLv3, after being notified by the copyright holder, Truth Social has 30 days to comply or the license may be permanently revoked.

In the media

Updates

Last updated: Dec 9, 2021

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 media, a set of additional functions that aim to combat the spread of misinformation by helping you critically analyze social media posts before re-sharing them. Currently available functions include:

But those functions are only useful when you’re already looking at a post in-depth. You can also configure which criteria and thresholds should make the EUNOMIA indicator flash on a post, prompting you that a deeper look is warranted.

EUNOMIA is decentralized and stores its information, such as the aforementioned votes, on IPFS, a decentralized storage network. It is also not a commercial product, but an academic research project spearheaded by the University of Greenwich and financed through the European Horizon 2020 program. The team consists of 10 entities: 3 universities, 3 private software development companies, representatives from two social media companies (one of which is yours truly), and the Austrian public broadcasting company ORF.

EUNOMIA should in theory work with any social media platform, but thanks to its already decentralized nature and a fantastic API, Mastodon lended itself as the perfect prototyping environment, since it allows the project to develop with its own Mastodon setup that never touches any live user data.

It is important to highlight that as a research project no user data can be processed without explicit user consent and as such EUNOMIA is confined entirely to its own Mastodon servers. One of which is now being opened up for the first public pilot!

The public EUNOMIA pilot is now live at mastodon.eunomia.social! The pilot will last one week, unless the developers receive feedback from users that they would want it to stay on for longer. Keep in mind:

There is also a quick-start video:

You can learn more about EUNOMIA here:

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 company with a few key differences. The founding document of the company is written such that the activity of the company is working towards goals that benefit the public; the shareholders may not receive any revenue from the company’s activities and can at most withdraw the funds that they originally paid in; employees may not receive extraordinarily high wages; and the company can receive donations which are then tax-free, although any other income that does not fit the definition of a donation continues to incur various taxes. To found such a legal entity the founding document must pass a review by the German tax office and the founders must pay in 25,000 EUR of starting capital.

Since I am the sole founder and shareholder, the 25,000 EUR are owed by me (with 12,500 EUR having had to be paid in at day of founding, and the remaining to be paid in the future). In terms of day-to-day operations, there are no changes. I will continue all my activities as the CEO of this legal entity. Starting July I’ve transferred everything related to Mastodon’s activities to the ownership of this new legal entity and redirected all sources of Mastodon’s income to it. Unlike the past 5 years that I’ve been running Mastodon operations as a sole proprietor, where Mastodon’s income was my personal income (minus all the expenses), I am now an employee with a fixed wage. My personal income will thus be lower but I was willing to go this route because I want Mastodon to have more resources for things like hiring extra developers, UX designers, developing official apps and so on, and I want there to be a clear boundary between fundraising for that cause and my personal income.

Since both Patreon and our custom sponsorship platform are based around rewards to patrons/sponsors, they cannot be classified as donations, so there are no changes to how those are taxed.

This would not have been possible without the generous help of the law firm Dentons that assisted in all aspects related to corporate law in the course of the foundation as well as employment law, telecommunications law, and privacy.

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 ecosystem contributed in large part to Twitter’s success at the beginning, with many innovative features like retweets coming originally from unofficial apps, and it is serving a similarly instrumental role for Mastodon. It is great that Mastodon users can choose from a variety of apps with distinct approaches to user experience.

However, there is a gap in this ecosystem, illustrated best by the amount and frequency with which new users ask us where to find the “Mastodon” app, why there is no “Mastodon” app, and when we will release a “Mastodon” app. Irrespective of our efforts of promoting third-party apps at every turn – from joinmastodon.org, from the web interface, from the frontpage of every Mastodon server – the lack of an app that carries our name in the app stores trips up newcomers.

This hampers our chances of converting people browsing app stores for a few reasons: We’re less likely to get on trending lists even when Mastodon is in the spotlight, since people either fail to find a native app or are split between multiple ones; most if not all contemporary third-party Mastodon apps do not prioritize first-time user onboarding, with many not offering sign-up functionality; and while it is fair that some of the apps are paid and not free, somebody looking to try out a new social network is not going to take the chance on their credit card.

That is all to say, we need an official Mastodon app that is free to download and that is specialized in helping new users get started on the platform. The end-goal is also to reach feature-parity with the web interface and spearhead new API features. The more new users we can successfully convert to Mastodon, the bigger the pool of potential users for all third-party apps will be, and if app developers are motivated to implement previously missing features to stay competetive, all the better.

We will focus on developing an official, open-source iOS app first. I have compiled a roadmap of features that a Mastodon app ought to have, with the first milestone being a Minimum Viable Product which we could get out on the App Store by summer. I am teaming up with engineers from Sujitech, who have a long history with the fediverse, and UX designers from the NYC agency Lickability, whose track record includes iOS apps for Meetup and the New Yorker.

The work begins on February 8, 2021.

To help offset the costs of this undertaking, I have created a new milestone on Mastodon’s Patreon profile. If you’ve got a business, you can now sponsor Mastodon directly without going through Patreon, with much smaller processing fees and tax-compliant invoices. Thanks to everyone who is already sponsoring Mastodon, and stay tuned for updates!

Update: Our iOS and Android apps are now available!

It’s Mastodon 3.3 time 🎉 We’ve got security fixes, performance fixes, new moderation tools and quality of life features!

Reversible suspensions

The main change in this release of Mastodon is our approach to suspensions. Previously, suspending an account deleted all of its associated data immediately, so while an account could be unsuspended technically, the person would have to start completely from scratch. Of course, that wasn’t ideal – everybody makes mistakes. Now, the data is kept for 30 days after suspension, giving a long enough time window to correct mistakes or talk through appeals. The suspended person also gets the ability to download an archive of their account, which was not possible before. If there is a need to delete the data immediately, the option is still there for moderators.

But that’s not all: Whereas previously suspended accounts would not show up in the app at all, now, as long as they’re recoverable, they do show up and more clealy communicate that they’re in a suspended state. As Mastodon matures and grows, we’re striving for more transparency and fail-safety around moderation.

IP blocks

Another missing piece has been added to Mastodon’s moderation toolbox – the ability to control access from specific IP addresses or subnets. As a response to a troll making alternative accounts to evade suspensions or a bot farm creating spam accounts, server administrators can now either fully block access from an IP or send new accounts through the approval queue while letting everyone else sign-up normally.

Creating a new IP rule from the admin interface

Performance improvements

The release includes multiple performance optimizations both on the server-side and on the client-side. On the client-side, lag caused by typing up a new post should be if not completely removed, vastly reduced, and all live updates from the Streaming API now come through a single connection no matter how many different columns you have open, one or thirty. Requests for an account’s media tab, your favourites, bookmarks, or hashtags should be much faster. Operations involving deleting an account’s data are up to 100x faster, reducing delays in the system, and so on.

“Bell button”

Bell button on the Ruby developer’s profile

Are you following an account that only posts once in a blue moon? And it would almost certainly be drowned out in an otherwise active home feed? Perhaps an artist that only posts new artwork, or a bot that posts weather warnings for your area – now you can choose to be notified when a person you follow makes a new post by toggling the bell button on their profile.

Pop-out media player

Continue watching or listening as you browse

As for media, if you scroll away from an audio or video while it’s still playing, the playback will continue in the corner of your screen with convenient buttons to reply, boost, or favourite the post it’s from. You can also finally use familiar hotkeys to control audio and video playback – space to toggle playback, “m” to mute, “j” and “l” to jump backward and forward, and a few others. And finally, media modals got a facelift, now using the average color from the picture for the page overlay and always showing interactive buttons for the post underneath.

Conclusion

The 3.3 release consists of 619 commits by 21 contributors since July 27, 2020. For line-by-line attributions, you can peruse the changelog file, and for a historically complete list of contributors and translators, you can refer to the authors file, both included in the release.

Contributors to this release: Gargron, mashirozx, ThibG, noellabo, aquarla, trwnh, nornagon, joshleeb, mkljczk, santiagorodriguez96, jiikko, ykzts, tateisu, uist1idrju3i, mfmfuyu, zunda, dunn

Translators for this release: qezwan, adrmzz, yeft, Koala Yeung, tzium, kamee, Ali Demirtaş, Jurica, Ramdziana F Y, Alix Rossi, gagik_, Hồ Nhất Duy, ᏦᏁᎢᎵᏫ mask, Xosé M., xatier, otrapersona, Sveinn í Felli, Zoltán Gera, Rafael H L Moretti, Floxu, spla, Besnik_b, Emanuel Pina, Saederup92, Jeroen, Jeong Arm, Alessandro Levati, Thai Localization, Marcin Mikołajczak, tolstoevsky, vishnuvaratharajan, Maya Minatsuki, dkdarshan760, Roboron, Danial Behzadi, Imre Kristoffer Eilertsen, Coelacanthus, syncopams, FédiQuébec, koyu, Diluns, ariasuni, Hakim Oubouali, Hayk Khachatryan, v4vachan, Denys, Akarshan Biswas, 奈卜拉, Liboide, cybergene, strubbl, StanleyFrew, Ryo, Sokratis Alichanidis, Rachida S., lamnatos, Tigran, atriix, antonyho, Em St Cenydd, Pukima, Aryamik Sharma, phena109, ahangarha, Isaac Huang, igordrozniak, Allen Zhong, coxde, Rasmus Lindroth, liffon, fragola, Sasha Sorokin, bobchao, twpenguin, ThonyVezbe, Esther, Tagomago, Balázs Meskó, Gopal Sharma, Tofiq Abdula, subram, Ptrcmd, arshat, Scvoet, hiroTS, johne32rus23, Hexandcube, Neo_Chen, Aswin C, Ryan Ho, GiorgioHerbie, Willia, clarmin b8, Hernik, Rikard Linde, Wrya ali, Goudarz Jafari, Pukima, Jeff Huang, Timo Tijhof, Yamagishi Kazutoshi, AlexKoala, Rekan Adl, ButterflyOfFire, Sherwan Othman, Yassine Aït-El-Mouden, Fei Yang, Hougo, Vanege, TracyJacks, mecqor labi, Selyan Slimane AMIRI, norayr, Marek Ľach, mkljczk, marzuquccen, Yi-Jyun Pan, Gargron, dadosch, Orlando Murcio, Ильзира Рахматуллина, shdy, Yogesh K S, Antara2Cinta, Pixelcode, Hinaloe, alnd hezh, Clash Clans, Sébastien Feugère, k_taka, enolp, jmontane, Hallo Abdullah, Kahina Mess, Reg3xp, さっかりんにーさん, Rhys Harrison, GatoOscuro, pullopen, CyberAmoeba, 夜楓Yoka, Xurxo Guerra, Apple, mashirozx, ÀŘǾŚ PÀŚĦÀÍ, filippodb, abidin toumi, tykayn, xpac1985, Ozai, diorama, dashty, Salh_haji6, Ranj A Abdulqadir, Amir Kurdo, Baban Abdulrahman, dobrado, 于晚霞, Hannah, Savarín Electrográfico Marmota Intergalactica, Jari Ronkainen, SamOak, dcapillae, umonaca, ThibG

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this release, to everyone who sponsors the project through Patreon or through our new sponsors portal, and to everyone who uses the network! 🐘

An ever growing problem of the modern social media-rich world is misinformation. The trust that was previously placed into government officials and journalism has eroded; the internet gave everyone a voice but with it made it so much more difficult to distinguish truth from fabrication. The consequences of this are very real: Almost eradicated illnesses are making a comeback because people refuse to vaccinate their children, Covid-19 is continuing to spread because people refuse to wear masks and practice social distancing, more and more people start believing that the Earth is flat and descend down a rabbit hole of ever more absurd conspiracy theories.

The social media giants have acknowledged the problem: Both Facebook and Twitter are taking measures to try and limit the damage of misinformation. Both take the fact check approach, wherein a dubious claim that has attracted enough attention on the platform is disputed by deferring to one or multiple trusted authorities. It is a step in the right direction but we must consider how well it would fit into the decentralized model, which is what we’re working with. In both cases, Twitter and Facebook unilaterally decide a) which claims deserve a fact check and b) which fact checking authorities to defer to. Facebook has already gotten in trouble for picking some very dubious fact checkers.

So we have issues on two layers: The fact checkers selected by the platform may not be the ones that the users actually trust, and only claims that the platform decides to fact check get any treatment. On a decentralized social media platform like Mastodon, there is no central authority that can make those decisions, and while you may argue that its more localized governance structure (where a server’s admins and moderators have fewer users to take care of and users have the freedom to pick the server that fits their needs the best) would be an improvement over this, there is a practical limit to how much micromanagement we can expect independent admins and moderators to perform.

While we routinely observe blatant conspiracy theorists being kicked off well-moderated Mastodon servers, the often volunteer staff simply cannot monitor every message for misinformation and link it up with appropriate resources. For the same reason we oppose various upload filter initiatives – manually checking every message on social media does not scale and any automation is so complicated that it inevitably leads to centralized solutions that are equally inaccessible for small players. Regardless, the takeaway is, if we want to tackle misinformation on decentralized social media, we need a solution that does not rely on manual action by server staff.

In late 2018 I was approached by someone from University of Greenwich who wanted to investigate potential solutions to this problem and wanted my advice, support, and knowledge of decentralized social networks. It was an invitation to participate in an academic research project EUNOMIA with, among others, three different universities (University of Greenwich, University of Nicosia, and University of West Attica) and a grant from the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 program – an extremely flattering acknowledgement of Mastodon’s importance. Indeed, Mastodon was the perfect choice for this purpose: An extremely easy to use, well-documented, and extensive API that not only allows, but encourages the creation of alternative user interfaces; and the ability to essentially run a fully-featured social network in an entirely sandboxed environment.

What EUNOMIA aims to be at the end of its 3-year development road map is a “digital companion” – in essence, an alternative user interface, containing a toolkit that would facilitate the discerning of manipulated or incorrect information. Facilitation is key, here: The user would be the ultimate authority for making a call on what they trust or distrust, what EUNOMIA would provide is easier access to the kind of criteria the user deems important for that decision. Someone might want to be notified if a post uses manipulative wording to distort a claim, someone else might want to see if similar messages have been posted by other people before and the one that you see is less accurate, other people may want to check with the wisdom of the crowd and pay extra heed when lots of people distrust a message. Any one method is imperfect by itself, but in tandem they may make fact checking more accessible.

The EUNOMIA “digital companion” is built on Mastodon but they are two completely separate projects. If you would like to follow EUNOMIA’s progress and provide any feedback, please follow its Mastodon account: @Eunomia@mastodon.social

The new Mastodon release brings you a much better audio player and improved support for different audio and video formats, as well as some additional security mechanisms.

The audio player has been completely reworked to have a more eye-catching design. It will extract album art from the uploaded audio file automatically, or allow you to upload a thumbnail of your own choosing to be displayed in the center. Dominant colors from the artwork or thumbnail will then be used to give the player a unique look.

Whereas previously video thumbnails were automatically taken from the first frame of the video, you now also have the ability to upload a custom thumbnail that will be displayed before the video starts playing. Simply click on “Edit” on a newly uploaded media file and then choose a new thumbnail!

Mastodon audio showing up on Twitter

When you share links to video or audio on Mastodon on other platforms, for example Twitter, your friends will be able to open Mastodon’s video or audio player right on that platform (assuming the platform supports the twitter:player tag).

To better protect your accounts when you’re not there, there’s a new security mechanism guarding new login attempts. When you don’t have two-factor authentication setup, have been away for at least two weeks, and someone tries to login to your account from a previously unseen IP address, they will be required to enter a token sent to your e-mail address.

It’s a feature more meant to guard those who forget to setup two-factor authentication, so if you are reading this, remember that it’s good practice to use two-factor authentication (Mastodon’s does not require a phone number or a Mastodon app, any TOTP app works), and to use a password manager to generate random and unique passwords for each account you have!

Adding a personal note

Have you ever blocked or muted someone but forgot why? Or have you followed someone but then forgot who they are? Now you can add personal notes to other accounts to keep track of who’s who. Visible only to you!

Conclusion

The 3.2 release consists of 380 commits by 27 contributors since May 14, 2020. For line-by-line attributions, you can peruse the changelog file, and for a historically complete list of contributors and translators, you can refer to the authors file, both included in the release.

Contributors to this release: OmmyZhang, ThibG, Gargron, noellabo, Sasha-Sorokin, dunn, highemerly, tateisu, ariasuni, bclindner, cchoi12, leo60228, mfmfuyu, mayaeh, lfuelling, ykzts, angristan, BenLubar, trwnh, arielrodrigues

Translators for this release: Duy, stan ionut, Besnik_b, Emanuel Pina, regulartranslator, ButterflyOfFire, adrmzz, FédiQuébec, GiorgioHerbie, Marcin Mikołajczak, ariasuni, Thai Localization, 奈卜拉, Mentor Gashi, Xosé M., axi, Selyan Slimane AMIRI, Alix Rossi, Jeroen, SteinarK, ThonyVezbe, Hrach Mkrtchyan, Gwenn, ᏦᏁᎢᎵᏫ mask, Danial Behzadi, spla, Rafael H L Moretti, Jeong Arm, koyu, Yi-Jyun Pan, norayr, Alessandro Levati, Sasha Sorokin, gagik_, lamnatos, Sveinn í Felli, Zoltán Gera, cybergene, Tagomago, Michal Stanke, borys_sh, Ramdziana F Y, Osoitz, Maya Minatsuki, Willia, BurekzFinezt, Evert Prants, ThibG, Dewi, Emyn-Russell Nt Nefydd, vishnuvaratharajan, tolstoevsky, Diluns, Falling Snowdin, Marek Ľach, Balázs Meskó, Ryo, Roboron, StanleyFrew, PPNplus, Heimen Stoffels, Andrew, Iváns, Carlos Solís, Sokratis Alichanidis, TS, SensDeViata, AzureNya, OctolinGamer, 北䑓如法, Laura, Imre Kristoffer Eilertsen, Rikard Linde, Ali Demirtaş, diorama, Daniele Lira Mereb, Goudarz Jafari, psymyn, v4vachan, Sebastián Andil, Khóo, ZiriSut, strubbl, Reg3xp, AlexKoala, VSx86, Mo_der Steven, musix, ギャラ, Saederup92, mynameismonkey, omquylzu, Miro Rauhala, 硫酸鶏, siamano, Viorel-Cătălin Răpițeanu, Pachara Chantawong, Balázs Meskó, Steven Tappert, Unmual, Zijian Zhao, Skew, enolp, Yann Aguettaz, Mick Onio, r3dsp1, Tianqi Zhang, piupiupiudiu, Padraic Calpin, るいーね, Belkacem Mohammed, Miquel Sabaté Solà, serubeena, Solid Rhino, Rintan, 林水溶, Tagada, shafouz, Tom_, OminousCry, ALEM FARID, Nathaël Noguès, Robin van der Vliet, twpenguin, Paz Galindo, 夜楓Yoka, mkljczk, kiwi0, Esther, Renato “Lond” Cerqueira, igordrozniak, Philipp Fischbeck, GaggiX, Allen Zhong, Albatroz Jeremias, Nocta, pezcurrel, Aditoo17, 森の子リスのミーコの大冒険, Doug, Fleva

As always, huge thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, to everyone who sponsors the project on Patreon, and to everyone who uses the network! 🐘

Happy tooting!

Since Mastodon 2.7, it is actually possible to let users sign up through your app, instead of asking them to go to a Mastodon website directly and then return. Let’s go over how this can be done.

First, not all Mastodon servers accept new users. If you perform a request to GET /api/v1/instance, you will see this in the boolean registrations attribute.

To proceed, your app must already be registered / self-register with the given server, and obtain a “client credentials” grant, which is an API access token that is not connected to any particular user, just to your app. The app must have the write:accounts (or above) scope.

As a refresher, given that you have already registered the app to get a client_id and client_secret, to obtain a “client credentials” grant, you just have to perform a POST /oauth/token request with the params grant_type=client_credentials, your client_id and client_secret, and scope=write:accounts (or whatever scopes you need).

You then need to collect the following information from the new user:

You must ask the user to agree to the server’s terms of use and privacy policy, and record that agreement in the boolean agreement param. The URLs for the terms and privacy policy are /about/more and /terms so you can just let the user open them in a browser, or render them in a web view. If you know what the user’s language is, you can pass that information in the locale param (but make sure the locale is something Mastodon supports, otherwise the API request will fail with a HTTP 422 error).

If the GET /api/v1/instance API has returned a true approval_required attribute, there is an additional piece of information you should ask from the user: reason. Because the user’s sign-up will be reviewed by the server’s staff before being allowed, you must give the user an opportunity to describe themselves and why they should be allowed onto the server.

You must then submit those params to POST /api/v1/accounts (authenticated with the app’s access token). You will need to handle a potential HTTP 422 response from the API in case the user has entered invalid information (like an already taken username).

On success, what you will receive in return will be an access token, identical to what you would get from a standard OAuth authorization procedure. The access token allows your application to use the API of the server on behalf of the registered user.

However, the token will be inactive until the user confirms their e-mail. The link in the confirmation e-mail will actually redirect them back to your application when possible. Of course, if staff approval is required, the token will remain unusable until the account has been approved.

Trying to use an inactive access token will result in a HTTP 403 error.

New REST APIs

Profile directory

The profile directory is a way to discover users who want to be discovered. To fetch the profile directory, access GET /api/v1/directory with the possible params local (boolean) and order (new or active). Pagination is accomplished using offset and limit params.

Trends

Hashtags that are used more than usual (and above a small minimal threshold) are “trending”. To fetch trending hashtags, access GET /api/v1/trends. Only 10 results are returned maximally but you can request fewer with limit param.

Managing featured hashtags

Users can feature hashtags on their public profile, which allows visitors to easily browse their public posts filed under those hashtags. These cannot yet be arbitrarily retrieved through the API, but there is now an API for managing the featured hashtags of the current user:

A featured hashtag contains the attributes id, name, statuses_count and last_status_at.

Timeline position markers

Apps can now synchronize their position in certain timelines between each other. Currently these are the home timeline and the notifications timeline. The web UI already implements this API and will save its position when closed.

To retrieve a map of markers with timeline names as keys, access GET /api/v1/markers . You must specify the desired timelines with the array param timeline. This is a slightly unusual structure in Mastodon’s REST API so it deserves an example:

To create a new marker, pass a map to POST /api/v1/markers with timeline names as keys (home and/or notifications), and an object containing the last_read_id for each timeline. Essentially, you pass it something like this, either encoded as JSON or using nested form/query params:

Hashtag autocomplete

If you are using the GET /api/v2/search API for showing the user autocomplete for hashtags, you can now pass the exclude_unreviewed boolean param to limit the results to only those hashtags that have been looked at by the server’s staff. This is a way to reduce junk and harmful results.

Sign-up API in approval-required registrations mode

You can now pass the reason param to POST /api/v1/accounts, containing the user’s reason for wanting to join the server, which is useful when the server is in approval-required registrations mode. You can detect when that mode is active by the approval_required boolean attribute returned from GET /api/v1/instance (in conjunction with the registrations boolean attribute).

Custom emoji categories

New attribute category on custom emojis returned from GET /api/v1/custom_emojis contains a string with which emojis are supposed to be grouped when displayed in a picker UI.

Displaying user’s own votes in polls

New attribute own_votes on polls contains an array of the user’s choices (as indices corresponding to the options array).

New search syntax support

When ElasticSearch is enabled, you can use the following syntax to fine-tune your search:

It should be noted that the default operator has been changed from “and” to “or”, so by searching for “foo bar” you will get results that contain both “foo” and “bar” at the top, but also those that only contain “foo” and only contain “bar”. For this reason, there is also another new operator, the plus sign (+) which you can prepend to a keyword or phrase to make sure the results definitely contain it.

Health check

There is now GET /health endpoint for the web process which you can use with a monitoring service. The endpoint measures not only that the web process responds to requests but can successfully connect to the database and the cache as well.

New deployment settings

Reply-to header on e-mails

If you want e-mails to be sent with a reply-to header, i.e. redirecting replies to those e-mails to a particular address, use the new SMTP_REPLY_TO environment variable. Mind that the reply-to header on moderation warning e-mails is set to the contact address configured in the admin UI.

Secure mode

Normally, all public resources are available without authentication or authorization. Because of this, it is hard to know who (in particular, which server, or which person) has accessed a particular resource, and impossible to deny that access to the ones you want to avoid. Secure mode requires authentication (via HTTP signatures) on all public resources, as well as disabling public REST API access (i.e. no access without access token, and no access with app-only access tokens, there has to be a user assigned to that access token). This means you always know who is accessing any resource on your server, and can deny that access using domain blocks.

Unfortunately, secure mode is not fully backwards-compatible with previous Mastodon versions. For this reason, it cannot be enabled by default. If you want to enable it, knowing that it may negatively impact communications with other servers, set the AUTHORIZED_FETCH=true environment variable.

Whitelist mode

Taking a step further than the secure mode, whitelist mode is meant for private servers. Our aim here are educational uses, such as schools and universities, where Mastodon could be used to provide a safe learning environment. When whitelist mode is enabled, no page is available without login, and any incoming or outgoing federation is ignored except for manually whitelisted domains. Domains can be whitelisted in the federation part of the admin UI. When whitelist mode is enabled, secure mode is also enabled.

To enable whitelist mode, set the WHITELIST_MODE=true environment variable. Please mind that this option was not designed for being switched on on already running servers. To clean an existing database of content that is not whitelisted, run tootctl domains purge --whitelist-mode

Because whitelist mode essentially creates a silo, not unlike Twitter, Facebook, and other centralized services, we do not recommend running public servers in whitelist mode.

New command-line tools

Please mind that if you find any of the below descriptions insufficient, you can always append --help to whichever command you’re interested in and receive the most detailed information about the usage of that command and the available options.

Parallization and progress

Co Continue reading at the publisher's website.

It’s finally here! Mastodon 3.0 is live! The team has been hard at work on making sure that this release is one of our most user-friendly yet with some exciting new features! Here are just a few:

Stronger anti-harassment tools

We’re always looking for new ways to provide users and admins with the most robust and comprehensive tools to combat harassment on the fediverse. We take a lot of pride in excelling where Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook have continuously failed in this regard. As such 3.0 introduces some powerful new features: whitelist mode, and an optional public list of blocked domains.

With the whitelist feature it’s now possible for private, semi-private, and secured networks to be deployed. Want to deploy mastodon for educational institutions, networked between a couple schools? Or do you want to build a secured, user-first network within the fediverse itself? The choice is yours. This protects servers and their users from stalkers, intrusive web crawlers, and other malign agents by creating the tightest security on a server yet.

Additionally, server admins now have the option of making their domain blocklists public, with optional comments clarifying why a domain was blocked. Security on the fediverse relies in part on admins working together to enforce safe community standards, and this allows for the most robust way of sharing information about bad actors in the fediverse. We want you to not just see who was blocked, but why. Transparency lets you see how yours, and other, servers are being run, so you can make informed decisions.

Moving accounts

You spoke, we listened! Here is the completely revamped account migration system! Easier than ever, and with 3.0 comes the ability to bring your followers with you like magic! Point the old account to the new one, and the new one to the old one, using the new interface, and your followers will be transferred over!

Moving followers to another account

Additionally, your old account will no longer show up in searches and will have limited functionality (that, of course, can be undone by re-activating it). This process is streamlined and straightforward, and we hope that it makes moving between servers even easier than before!

A more powerful search

Searching is now more flexible and more powerful than before. You can now search using “phrase matching” and by excluding words from a search by including a minus sign before a term. For example: if you wanted to search for Cute Doggos (I know what you like) but didn’t want to include cats, you’d just search for cute doggos -cat to get to get those puppies.

💁 Working with custom emojis just got easier! 😸

Admins can now create custom emoji categories! No more worrying about having too many, or thinking ‘oh jeez now I have 40 thounking emojo, where will I put them??’ No more scrolling through hundreds of custom emojis on the web UI to find that perfect way to express yourself! 🐣 Categories! They’re here!

Custom custom emojis categories

Goodbye OStatus; You’ve been deprecated!

Mastodon will no longer support OStatus. For most users this means that there will be no change whatsoever. For the extremely slim margin of people this affects, please refer to the discussion on the bug tracker to see how we got here. We’re a 100% ActivityPub household now!

The hashiest hashtags

3.0 brings support for auto-suggestions for hashtags and shows you how many times each tag has been used in the past week! This makes it easier to see what the fediverse is talking about and what tags are most popular during the week!

Hashtag auto-suggestions

Even better, you can see trending hashtags now, making it easy to follow along with current events and the lightning-fast world of memes on the fediverse. Hashtag trends aren’t blind though; they’re reviewed by your admin to ensure they aren’t being gamed as a vector for abuse. Trust your admin? Use those hashtags!

Trending hashtags

The timeline’s alive, with the sound of music

We thought the old media player was pretty disappointing, so we did something about it! Introducing the new and improved audio player for web UI! Sharing audio on Mastodon is now much more user-friendly, with a vastly improved experience over the old player.

All new audio player for web UI

Changes to the UI

Single-column mode now supports scrolling from anywhere on the page! This makes viewing the timeline easier than ever and makes mastodon even friendlier to use on laptops and touchscreens.

Slow mode! It’s a slower mode! Pop into the preferences pane and toggle this mode to disable livestreaming in the timeline. Instead, you’ll see a manual link to refresh the feed, with a counter letting you know how many new toots there are for you to catch up on. Having a lot of followers doesn’t mean you aren’t able to keep up anymore: stay in the loop with slow mode!

Lastly, new users see a minimal UI and can change their email address before their account is acivated! Less worrying about typos in the sign-up phase just makes it easier for new friends to join, which is good news for everyone!

Conclusion

The 3.0 release consists of 563 commits by 23 contributors since June 22, 2019. For line-by-line attributions, you can peruse the changelog file, and for a historically complete list of contributors and translators, you can refer to the authors file, both included in the release.

Contributors to this release: abcang, ahangarha, brortao, cutls, danhunsaker, Gargron, highemerly, hugogameiro, ichi-i, Kjwon15, koyuawsmbrtn, madmath03, mayaeh, noellabo, nzws, Shleeble, ThibG, trwnh, tsia, umonaca, ykzts, zunda

Translators for this release: 101010, Abijeet Patro, Aditoo17, Adrián Lattes, Akarshan Biswas, Alessandro Levati, Alix Rossi, Andrea Lo Iacono, Anunnakey, ariasuni, atarashiako, AW Unad, Benjamin Cobb, borys_sh, ButterflyOfFire, carolinagiorno, Ch., christalleras, Cutls, cybergene, d5Ziif3K, Daniel Dimitrov, Dewi, diazepan, Diluns, dragnucs2, Dremski, dxwc, eichkat3r, Emyn Nant Nefydd, EPEMA YT, erikstl, Evert Prants, Evgeny Petrov, filippodb, frumble, FédiQuébec, Hinaloe, hiphipvargas, Hugh Liu, hussama, Jack R, JackXu, Jaz-Michael King, Jeong Arm, Jeroen, Johan Schiff, Juan José Salvador Piedra, juanda097, JzshAC, Karol Kosek, kat, KEINOS, koyu, Kristijan Tkalec, lamnatos, liffon, Lukas Fülling, MadeInSteak, Marcepanek_, Marcin Mikołajczak, Marek Ľach, Masoud Abkenar, Maya Minatsuki, mmokhi, Muha Aliss, Oguz Ersen, OpenAlgeria, Osoitz, oti4500, oɹʇuʞ, PPNplus, Rakino, Ramdziana F Y, Ray, Renato “Lond” Cerqueira, Rhys Harrison, Rikard Linde, Rintan1, Roboron, ruine, Ryo, sabri, Saederup92, Sahak Petrosyan, SamitiMed, Sasha Sorokin, sergioaraujo1, SHeija, shioko, silkevicious, skaaarrr, SnDer, Sokratis Alichanidis, spla, Stasiek Michalski, taoxvx, tctovsli, Thai Localization, Tiago Epifânio, Tradjincal, tykayn, umelard, Unmual, Vanege, vjasiegd, waweic, Xosé M., Yi-Jyun Pan, Zoltán Gera, Zoé Bőle, さっかりんにーさん, 唐宗勛, 森の子リスのミーコの大冒険, 硫酸鶏

As always, huge thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, to everyone who sponsors the project on Patreon, and to everyone who uses the network! 🐘

Happy tooting!

After crowdfunding millions of dollars, social media platform Gab abandoned its own code and switched to the freely available Mastodon software in early 2019 as a way of circumventing Google’s and Apple’s ban on their own app from their app stores, since offering Mastodon’s client-side API would allow any existing Mastodon app to be used to access Gab. We have never had any sympathy for their thinly (if at all) veiled white supremacist platform so that was not a welcome move on our part, however the license that we publish our software under (AGPLv3) allows anyone to use it as they see fit as long as they keep the same license and make their modifications public.

While we gave up the ability to choose who can and cannot use our software by publishing our source code using this Free Software license, we can still choose who we as a project associate with. We are opposed to Gab’s philosophy, which uses the pretense of free speech absolutism as an excuse to platform racist and otherwise dehumanizing content.

Mastodon has been originally developed by a person of Jewish heritage and first-generation immigrant background and Mastodon’s userbase includes many people from marginalized communities. Mastodon’s decentralized approach that allows communities to self-govern according to their needs has enabled those marginalized communities to create safe spaces for themselves where previously they were reliant on big companies like Twitter to stand up for them, which these companies have often failed to do. While the Mastodon software is free for everyone to use and modify, our world view could not be further from Gab’s.

As a truly decentralized network, each Mastodon server operator has to make the call on their own. Many have already opted to block communication from Gab’s servers. On our side, we have blocked them from the Mastodon server that we operate, mastodon.social. We have also recently introduced a more strict policy for which Mastodon servers we promote through our official website joinmastodon.org, listing only such servers that commit to standing up against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.

Updates

Last updated: Oct 28, 2021

One of the biggest obstacles for new users to Mastodon has been the multi-column UI. For users accustomed to the single-column layouts of Twitter or Tumblr, Mastodon’s multi-column layout can be overwhelming. At Mastodon, we want users’ first-day experience with us to be a positive and accessible one! A UI that feels cluttered or that leaves users confused dramatically reduces the chances that they will come back to Mastodon as a regular user. It was clear to us that the multi-column layout was impeding this accessibility.

So, we are happy to introduce the new single-column layout. Instead of seeing multiple columns side by side the new single-column layout turns the Home, Notifications, Local, and Federated timelines into their own tabs within the single column that you can easily access by clicking on the tab name or—if you are on a tablet—swiping left and right. The new single-column layout reduces visual clutter and lets you focus on the specific part of Mastodon you want to engage in. We also hope that by reducing visual clutter the new single-column layout also makes the relationship between the Home, Local, and Federated timelines clearer.

For new users this new interface provides an easier and more familiar way to join the fediverse without sacrificing the special features of the fediverse itself. For returning users it provides a new way to use Mastodon that provides greater accessibility in general. Notably, we haven’t cut any features with this new layout. Everything you love about Mastodon is still accessible, just in a new user-friendly interface. But for those users who prefer the old layout it can still be enabled on the Appearance Preferences page by clicking “Enable advanced web interface”—it’s not going away anytime soon.

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With the sad news that KNZK was shutting down we thought it might be useful for people to have a refresher on the features that Mastodon has built in that make moving instances easy and painless.

Backing up Your Data

Data export

If you are moving to a new instance the first thing you will want to do is to get a backup of all of your data. Thankfully this process is painless with the Data Export tab under the “Import and Export” page. Here you can download your followers list, your muted users list and your blocked users list.

Keeping users safe is one of our top priorities and we highly recommend that anyone moving instances backs up their muted and block lists. We’ve made this as straightforward as possible to ensure that moving instances is a seamless experience and free from having to block those accounts that you do not want to see or interact with.

On this page you can also download a copy of your archive that can be read by any ActivityPub software. This archive includes all of your posts and media. So even if the instance that you are moving from shuts down, as is the case with KNZK, you will still have a copy of all of your posts!

Importing Your Data

Data import

Once you have backed up the data that you wish to bring over to your new account (we recommend all of it!) it’s easy to import these into your new account under the “Import” tab of the “Import and Export” page!

Here you will simply select the type of data that you are importing and then choose the CVS file that you exported earlier before hitting upload! The CVS files are by default clearly labeled with what kind of data they contain to make it easier to know which file to upload. Depending on your new instances size and the size of the lists that you have imported it will take a few minutes for all of the new data to be properly imported. When the data has finished upload your home TL should look like it did before!

Announcing the Move

Setting up profile redirect

As a final step in moving your account, something you may want to do is to let people know that you have moved your account to a new instance! Scrolling to the bottom of the “Appearances” tab of the Profile edit page you will find the option to announce that you have moved accounts under the helpfully titled “Move to a different account” header! What this will do is make it so that when people visit your old profile it is grayed out and people are redirected to your new account.

Moving instances is painless and straightforward with Mastodon and we’re happy to have developed tools that give users the greatest possible control over their own data while also keeping them safe!

In the future we are planning to expand the account migration functionality beyond a mere redirect message. The system will support notifying followers of the move and have them automatically re-follow the new account, with safety precautions. Stay tuned!

Although Mastodon has no central authority, we as a project still want to provide a safer experience than found on Twitter or Reddit. One of the things that gave impetus to the creation of Mastodon was a lack of moderation on Twitter against hate groups. The “no nazis” rule of the original mastodon.social server not only continues to serve as a major attraction of the project, but has also been adopted in the majority of subsequently founded communities as well.

We thought long and hard about how to best provide people new to Mastodon a safe and friendly experience without compromising the federated and free nature of the project. Thus, we are proud to announce the creation of the Mastodon Server Covenant. By highlighting those communities that are high quality and best align with our values, we hope to foster a friendly and better moderated online space. Any server that we link to from joinmastodon.org commits to actively moderating against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. Additionally, servers listed on joinmastodon.org are those that have committed to having daily backups, more than one person with emergency access (“bus factor”) and promise to give people a 3 month warning in case of potential closure.

While there have always been server listings on joinmastodon.org, this is a break from our previous practice of listing servers. Before the Server Covenant we pulled a list of servers from a 3rd party provider called instances.social. However, instances.social was a 3rd party and automated service. The one thing that it could not do was any kind of quality control as it simply listed every instance submitted–regardless of stability or their code of conduct. As Mastodon has grown it has become increasingly clear that simply listing every possible server was not in our interest as a project, nor was it in the interest in the majority of the communities running Mastodon.

We want people’s experience with the Mastodon to be safe and consistent and we believe in highlighting those communities that best embody our values. Mastodon is released as free software and that is where our obligations of neutrality end. We do not believe that moderation is a crime, and we do not have to support or promote those who would choose to use Mastodon to spread intolerance and hate.

For those interested in learning more, or learning about including their community in the Mastodon Server Covenant, can find out more here.

The latest point release of Mastodon adds a small new feature that might have a significant impact on all adult content creators on the platform. The feature has a fancy, memorable name: Blurhash. But first, let’s talk about how adult content works on Mastodon.

Mastodon allows you to put content warnings on posts. These can be textual, hiding the text content, for example if you want to talk about spoilers or something uncomfortable for other people. Images and videos can be hidden as well, even while leaving the text visible. When the images and videos are hidden, you only see a black box where they would be, that can be clicked to show them.

Beyond providing visual protection against say, co-workers looking over your shoulder to see something inappropriate on your screen, Mastodon also does not load said images or videos at all until you choose to unhide them, which helps if it’s important that inappropriate content is not stored in your browser’s cache. But there is a drawback. Every post with hidden media looks the same. They all blend together. Especially in public timelines, which provide a stream of all public posts that people use to explore Mastodon outside of their friend circle. As a result, posts with hidden media usually get less interactions.

Side-by-side comparison of the original picture of Doris (cat) and the generated blurhash, which is the string KJG8_@Dgx]_4V?xuyE%NRj

Here comes Blurhash. Developed by Dag Ågren, who is behind the popular iOS app for Mastodon, Toot!, it is an algorithm that compresses a picture into a short string of letters. The string is so small that there is no problem with saving it in the database, instead of as an image file, and conversely, sending it along with API responses. That means that string is available before any image files are loaded by the browser. You can see where this is going… When you decode the string back into an image, you get a gradient of colors used in the original image.

So little information is transmitted through blurhash that is is safe to display even if the underlying content is inappropriate, and the resulting gradient is pleasant to look at. Even more importantly, it’s different for each image, making posts with hidden media look different from each other, which should hopefully increases their chances of getting noticed. But that’s not all! Even for posts where images and videos are not supposed to be hidden, it provides a pleasant placeholder while the much heavier image files are loaded by the browser.

If you would like to use Blurhash in your project, there is a Ruby port on RubyGems and a JavaScript port on NPM. More are to be published by Dag Ågren in the future!

In this long-awaited release: Polls, new tools for managing followers, new frontpage design, new admin features, Keybase integration, and more.

A poll

Mastodon now has a poll feature. Instead of attaching images or video to your post, you can ask your followers to choose an answer to your question. You can choose how long a poll will remain open for. Polls in private posts are accessible only to your followers.

Featured hashtags on an artist’s profile

You can now choose which hashtags to feature on your profile. They will be displayed on the sidebar and allow visitors to browse your posts specifically under those hashtags.

A new server setting will allow communities to grow without worrying about spammers, trolls, or unexpected traffic spikes: Instead of allowing everyone to sign up, or allowing nobody to sign up, a server owner can choose to let people apply for an invite and manually approve sign-ups.

The new landing page

The landing page has been simplified to its essence: Sign up form, quick access to a login form for returning users, short and to the point information about the server, and links to ways of exploring the server.

The design of profiles within the web app has been changed to match the design of public profiles more closely, making better use of space and showing the header image without obscuring it.

Manage follows and followers

There is a new powerful UI for managing your followers and follows. It allows you to filter them by various criteria, such as your mutuals, or who hasn’t been active in a long time, and you can unfollow them in batches, as well as remove them from your followers in batches.

In a similar vein, the import tool for follows, mutes, and blocks now allows you to choose whether the imported data will merge with what you already had in your account, or replace it.

Among other things, Mastodon now supports Keybase’s new proof system, allowing you to connect your Keybase account with your Mastodon account to affirm your identity across the web. Keybase is slowly rolling this feature out on their side, and it will eventually be available to all Mastodon servers.

Conclusion

The 2.8 release consists of 392 commits by 32 contributors since January 28, 2019. For line-by-line attributions, you can peruse the changelog file, and for a historically complete list of contributors and translators, you can refer to the authors file, both included in the release.

Contributors to this release: Aditoo17, armandfardeau, aurelien-reeves, BenLubar enewhuis, Gargron, hinaloe, jeroenpraat, Kjwon15, koyuawsmbrtn, m4sk1n, mabkenar, marek-lach, mayaeh, noellabo, nolanlawson, palindromordnilap, Quenty31, renatolond, rinsuki, salvadorpla, sascha-sl, Shleeble, Slaynash, slice, ThibG, xgess, yagizhan49, ykzts, ysksn

Translators for this release: Aditoo, Albakham, Alessandro Levati, Ali Demirtas, Alix D. R., Amrz0, Andrew Zyabin, Angeles Broullón, Antonis, arshat, Austin Jones, Becci Cat, Besnik Bleta, Burekz Finezt, ButterflyOfFire, dxwc, Einhjeriar, Eirworks, Evgeny Petrov, goofy-mdn, Hinaloe, Ivan Pleva, Jaz-Michael King, Jeong Arm, jeroenpraat, Joseph Nuthalapati, João Pinheiro, Kaitian Xie, Kevin Houlihan, koyu, Kristijan Tkalec, Kumasun Morino, Leia, lilo, Maigonis, Marcin Mikołajczak, Marek Ľach, martialarts, Masoud Abkenar, Max Winkler, mayaeh, Mikko Poussu, Mélanie Chauvel, Osoitz, Owain Rhys Lewis, pan93412, parnikkapore, Peter, Quenti2, Quentí, Rasmus Sæderup, Renato “Lond” Cerqueira, Sarunas Medeikis, Sergio Soriano, spla, Thai Localization, Vanege, Xose M., Павел Гастелло, 森の子リスのミーコの大冒険

As always, huge thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, to everyone who sponsors the project on Patreon, and to everyone who uses the network! 🐘

Resources

We have published a 1-click install image on DigitalOcean. This reduces the initial time investment in self-hosting Mastodon substantially. You create a new droplet, choose the Mastodon image, and once it boots up, you are taken through an interactive setup prompt.

The only necessary information for the prompt is a domain name (it should already be pointing at the IP address of your droplet!) and credentials to some e-mail delivery service, like SparkPost, Mailgun, Sendgrid, or something similar. Once you enter them into the setup prompt, your brand new Mastodon server boots up, ready to go.

Optionally, the setup prompt can also take Amazon S3, Wasabi or Google Cloud credentials for storing user uploads in the cloud instead of the local filesystem on the droplet.

What you get in the droplet is a standard installation of Mastodon, exactly as if you simply followed installation instructions in our documentation. This means that the documentation already covers everything you might want to know!