Trunk & Tidbits, December 2024

A belated “happy 2025!” wish, from the Mastodon team (although, if you’ve been paying attention, there has been some important news already this month). We’re a little later than planned in posting a summary of the work that happened during December, but let’s get into it.

Last month was a bit more quiet than usual, because most of the team took time off with friends and family over the annual holiday season.

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.

Trunk & Tidbits, October 2024

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!

Trunk & Tidbits, August 2024

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Inspired by a joke post I decided to go ahead and compile a list of the most shared things on Mastodon in 2018.

After Apple has delisted the Tumblr app from its store citing a large amount of adult content on the site, artists and other creators are reporting having their blogs deleted, and are now looking for alternatives. Before choosing another commercial solution like Twitter, let me outline why Mastodon is the better choice:

Mastodon was first announced to the public through Hacker News, a link aggregator site for programmers, on October 6, 2016. Now we’re celebrating the 2 year anniversary! 🎉

In the previous tutorial we have learned how to send a reply to another ActivityPub server, and we have used mostly static parts to do it. Now it’s time to talk about how to subscribe to other people and receive messages.

The inbox

Primarily this means having a publicly accessible inbox and validating HTTP signatures. Once that works, everything else is just semantics. Let’s use a Sinatra web server to implement the inbox.

We often tout things like “Mastodon is based on open web protocols” as one of its advantages. I want to elaborate why exactly that’s a good thing.

I follow many talented artists on Mastodon, and over my 2 years of being on the platform I have noticed some common patterns that may help a newcomer find their audience on here, too.

Today we’ll be looking at how to connect the protocols powering Mastodon in the simplest way possible to enter the federated network. We will use static files, standard command-line tools, and some simple Ruby scripting, although the functionality should be easily adaptable to other programming languages.

First, what’s the end goal of this exercise? We want to send a Mastodon user a message from our own, non-Mastodon server.

So what are the ingredients required? The message itself will be formatted with ActivityPub, and it must be attributed to an ActivityPub actor. The actor must be discoverable via Webfinger, and the delivery itself must be cryptographically signed by the actor.

A fresh new release of the federated social network software is here, and while the primary focus of it has been on fixing bugs and improving performance, it brings a couple of notable new features to the board.

Delete & Redraft

There are legitimate reasons why social media platforms rarely, if ever, have an editing function. In an environment where content spreads like wildfire in a matter of minutes, you could easily conceive of nefarious misuses such as creating a post about something agreeable and positive, and, once it reaches critical mass, changing the content to something malicious.

Deep down you always knew it. On the edge of your perception, you always heard the people who talked about the erosion of privacy, that there was no such thing as free cheese, that if you don’t pay — then you’re the product. Now you know that it’s true. Cambridge Analytica has sucked the data so kindly and diligently collected by Facebook and used that data to influence the US elections (and who knows what else).

Human beings, above all else, are storytellers. It’s how we relate to our own past, or personalities, or each other. It’s how to connect with the world around us, make sense of events, and assess values. We rely on stories to function as agents in the world.

These stories are often told in-person: “oh, I did this today, I felt like this, then this happened and I was like ‘whoa no way!’” In times past, we relied on an oral tradition to pass on values, moving towards the written form as literacy grew and cities became the primary way people lived.

My name is Eugen Rochko and I’m the creator of Mastodon, a free, open-source federated social network with over 760,000 users. You can check it out here.

The Mastodon project is finally well-represented visually. I always felt like the previous logo did not do it justice. To its credit, it was both an M, and 3 sideways speech bubbles, but it did not scale well and overall it was just a circle. Now, after months of planning and weeks of back and forth with the designer, we have a distinct shape and a distinct font.

My instance mastodon.social has recently surpassed 43,000 users. I have closed registrations both to have more time to investigate the infrastructure and ensure a good experience for existing users, and to encourage more decentralization in the network (with a wonderful effect — the Mastodon fediverse now hosts over 161,000 people spread out over more than 500 independent instances!)

But providing a smooth and swift service to 43,000 users takes some doing, and as some of the other instances are approaching large sizes themselves, it is a good time to share the tips & tricks I learned from doing it.

My name is Eugen Rochko and I’m the creator of Mastodon, a free, open-source federated social network server. The flagship instance mastodon.social has over 22,000 users and is growing fast. You can check it out here.

Very early on in the development of Mastodon I’ve decided that centralization and unexpected algorithmic changes were not the only one of Twitter’s problems. Harrassment and tools to deal with it have always been lacking on Twitter’s end. I reached out to people who have been affected by it to collect ideas. Here is what I gathered: