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

• Reworked the account and post menus.
• Improved the content warning display in the timeline. They no longer use the full post height, which caused them to create a lot of white space.
• Released version 2024.5, with a lot of crash fixes and other stability improvements. (release details)

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!