Trunk & Tidbits, June 2024
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Renaud Chaput
CTO
![](https://blog.joinmastodon.org/authors/andy-piper.jpg)
Andy Piper
Developer Relations
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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.
- new feature
The grouped notifications backend has been merged. This is still experimental; the API might change. —
PR #29889 (by ClearlyClaire)
- developer
The devcontainer setup has been improved, thanks to polotek asking us about it and the work of a number of contributors —
PR #30548 (by vmstan) —
PR #30547 (by mjankowski) —
PR #30502 (by fabiosammy and mjankowski) —
PR #30566 (by mjankowski) —
PR #30592 (by mjankowski) —
PR #30593 (by mjankowski) —
PR #30603 (by mjankowski)
- performance
libvips
support has been merged! ImageMagick is still available, but we plan to switch the default tolibvips
in the next version, then remove ImageMagick support.libvips
≥ 8.13 is required, and our official container images useslibvips
out of the box —PR #30090 (by gargron)
- container
libvips
andffmpeg
are now built from source in our official container image, allowing us to use just the dependencies we need and to use the latest version, removing several hundred megabytes from the image. Those versions are also automatically tracked by Renovate, to ensure we update them. —PR #30571 (by vmstan) —
PR #30569 (by vmstan)
- api
The recently-introduced
read:me
OAuth scope has been renamed toprofile
for consistency —PR #30357 (by ThisIsMissEm)
- new feature
Support for
fediverse:creator
author links in the web UI. —PR #30521 (by Gargron)
- api
In order to support multiple authors for a
fediverse:creator
link preview, we are introducing theauthors
attribute in the REST API. This will contain the author name, optional URL, and optional Fediverse account. For now, this attribute cannot contain more than one author on Mastodon, but this might change. Theauthor_*
attributes will be deprecated. —PR #30846 (by Gargron)
- new feature
Mastodon now has account hover cards that show when hovering over an account name. We are still gathering feedback and tuning the feature, but it should be especially useful with the new grouped notifications. —
PR #30754 (by Gargron)
We are currently working on:
- Finishing the frontend part of the grouped notifications feature. This is a lot of work to get all specific behaviour implemented, but we are nearing the end. We intend to release this as an experimental, opt-in, feature at first for a few weeks, to ensure it behaves correctly both in the UI and in terms of performance. This is the last piece to complete before the 4.3 beta can be released!
- Thinking about link preview federation. The first step is listing everything related to this concept, potential issues, points of concern… and then, trying to find all possible ways of solving the issues. More news on this topic in the upcoming weeks!
Android
- Redesigned the “news” tab, to align with the web version.
- Implemented support for
fediverse:creator
display in link previews. - Polished the upcoming in-app donation feature.
- Multiple bug fixes and small improvements.
iOS
- Implemented support for
fediverse:creator
display in link previews. - Fixed multiple bugs related to the translation feature.
- New privacy & safety screen.
- Reworked and fixed timeline loading.
- Other bug fixes and stability improvements.
The focus for July on iOS will be on adding support for Lists, and the new grouped notifications feature coming in 4.3.
Around the community
If you’re building something using Mastodon or the Mastodon API, let us know about it (you can use the #MastodonAPI hashtag, if you like). Here are some things we noticed this month that we thought you might like to know about, too!
- Not one but two new things from Stefan Bohacek: a pinned posts organizer, and a series of Fediverse explorations. Thanks for sharing, Stefan!
- Frederik Elwert posted about a bookmarks app. It is an additional way to search your bookmarks on Mastodon (tip: you can use the
in:collection
search operator to search your bookmarks, but that includes likes as well). - Hexmasteen posted that SocialHubIO now supports Mastodon.
Thank you for using Mastodon
We’re happy to be able to build a platform that matters to so many people around the world. Spread the word!
Thank you for supporting Mastodon
We develop and maintain the free and open-source software that powers the social web. There is no capital behind this—we rely entirely on your support through platforms like Patreon.