Trunk & Tidbits, July 2024

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:

• Changing the filtered notifications, taking user feedback of the initial experience into account.
• Polishing the new grouped notifications, based on feedback and on and some performance data we are gathering.
• Discussing the best way to let applications know what is supported by the Mastodon API on a given instance. Currently, developers needs to either use the Mastodon version (not precise enough) or probe for API availability, which is painful and brittle.
• Releasing the first 4.3 beta. We have been saying this for some time now, but this is still our priority!

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 mastodon.social and mastodon.online for now, but is part of a bigger project to improve the Fediverse’s sustainability, and we plan to expand it to more instances later, allowing the instance administrators to more easily fund the infrastructure, while also supporting financing of the development of the software.

We also updated the app description in the Play Store to better explain what Mastodon is, and what it brings to users.

iOS

• This has been a long-requested feature: you can now access your lists and followed hashtags from the app! Creating or editing lists is not there yet, but will be added in a future release.
• The new 4.3 filtered notifications feature is available in the app. It does not yet mirror the latest experience from the web (because we are still iterating on it), but the basics are there.
• Other bug fixes and stability improvements, including fixing the widgets and shortcuts, as well as correctly counting URLs as 23 characters, regardless of their actual size.

You can explore these improvements in the 2024.8 release of the app, and read the full release notes on GitHub.

Community radar

We’re always interested to hear what you’re building using the Mastodon API. This month, our Developer Advocate Andy has been trying some of the nice command-line / terminal client apps that exist for Mastodon, for example toot and tut - should we add a section to the client apps section of the website for these? Are there more of them that we don’t know about yet? Let us know what you think.

If you are interested in trains and railways, you may also be interested in Stefan Bohacek’s recently launched @trainstations@botsin.space bot. What are your favourite friendly, fun or useful bots? Let Andy know, and we may feature some in a future update.

Thank you for using Mastodon

We are extremely grateful to have such an incredible community of users who believe in what we’re building, and contributors who support us in the code and documentation. Your support and engagement are what make Mastodon a platform that matters.