Trunk & Tidbits, September 2024

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:

Special thanks to @JoeDupuis, for submitting a PR to migrate to a new Paperclip Adapter for Azure Storage. This means Azure storage support will not be deprecated, and Mastodon 4.4 will switch to this new library.

With the 4.3 release complete, we’re turning our focus to 4.4, which will include:

• Quote Posts: We are resuming work on this long-awaited feature, and it will be our main focus for the rest of the year.
• Block list improvements: We are evaluating several improvements, including subscribing to external blocklists and offering an optional default “worst of the worst” blocklist for new Mastodon installs. We’re also exploring ways for operators to approve blocks from external lists.
• Post Parsing: We’re experimenting with potentially changing to a new parser for posts, which will be more modular and enable features like basic text formatting.

Mobile apps

iOS

We completed the recruitment of our new iOS developer; she will begin in 2 weeks. We received our first application on 25 July, and closed the role just over 9 weeks later - a great turnaround given that our recruitment team was away for 3 weeks during the summer.

Thanks to our incredible community and network, the quality of candidates was the strongest we’ve ever seen!

Fun fact: Out of 46 applicants that applied, we interviewed 39% of them - the highest conversion from the application form to a screening interview we’ve had.

Android

During September, we landed a number of updates in the Android app to support the new features in 4.3:

• Grouped notifications are now available for users on servers running Mastodon 4.3.
• Posts and notifications were redesigned to match the latest look and feel.
• Notifications about the impact of domain blocks (lost follow connections) are now available.

Fediscovery

At the September Fediforum event, we introduced the Fediverse Discovery Providers project, also known as Fediscovery. If you’ve been following the Trunk & Tidbits series, you’ll remember we mentioned plans to share more details about this initiative. This project is funded by the European Commission through the NGI Search program.

As part of this work, we released the first specification for “Fediverse Auxiliary Service Providers.” This will enable Fediverse server operators to opt in to additional services that extend the capabilities of their software. You can find all the details in our repository, and we encourage your feedback.

We’re currently experimenting with the first building block: allowing a provider to receive data (such as accounts and statuses) from connected instances.

A big shout out to one of our core developers, David, for leading this effort!

From the wider community

One of our community members, @gee@framapiaf.org, recently pointed out that you can now add your Mastodon profile link to your Steam profile. Meanwhile, our developer advocate Andy has suggested to Ko-fi that they add Mastodon as a social media option, but we’re still waiting for them to implement it. It would be great to see more platforms supporting Fediverse profiles!

Thank you

We truly appreciate your support and feedback. September was a fantastic month, with two betas and a release candidate for 4.3, and your comments and input helped to shape the final release. We hope you enjoy the new features and improvements - we’re already working on more for the future.

As always, if you want to help us, we appreciate your donations.