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.

In case you missed it

• At the start of December, our Developer Relations lead, Andy, gave the opening keynote at RubyWorld 2024 in Japan (including a video message from Eugen). The topic was The Social Web: Decentralization and Building a Better Internet, and included the important role that Ruby plays in Mastodon’s development. You can read the full script of the talk, and also access the slides.

• During December, the project published the Annual Report for 2023.
• We secured a table at FOSDEM 2025: find us at H14. We will also be part of the Social Web track (more on this below), and attend the Social Web After Hours meetup.
• We’ve opened a new role on the team, for a front-end web developer.

Post by @MastodonEngineering@mastodon.social

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Releases

No release updates during December: the latest released versions remain 4.3.2, 4.2.14, and 4.1.21.

As a reminder, Mastodon 4.1.x is now deprecated, which means that it will reach End of Life and no longer receive updates on April 8, 2025. If you own an instance running 4.1.x, please update to 4.2.x or 4.3.x soon.

We recommend that owners / administrators of Mastodon instances upgrade to the latest available versions, as appropriate to their environments.

Code updates

In December, we reviewed and merged 187 Pull Requests (127 with translation and dependency updates removed) from 17 authors. This was a quieter month, as the team was away for the holiday break.

Backend

Android

Nothing significant to report for December.

iOS

Our final release of 2024 brought improvements to the compose window and the timeline.

The app is now less likely to freeze up while you’re typing out a post, and the post compose view won’t disappear (along with all your typing…) until after the post has successfully published.

In the timeline, link previews no longer show large blank spaces for images that never arrive, and compact link previews show all the expected information.

We also fixed a problem where images and avatars could show up with posts they didn’t belong to, and one where GIFs in content-warned or filtered posts were not blurred out. Filters set to hide, really do remove posts from your timeline completely now, and tap targets in the post header are easier to hit (for the author name, action menu button, and show/hide button).

In the coming months, we will continue improving stability and fixing small UI issues while working towards supporting grouped notifications, and updating post layouts to the latest design.

Documentation and website

We continue to get great community contributions for the documentation repository, and will work on improving our rate of review here during 2025.

The code for the main joinmastodon.org website has a backlog of dependency updates via Renovate, including some with React components that contain breaking changes. If you would like to help out here, please take a look - we would welcome the additional help to get things to a better state!

Fediscovery Project

We merged our first draft of the data sharing specification. We also have a working proof of concept provider implementation, along with the Mastodon integration.

Work is now focused on the first real capability, trends (for which we have a first specification draft), and the implementation of the reference provider software.

You can learn more about Fediscovery at FOSDEM - check out David’s talk on Saturday afternoon.

Thanks

The past year has been a period of change and growth, inside and outside of the Mastodon project - new team members, new organisations forming in the Fediverse, more people discovering that there is an opportunity to choose better social media. If you read the news about the organisational change over the coming months, you will see that we plan to continue to build Mastodon for everyone.

Thank you for your support, and for your contributions.