Trunk & Tidbits, May 2025

Hello again! Thank you for reading our monthly engineering team update, we’re happy to share what we’ve been working on.

Events

We had a busy May, with several events that we participated in, or organized. The biggest one was re:publica in Berlin, where several members of the Mastodon team were able to meet with the community, talk about the project, and share our plans for the future.

In particular, the team hosted a community meetup at the Wikimedia offices, to discuss the latest developments in Mastodon. At re:publica itself, Philip was on stage for a conversation about Mastodon as open infrastructure, and Felix joined a discussion about large scale adoption of independent social media platforms.

There is a range of very active conversations about the Fediverse happening right now, particularly (but not exclusively) in Europe, and we are grateful to be taking part in them.

Releases

At the very beginning of May (just before last month’s blog post) we released Mastodon versions 4.3.8 and 4.2.21 - hopefully you’ll already have updated to one of these stable versions.

We’ve now released the first beta of Mastodon 4.4.0.

Post by @MastodonEngineering@mastodon.social

View on Mastodon

The plan is to release a second beta in the next few days, with a release candidate to follow. We hope to make the final release by the end of June.

There are a lot of great new features in this release, so take a look at the release notes. We will be sharing more details for developers and for users in the coming weeks as we get towards the final release.

Backend and web

In May, we reviewed and merged 180 Pull Requests (114 with translation and dependency updates removed) from 17 contributors.

Android

No significant updates shipped in May.

iOS

On iOS, work continues on overhauling the basic post layout (currently only available to beta testers). A few smaller fixes will likely be coming soon.

Fediscovery

We implemented the follow_recommendation capability in our discovery provider reference implementation, fediscoverer.

In May, work began to get fediscoverer closer to production readiness. There is still a way to go, but we are making steady progress.

Community news

We are always happy to see the community building on Mastodon, and this month we have a few interesting tidbits to share:

• Tom Casavant shared a post about using Meshtastic to post to Mastodon from over a mile away!
• Oliphaunt is a native macOS app for Mastodon that can be tried via TestFlight.
• Splinter is a tool for Mastodon threads - it turns long articles into threads and posts them for you automatically.
• Beej shared a blog post with a method for using Mastodon to add comments to a static blog.
• Masto2RSS creates RSS feeds containing links shared on Mastodon timelines.

Thank you - and, we need your help

If you appreciate the work we do, and want to support the project, consider becoming a patron or making a donation. We are a non-profit organisation, and we rely on your contributions. The team is grateful for your support.