Trunk & Tidbits, February 2026

Welcome to our monthly engineering update. The team is continuing to work on the next major version of Mastodon (4.6), as well as maintaining the current stable releases.

Before we dive in to our regular review of code changes and updates from the past month, there are a number of items that we wanted to highlight this time around.

• We are hiring! We’re looking for two Ruby on Rails developers to work with us on the backend of the software. More information here.
• We’re pleased to be able to share that Mastodon GmbH has formally joined the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the multi-stakeholder community organisation that develops standards like ActivityPub. We look forward to collaborating in the evolution of the open social web through the Social Web Working Group. Several members of the team took part in the first meeting of the group at the end of last week, and we are excited to be part of this important work.
• Authenticity and connection are core elements of Mastodon’s mission. The project has now added an AI Contribution Policy to the set of documents that define how we work. Many other open source projects have been adopting similar policies over the past year or so. We are grateful for the work of projects such as CloudNativePG and Ghostty (as well as others), from whom we’ve borrowed in creating our guidance.
• In case you missed it: back in November 2025, we adopted the Contributor Covenant, version 3.0, as our community Code of Conduct. We want to remind everyone that participation in the Mastodon project and community spaces is subject to the Code of Conduct - it is a crucial part of how we keep our community safe and welcoming for everyone.

Releases

At the end of February, we shipped point updates for each of the current release streams: 4.5.7, 4.4.14, 4.3.20. Note that versions 4.5.7 and 4.4.14 specifically include security fixes.

As usual, we strongly recommend that server operators upgrade to the most recent release of the version they are running. This helps keep your systems up-to-date with bug fixes, and provides a more consistent experience for people who use Mastodon.

Also, we need to remind you that version 4.3.x will not be supported after 06 May 2026 - please move to a more current version before then.

Beyond the Mastodon server code, we also shipped something new - a Share button that anyone can include in their websites. There have been a number of other ways to implement sharing before now - thank you to everyone who has been promoting the Fediverse! We’ve regularly been asked to create something like this, and that is why we built it. The code is open source, so feel free to have a look at how it works.

Backend and Web

In February 2026 we reviewed and merged 230 Pull Requests (166 with translation and dependency updates removed) from 14 contributors.

Version 4.6 will include a couple of changes that we plan to share separate blog posts about in the coming weeks. The first of these is Collections; we previously wrote about this new way to curate follower recommendations, and this is well into implementation. Another update is an overhaul and redesign of the profile page, and we’ll have more to explain about the design choices here soon. As a result, a lot of the work this month is clustered in these two areas.

Android

Most of the Android work during February was related to the upcoming profile redesign.

iOS

A small update should be arriving soon (as version 2026.02), but most effort continues to go into the profile redesign implementation.

Community

A bumper month for news and projects from around the community!

The new share button can be used in different ways. Coywolf explains how to customise it for a WordPress site, and Roy Scholten has a similar post for Hugo and static site generators (as a side note, we’ve been using the button on our blog for a while now - you can see it in the top right corner of this page!).

There are a couple of other interesting blog posts from around the community. Terence Eden writes about adding Log In With Mastodon to Auth0. Multi-time Trunk & Tidbits featured contributor Stefan Bohacek has a new tool for sending Fediverse Invitations to friends, where you can include recommended apps and other information of your choice.

On the code projects side of things, we spotted an RSS-to-Mastodon app that can help with cross-posting, if that is something you might find useful.

There were also a few client apps released over the past month that may be of interest:

• Elefeed is an experimental web client that allows you to view your feed with and without followed hashtags, etc.
• CrowFi is a recently-released iOS client app;
• Oliphaunt is a macOS client app;
• MastoBlaster is an iOS app currently on TestFlight, that works with Mastodon servers and with other Fediverse servers, specifically snac.

It is exciting to see so many interesting new things happening around the ecosystem!

We appreciate you

As always, we want to take the time to say Thank You for following our project, and for being a part of the community. We’re building a more human internet together, and we value your support. See you back here next month!