Trunk & Tidbits, May 2026

Welcome to the 26th edition of Trunks & Tidbits!

It is a bit later than usual, but a lot happened in May.

First of all, we welcomed Pia into the team as a backend developer. This new hire was made possible by our recently announced contract with the Sovereign Tech Agency and will help us deliver all of those features.

Releases

We worked hard preparing the Mastodon 4.6 release, along with a blog post outlining the major changes for API users and Fediverse implementors. As of this writing, Mastodon 4.6 has been released, you can learn more about it in our announcement blog post.

We also released a few patch versions to fix security issues in supported versions. At the time of this publication, the latest supported versions are 4.6.2, 4.5.13 and 4.4.18. We strongly suggest administrators to update to those versions as soon as possible.

We also published Mastodon 4.3.23 with some security fixes, but Mastodon 4.3 has now reached end of life, as announced previously, and will not get any additional updates. We advise Mastodon administrators running 4.3 update to the latest version available.

To get the latest updates on our releases, you can follow our Mastodon Engineering account.

Backend & Web

In May 2026 we reviewed and merged 209 Pull Requests (141, not counting translation and dependency updates) from 21 contributors.

Our active projects (collections and emoji frontend refactor) got a lot of small fixes and tweaks in advance of the 4.6 release.

On the collection front, we marked the API as stable, removed the need for a feature flag, and published the relevant API documentation.

Other notable changes include:

• Added an admin interface to manage the new email subscriptions feature: — PR #38741 (by Gargron)
• Improved the moderation panel:
  • Add search to email blocks page: — PR #38923 (by arte7)
  • Allow batch actions on collections: — PR #38991 (by arte7)
• Improved Mastodon’s accessibility, including:
  • Improved visibility of focus indicators on search fields and the composer: — PR #39120 (by diondiondion) — PR #39120 (by diondiondion)
  • Add landmark regions to web app & settings: — PR #39133 (by diondiondion) — PR #39129 (by diondiondion)
  • Use a list markup for navigation lists: — PR #39145 (by diondiondion) — PR #39144 (by diondiondion)
  • Fix gaps in heading levels: — PR #39149 (by diondiondion)
  • Fix focus order of post elements not matching visual reading order: — PR #39169 (by diondiondion)
• Improved Emoji search: — PR #39008 (by chaosexanima) — PR #39077 (by chaosexanima) — PR #39167 (by chaosexanima)
• Added a new “Overview” option for the server landing page setting, which shows a simplified page with your server info and the latest posts — PR #39074 (by Gargron)

Android & iOS

On Android, we released the 2.12.0 update implementing new generic notifications and admin-specific notifications, as well as adding view-only support for collections (full support will be coming in a future version).

On iOS, we released version 2026.03 with a full redesign of the profile screen consistent with Mastodon 4.6, support for generic notifications, and view-only support for collections.

Thanks

Thanks for reading! Excited about what we’re working on? We are a non-profit team running on a very tight budget. Please consider supporting us with a small, recurring donation!