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.
We worked hard preparing the Mastodon 4.6 release, along with a…
In case you missed it, a lot has happened in the European social web community over the last few weeks. We’re thrilled about these developments and wanted to share our perspective on what ties them together.
Until now, many have thought of the open social web as a technical movement. It’s so much more. The social web is a social movement. Of course there is no one true path to success for all…
After many months of design, development, gathering feedback, and testing, today we’re releasing a big update with Mastodon 4.6. The headliner of this release is Collections, a way to create and share curated collections of profiles. Part of Mastodon’s work ethos is our commitment to trust and safety, so we’ve put a lot of thought and care into the design of this feature to avoid some of the…
The European Commission has just released a major strategy on technological sovereignty, and it’s placing open source software squarely in the spotlight. The message is clear: open source is key to true digital independence.
Right now, Europe depends on non-EU tech providers for over 80% of critical digital infrastructure, and that’s a problem. The EU’s new approach to open digital ecosystems…
Welcome to the 25th edition of Trunks & Tidbits!
Looking back at April:
Over the past couple of decades, the concept of the “social” internet has come a long way - from the first interactive websites and the Web 2.0 era, blogs and self-publishing, the ability for people to create and share their own content online, through microblogging to broadcasting at scale. Today, what we know as “social media” is having a huge impact on society - often, taken advantage of in…
Hello everyone! I’m Renaud, and I’m the Technical Director at Mastodon. I’ve also been the technical lead for delivering Mastodon releases for several years now. This post is co-written with Imani, our lead product designer.
Mastodon continues to grow as more people seek alternatives to centralised social media and closed social networks. Today, we’re sharing our vision for making the Fediverse…
In November 2025, we shared our new organisational structure, and explained that the process to establish a new, non-profit, home for the project in Europe is well underway.
In the same post, we also mentioned that our German-based organisation has had its former charitable status removed. As a result, we are making necessary changes to some of the legal terminology across the project, and on…
Profiles are the primary way for people using Mastodon to ‘meet’ one another on a deeper level – beyond a threaded conversation or search results. You might have noticed that the overall design of Profiles hasn’t been explored in a while, and in the meantime, we’ve heard requests and challenges from people who use Mastodon every day.
The profile redesign supports some of our current…
Have you ever wondered why news articles around the web have buttons to share to some of those other social sites, but not on Mastodon? There used to be a legitimate reason for this: unlike legacy social, Mastodon isn’t a single monolithic website you can link to; there are over 8,000 places where a person could have a Mastodon account! Their account could be on mastodon.social, the large,…
We are delighted to announce that Mastodon has been awarded a €614k service agreement by the Sovereign Tech Fund (@SovTechFund) to support improvements and updates to Mastodon and the broader software ecosystem. Out of the total amount, €90k is set aside to be shared with other Fediverse projects that choose to implement the protocols developed during the work - more on this, below.
Mastodon’s…
We’ve just released two new t-shirts on our shop, based on slogan suggestions from the community, and featuring lovely artwork from our artist Dopatwo. One is “My friends are not for sale”, and the other is “I write ALT text”. We’ve chosen quality over quantity, as we often do, by screen printing the designs on high-quality, organic cotton. As someone who’s bought a lot of band merch over the…
Welcome to Mastodon’s monthly product and engineering update, looking back at January 2026.
We’ve just published a recap of our visit to FOSDEM 2026. We’ve had feedback that some event updates were a bit buried in the Trunk & Tidbits posts; and, that the results and outcomes of our team presence at events could be made more clear. We’ve heard you, and we’ll be posting these…
People come to the Fediverse to connect with others around communities and topics of interest. We’ve seen people enjoy their time on Mastodon the most, when they can follow and engage with individuals and organisations that have interesting things to share. We want to help those who are new to the Fediverse discover these communities more easily.
Back in October 2025, we shared our initial ideas…
Hi, I’m Hannah. I’m a community builder and long-time professional social media poster, though most of my “greatest hits” weren’t under my own name. I’ve managed and contributed to social accounts for a blowtorch manufacturer, a fancy hand soap maker, a Chicago-based foodservice company, and ultimately, tech companies. (That last one is how I found my way to open source — but that’s a rerun…
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.
This year, the Mastodon team returned to FOSDEM for the third time. FOSDEM is an annual gathering of open source developers, held in Brussels. We’re excited to report that the Fediverse is feeling vibrant!
FOSDEM has become a central element of EU Open Source Week - a series of events, meetups and workshops that have formed around the conference itself. The range of events makes this trip to…
Welcome to the 24th edition of Trunk & Tidbits 🎉 We’ve been publishing this monthly series, “behind the scenes of the code” from the Mastodon team, for a whole two years now!
We’re getting close to the release of Mastodon 4.6. In the past few weeks we published two feature updates about things you’ll see in the next version:
When people think about running a Mastodon instance they often picture servers, code, and technical infrastructure. They’re right! That’s important and non-trivial work, but it’s not the only kind of work involved in building a Mastodon community. The “people” work is just as hard, if not harder.
Yehuda and Tzipporah are the grandfather and grandkid duo that co-founded the instance Turtle Island…
