Mastodon Release Notes

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 priorities:

• Make the Fediverse Intuitive. We want people who are new to Mastodon and the Fediverse to be able to discover and connect with interesting accounts, without having to understand the details of decentralisation. The new Profiles view includes an updated handle explainer, and a new editing experience delivers a more consistent, unified experience across web and native mobile apps.
• A Home for Everyone. As well as individuals, Mastodon is also home to organisations (NGOs, local governments, software projects, etc) that want to share news and interact with their communities. The layout changes offer us a solid starting point from which to explore features that will help these “institutional users” to make their most out of their presence in the Fediverse.

Our approach

Learning from the community

In addition to reviewing community requests related to profiles, we surveyed more than 500 people across over 300 servers, to understand what profile information they prioritise when it comes to identifying whether an account is trustworthy (and therefore, worth following). We also analysed patterns from other apps that respondents mentioned they frequently use.

Technical constraints

We’re currently constrained within the existing 3-column layout on desktop.
We also know that improvements could be made to the custom fields feature, but structural and backend changes to custom fields were out of scope for this work.

What’s changing

Profile viewing

The new ‘Activity’ tab offers granular filtering of posts

Previously, there have been two tabs for “Posts” and “Posts and replies.” It turns out that this was misleading (the “Posts” tab also included boosts); and, that there was no way for you to view an account’s activity with the granularity that you can after following them – no view for Posts only, for example.
There are, in fact, 4 distinct views that you may want to see:
Posts, Posts+boosts, Posts+replies, or Posts+boosts+replies. Providing this granularity led us to adopt a more appropriate UI over displaying each of these as tabs.
The new Activity tab has a dropdown menu, allowing you to view any of these combinations by filtering both boosts and replies. It is optimised to work equally well for you on the desktop as on mobile, and also if you use the advanced interface for desktop.

Featured hashtags are more discoverable and contextual

Hashtags can provide you with topic-based discovery. In the new Profile view, you can view hashtags contextually within the Activity tab, and click on them for a filtered view of the account’s tagged posts.

It’s easier to view all pinned posts

Some people have expressed frustration over pinned posts being buried in a carousel. We understand this concern, and are also balancing the needs of people who are browsing others’ profiles who have shared that they want easy access to recent posts.
Informed by data on the number of pinned posts across Mastodon profiles, we’ve replaced the carousel with an alternative form of progressive disclosure that allows you to reveal all pinned posts in a single click.

Updated handle explainers

One of our objectives is to make the Fediverse more intuitive for people who are non-technical. We’ve updated the handle explainer card to clarify what handles and servers are.
Additionally, the full profile handle (@[email protected]) now displays beneath the account’s display name, even if the account is on the same server as yours.

Custom fields are more compact

Custom fields display side-by-side when possible, making smarter utilisation of the Profile’s vertical space so that you get to the account’s content more swiftly.

Additional changes reduce visual load

People must be able to find the content they need. However, when all information displays at once, it impacts your ability to focus and complete tasks.
You might notice we’ve given less prominence to a few pieces of information. When introducing changes that add friction, we take into account both the frequency and importance of related actions.

Personal notes: The ‘Add a personal note’ action does not display as prominently on the profile; it is now accessed within the profile’s overflow menu. If a note exists, it still displays on the profile page, just as it has in the past.
‘Following you’: The ‘Following you’ badge no longer displays on the profile. People we surveyed ranked this information remarkably low in terms of establishing both trust and interest an account. You still have numerous options to understand whether someone is following you:

• The ‘Follow’ button: When you’re not following an account but the account follows you, the primary button label displays as “Follow back”.
• The accounts ‘Following’ list: If the account is following you, you will see yourself at the top of that account’s ‘Following’ list.
• Profile overflow menu: If the account is following you, a ‘Remove follower’ option appears in the overflow menu.
• Preview cards (desktop): When hovering over an account, the preview cards still show ‘Follows you’ and ‘You follow each other’ statuses.

Note: we’ve heard your feedback in the early roll-out, and the ‘Following you‘ badge has been brought back in the current development build; we’re still iterating on these changes, so look out for the release announcement (when 4.6 launches) for information about any other tweaks between now and then.

Profile editing

A unified editing experience

Previously, profile editing on web was hidden within account settings. You had to take multiple steps to navigate back to your profile view.
The new profile editing experience combines featured hashtags, link verification, and all other profile customisation in a single view. It’s easily accessible from an ‘Edit profile’ button directly on your profile – making switching between viewing and editing more seamless.

More control during image upload

You can now crop images, and add alt text to profile and cover photos.

Custom fields and verified links

Previously, custom field editing was only available on web, and lacked accessible form labels. Additionally, link verification – a powerful feature for establishing credibility – was hidden in profile settings.
Now, you can access link verification instructions directly from the custom field editing experience. You can also now add and edit custom fields in our iOS and Android apps.

Featured hashtags

Featured hashtags are a useful way of helping others discover topics you frequently post about. We’ve decreased the friction and guesswork in adding featured hashtags on web: Suggested hashtags will appear on your profile view, and can be bulk added in a single click.
For more granular control, hashtags can also be managed within the profile editor.
Basic functionality for featured hashtags is now supported on iOS and Android.

Customising tab displays

The editing experience includes profile tab display settings, allowing you to hide the ‘Media’ and ‘Featured’ tabs if desired.
Replies can also be excluded from the ‘Media’ tab, allowing for a more accurate gallery where creative people may showcase their work. We hope that these additional controls empower both people who use Mastodon day-to-day, and people who represent institutions.
Before the 4.6 release, profile tab customisations will only impact a few servers that are testing the new profile experience. After the 4.6 release, these customisations will be reflected on most servers running the latest version of Mastodon. Displays may vary on third-party apps and independent servers.

Availability

The new design will be visible on mastodon.social, and other servers that run nightly builds of Mastodon, from today. The goal is to do some testing ahead of the 4.6 release, and make any adjustments based on feedback (see below). The new look will roll out to all Mastodon servers, as part of Mastodon 4.6, coming in a few weeks.

We’re open to feedback

We’ve shared our thinking, and the choices we made in this redesign, in this post. If you have things you’d like to let us know related to these updates, contact us at [email protected]. We may not be able to respond to every individual message, but we’ll be reading every piece of feedback to inform our future plans.

Original source

Mastodon 4.5 has arrived, with enhanced conversations across communities, expanded moderator tools, and new ways for admins to showcase their server communities. Read on for more details.

As always, if you use mastodon.social, you may already have seen some of the updates as they gradually showed up across the user experience. Rolling out a new stable release enables us to share all of that goodness across the whole Mastodon community. We encourage all server operators to upgrade to Mastodon 4.5, starting today.

🔍 If you’re a developer building on Mastodon, you should check out our Mastodon 4.5 for Developers post, for all the additions and changes in the Mastodon API. 🛠

Quote Posts: Consent and Conversation

Quoting has been integral to deepening discussions online, and it’s now available in Mastodon 4.5. This release not only introduces authoring capabilities but also mechanisms prioritizing user safety and privacy. Authors can limit and disable quoting, both globally on the new Posting Defaults page, and individually on specific posts. Also, when quoted, they can easily revoke the use of their post.

Learn more about Quote posts in our previous blog post, our FAQ, and our developer implementation guide.

Fetch All Replies: Completing the Conversation Flow

Users on servers running 4.4 and earlier versions have likely experienced the confusion of seeing replies appearing on other servers but not their own. Mastodon 4.5 automatically checks for missing replies upon page load and again every 15 minutes, enhancing continuity of conversations across the Fediverse.

Enhanced Features for Server Administrators

For server operators, especially those running smaller, organisational instances, we continue to deliver new tools that enable greater instance customisation:

• Feed Management

The ability to disable some of the content feeds for either visitors or logged-in users, offering greater control over content flow.

• Visitor Homepage

In addition to trends or about pages, administrators can now set the local feed as the home page for visitors. This is useful for small organization servers where there are seldom any trending posts, allowing visitors to see local activity immediately.

• Targeted Blocking

Server owners now have tools to block specific usernames. This process can be configured with options for partial matches or character variations, or to mark a potential user match as needing review by a moderator.

• Moderation Context

The moderator interface has received improvements to display crucial context, such as link previews and quote posts in messages, supporting more rapid and informed decision-making.

Native Emoji support

The web interface now includes support for displaying native emoji. A new setting is available to manage how emoji appear to you.

Looking ahead

Our team is already working on Mastodon 4.6 (tentatively planned for the first quarter of next year). We shared our early explorations around Packs and are planning to include the first parts of this feature in our next version. It will also include improvements to onboarding, and some features targeted toward institutions with a presence on Mastodon, thanks to a grant by NLNet and NGI Zero Commons Fund.

We just updated our public roadmap to provide better transparency on what is currently in the works, and what we are planning to focus on next.

Support Mastodon

Thank you to everyone that contributed to this release, including our team, our community, and the many contributors from across the Fediverse. We’re excited to continue building Mastodon together with you.

We’re going through a formal process of setting up a new European non-profit organisation (more update on this topic very soon!) so that Mastodon remains free, open, and not owned by any single individual .

We depend on your support as we build, support, and advocate for decentralised and non-commercial social media.

We don’t take venture capital, we don’t sell ads, and we don’t sell your data - unlike many other platforms out there.

Please support our mission, so that we can continue to make Mastodon better.

Thank you for supporting Mastodon

We develop and maintain the free and open source software that powers the social web. There is no capital behind this — we rely entirely on your support.

Original source

Over the years, we’ve learned just how essential quoting is to many of you. When done responsibly, quoting allows us to expand discussions, make new connections, and amplify underrepresented voices.

Quoting is a powerful tool, and like any tool, it can be misused. That’s why we’ve taken time to introduce quotes in a way that aligns with Mastodon values, focusing on safety and mental health – not just on engagement. We shared our thinking about bringing quote posts to Mastodon earlier in the year.

Found something inspiring? Quote your favourite posts from where you typically boost them. Don’t want to be quoted? Disable quoting by default for all posts, or turn off quoting for a specific post. Want your thoughts to inspire a wider audience? Keep the default setting enabled to ‘Anyone’. You’re in control of how much or how little you engage.

Quote post functionality will arrive on mastodon.online and mastodon.social next week, and will be available in Mastodon 4.5 soon thereafter. Read on for a more detailed look at how quote posts will look and function in Mastodon 4.5.

Quote anyone who wants to be quoted

Quoting from the Boost menu

If an author of a post has enabled quoting, you’ll see an option to quote their post under a new menu accessed from the Boost button. Your post will then appear within the composer window, where you can add your comment and post to continue the discussion.

Power booster? You can still boost quickly using Shift + Click on the Boost button or using the B hotkey.

Quote responsibly. Authors can remove their post if they’re uncomfortable with the way you’ve quoted them. See Notifications and Revocation for more details.

Quoting across the Fediverse

Mastodon shares space in the Fediverse with other software that may behave differently. In practice, it means it’s possible that when you quote a post from another Fediverse platform, it may take some time for the quote to appear. When the content is available, it will automatically update on your post.

We worked on a technical specification for the Fediverse that offers the concept of consent-respecting quote posts. We’ve also collaborated with other apps and services to make this work between platforms. We expect that not every platform will update to use this specification right away, but we hope to see more of them do so in the future.

You’re in control of who quotes you

Default settings

Disable or limit quotes by navigating to Settings -> Preferences -> Posting Defaults. These defaults will apply to all future posts you create.

(Note: if your server is running Mastodon 4.4.x, you will find this setting under Settings -> Preferences -> Other instead)

Your visibility setting controls options for who can quote. When you make a followers-only post, others (including followers) won’t be able to quote it – this ensures that your post remains visible to only your followers.

Post-level settings

Override your global settings for an individual post by navigating to Visibility and interaction settings within the composer.

Notifications and revocation

When someone quotes one of your posts, you’ll be notified. You can easily remove your original post from theirs, using the ••• Options menu.

Sometimes, removing your post from a single quote may not be enough. If you believe someone is abusing the ability to quote you, you can also take the following actions:

• Block the user. While this action won’t retroactively remove your post from posts the user has already published, it will prevent the user from quoting you in future posts.
• Change the quote settings for your published post. The next section outlines how to do this.

Changing quote settings on a published post

On your own published posts, edit the quote settings from the ••• menu. Changes will prevent users from quoting your post in the future, but will not apply retroactively to quotes already published.

Only public and quiet public posts can be edited this way; your followers-only posts and direct mentions can only ever be quoted by you.

Stay tuned

As we mentioned at the start, quote post functionality will arrive on mastodon.online and mastodon.social next week. If you use a third-party app, the feature may not show up right away, and you may need to wait for the author to add it. It will be available more widely when Mastodon 4.5 is released in the near future.

Developing a Mastodon client? Visit our draft developer implementation guide and documentation.

For more information on how to use quote posts, have a look at the FAQ section of the documentation.

If you’d like to preemptively opt out of being quoted, you can do so on Mastodon 4.4 under Settings -> Preferences -> Other.

We’re committed to making quote posts a tool for meaningful discourse. If you have thoughts on our quote post feature, contact us at [email protected]. We may not be able to respond to every individual message, but we’ll be reading every piece of feedback to learn more about your ideas.

Gratitude

We’d like to thank the NGI Entrust Fund and NLNet for their support towards building this feature for Mastodon and ActivityPub.

Original source

Mastodon 4.4 is here, bringing you new ways to showcase yourself, manage your growing network, and enjoy what’s in your timeline. Administrators and moderators also gain new tools for keeping communities safe.

As always, if you use mastodon.social, you may already have seen some of the updates as they gradually showed up across the user experience. Rolling out a new stable release enables us to share all of that goodness across the whole Mastodon community. We encourage all server operators to upgrade to Mastodon 4.4, starting today.

🔍 If you’re a developer building on Mastodon, you should check out our Mastodon 4.4 for Developers post, for all the additions and changes in the Mastodon API. 🛠

Profiles, and managing your network

Your profile is the main way that people find out more about you on Mastodon, and we want to make it easier to navigate it and highlight what you’re about.

Do you post all of your cat pictures under #CatsOfMastodon? Simply tap “Feature on my profile” on the hashtag page, and people will be able to browse all of your #CatsOfMastodon posts specifically from the new “Featured” tab on your profile. Do you want to promote cool and interesting accounts? Tap “Feature on my profile” on a person’s profile, and they will likewise appear on your “Featured” tab.

On Mastodon, you can pin up to 5 posts on your profile, so you can feature your best work, or plug your latest project. The downside is that if you wanted to see someone’s most recent post, it introduced a bit of scrolling to get there. No more! We’ve reduced the amount of scrolling you have to do, by combining all pinned posts in a single carousel at the top of the profile.

To make it easier to see at a glance if the profile belongs to someone you might know, we’ve added a little widget showing how many of the people you follow are following that person to the top of their profile. This also shows up in the profile preview that appears when you hover over their name somewhere else. Don’t want someone to follow you anymore? You don’t have to block them, simply tap “Remove follower” in the dropdown menu on their profile.

Enhanced list management

Lists in Mastodon allow you to declutter your home feed by organising accounts you follow into arbitrary alternative feeds. Creating and managing lists has been significantly streamlined, and it’s easier than ever to add and remove accounts from your lists both directly from profiles and from your own follows and followers listings.

Media controls

Mastodon doesn’t just support pictures and videos—you can upload audio on the platform. Since every Mastodon profile comes with an RSS feed, some people actually publish their podcasts this way. We’ve just given our audio player a facelift, making it a bit more visually pleasant and a lot easier to use by putting the play and pause front and centre and adding quick shortcuts for skipping forward and backward. We’ve also expanded hotkey controls for audio and video: left and right arrow to skip around, up and down arrow to control the volume, “m” to mute, “f” for full screen, and so on.

If you like to pixel-peek images, or admire the pleasant grain of scanned in analogue photos, we’ve made zooming in more intuitive: simply double tap the image once you’ve clicked to open it. Panning around has also been made smoother. On touch devices, you can now pinch the image with your fingers to zoom it to the desired level, and swiping up when the image is zoomed out will close it, like you would expect from your native photo app.

We are proud of Mastodon’s strong accessibility and inclusivity culture, which has fostered a larger presence of vision impaired users. To support this community, we’ve added a new reminder to add alt text when posting images or video. Alt text isn’t just helpful to those who use screen readers: it can provide extra context to sighted users, and as it’s indexed in Mastodon’s search system, it can help you and others find your post better. Of course, this reminder can be disabled from preferences. We’ve also added some tips on writing good alt text into the user interface.

Navigation enhancements

We’ve revamped the mobile web interface to mimic native apps, with important actions easily accessible in a bottom toolbar that frees up more space for your timeline. We’ve also begun experimenting with ways to make navigation more consistent across devices, and to make relevant content (like followed hashtags and trending content) more easily discoverable. The Explore item has been renamed to Trending, to reduce the need for banners within the Explore page to explain each feed. The navigation sidebar is divided into three sections. At the top is a section for the main navigation areas, which mirrors the bottom navigation bar on smaller screens. Next, a “Library” section, which contains your own curated content - bookmarks, favourites, and lists, and your followed hashtags, now in a more visible location (in response to community feedback). Finally, other elements are in the last section. This brings all the navigation elements into a single place.

We’ve also streamlined the onboarding flow for new users. What used to be a list of four items you could check off as part of onboarding, has become a simpler two-step process where you first fill out your profile, and then follow a few users of your choosing. Importantly, we’ve made search an integral part of this process so people don’t feel confined to the list of recommended accounts we’ve generated for them, but can feel free to immediately begin searching for people they might know.

Features for Administrators

We’ve made a range of updates and improvements for people who operate their own Mastodon servers. Some of these are legal compliance features, such as adding and managing Terms of Service, offering translations of server rules into different languages, and optionally setting a minimum age requirement for new user sign-ups. Our earlier blog post covers each of these topics in more detail.

As well as the legal features, there are a couple of other useful items that administrators should look at. Server owners can now send important announcements to all users via email, for critical communications that cannot be opted out of (essential for emergency notifications, or major policy changes). There is also a new system for moderators to keep internal notes about moderation decisions and user interactions. This should help to improve coordination across moderation teams, and help to keep track of decision making.

Quote Posts (part one)

Earlier in the year, we shared our thought process about bringing the much-requested Quote Posts feature to Mastodon. We’ve worked hard on bringing this capability to the platform while maintaining the strong safety principles that Mastodon is known for. Since Mastodon runs on over 8,000 independent servers that together form the platform you know, releasing features like this requires a two-pronged approach: first we release code that supports processing and displaying this new format, and then release code that allows our users to actively use the feature. This ensures all of our users can see this new type of content before anyone can create it. As part of our 4.4 release, you will be able to see quotes from compatible Fediverse platforms (including future Mastodon releases), but you will not yet be able to quote posts yourself. That capability will come in 4.5.

Looking ahead

We’re really happy that this is the first version released by our expanded team as a whole! We have some exciting plans, and will get moving towards version 4.5 right away.

Key items for the next few months include: enabling anyone to create Quote Posts; some new features for organisations that run their own servers (for example, greater instance customisation); and, the ability to fetch replies to posts from many different instances, to improve the ability to follow conversations that include people your server is not yet aware of.

We plan to have 4.5 ready for everyone later in the year, and we have a lot of other exciting things to work on once the next release is ready. Stay tuned!

Support Mastodon

Thank you to everyone that contributed to this release, including our team, our community, and the many contributors from across the Fediverse. We’re excited to continue building Mastodon together with you.

We’re going through a formal process of setting up a new European non-profit organisation so that Mastodon remains free, open, and not owned by any single individual (more updates on our progress, very soon).

We depend on your support as we build, support, and advocate for decentralised and non-commercial social media.

We don’t take venture capital, we don’t sell ads, and we don’t sell your data - unlike many other platforms out there.

Please support our mission, so that we can continue to make Mastodon better.

Thank you for supporting Mastodon

We develop and maintain the free and open source software that powers the social web. There is no capital behind this — we rely entirely on your support.

Original source

Mastodon 4.3 just landed! If you’re a mastodon.social user, you might have already seen some of this in action as we’ve been gradually rolling out these updates over the course of the last 11 months in nightly releases, but we’re finally making a new stable release available to the community. If you use a different server, you will get access to these improvements once your server operator upgrades.

Notifications

On Mastodon, your experience depends a lot on the moderation style of the server that hosts your account, but your unique ability to choose a server that suits your needs the best is useless if you don’t have much insight into how moderation decisions impact you. If a moderator decision results in you losing followers, or no longer being able to follow people from another server, you will now be notified and have the ability to export a list of the affected profiles.

Also, if a moderator decision targets your account specifically, you will now receive an in-app notification so you can’t miss it.

We’re also bringing two new major features to help people deal with unwanted attention. Notification grouping has arrived in Mastodon, allowing you to make sense of your notifications even if your posts are going viral. Instead of inundating your screen with hundreds of individual notifications for the same post, you’ll see a summary of how many people boosted or favourited it.

We’re also introducing a brand new system for filtering unwanted notifications. You get to decide what happens to notifications from people you don’t follow, who aren’t following you, recently created accounts, or unsolicited private mentions. You can either send them to the void immediately, never to be seen again, or put them into a special inbox you can peruse when you want.

Design

One of the ongoing efforts is to make Mastodon easy and delightful to use. We’ve invested a significant amount of money and time into working with professional designers and performing user testing over the last few years, but we really ramped up our efforts in 2023. Mastodon is quite a large application, and our resources remain very constrained compared to our corporate competitors, but we’ve made significant progress on improving the look and feel of Mastodon across the board.

We have redesigned the new post composer to be much more intuitive to use, to make sure you get your post right the first time. Not only does it look better, but you can now re-arrange media you’ve uploaded as you see fit, and see exactly what layout it will be displayed in. We’ve also made content warnings and word filters easier to notice and expand.

Across the web app, our iconography and color palette got a refresh, link previews look even better, and you can now hover over anyone’s name to peek at their profile and quickly follow or unfollow them. We also redesigned all of the “utility” emails (password resets, follow notifications, etc.) as well as the first welcome email to help you identify what’s most important.

Among various redesigned dialogs, new confirmation dialogs for muting and blocking describe exactly what effects muting and blocking will have. If you are about to block another server, we’ll show you exactly how many followers you would lose to help avoid potential mistakes. In the spirit of surfacing product education in more areas, clicking the domain on someone’s profile now brings up information about Mastodon’s decentralized nature.

Onboarding and discovery

Helping new users get started on Mastodon has been a key focus for us over the past few years. We found that people would skip follow recommendations during onboarding and end up with a boring feed that doesn’t offer anything new for hours or days.

We value the user’s agency over what is shown in the home feed, and pride ourselves on being a reliable platform to keep up with the people you care about without opaque algorithms randomizing which things you see in which order. This presents a challenge when other platforms have created an expectation that the user only has to passively consume what is generated for them instead of actively curating what they want to see.

On Mastodon, you need to follow people or hashtags to see them in your home feed. To bridge the gap for people who fly past the onboarding, we’ve introduced a little carousel with follow recommendations that will appear above the first post older than four hours on the first page of your home feed.

We’ve also significantly improved the system of follow recommendations as a whole, mixing generalized results like profiles popular in your language with personalized ones like profiles that a lot of the people you follow, follow. For added transparency, the reason for the recommendation is displayed along with it.

Helping writers and journalists

In this version we’re introducing a new way to highlight writers and journalists on the fediverse. By adding a single line to their HTML, publishers can feature the fediverse profile of the page author in the link previews on Mastodon. That way, when lots of different people are sharing the link, or the link is trending in the News tab, you can easily navigate to the author’s fediverse profile and follow them right from within Mastodon to receive future updates. Publications like The Verge and TechCrunch are already using this.

We’ve also put a fresh coat of paint on our website embeds. You’ve always been able to embed a Mastodon post on your own website, but we’ve made them look a lot better and gave them a more graceful fallback when the source is slow to load or no longer available. Of course, the dialog for embedding a post now looks a lot better as well, offering a simple click to copy button. Keep in mind that you can only embed posts that are public!

What’s next?

Now that 4.3 is done, our focus for the next release will be on implementing the highly requested features of quote posts, as well as the ability for server operators to subscribe to managed blocklists, which along with our new initiative of pluggable fediverse discovery providers should make running small and medium-sized fediverse servers much more viable; and with Ghost entering the fediverse, further improving how long-form content from other fediverse platforms is displayed within Mastodon.

We are extremely grateful to everyone who supports Mastodon through Patreon, our 501(c)3 in the US, and other means. Unlike our competitors, we don’t take venture capital, don’t sell ads and don’t sell your data. While other social media platforms have teams of hundreds of engineers working on them, we operate on less than 500K USD annually with a team of only 4 full-time employees, and a number of contractors. If you’d like to see the pace of development increase, please consider chipping in so we can hire more people!

Thank you for supporting Mastodon

We develop and maintain the free and open source software that powers the social web. There is no capital behind this — we rely entirely on your support.

In other news

The Mastodon stuffed toy is almost ready to go on sale. We’re waiting for the shipments to arrive at the warehouse. Find out more in the original announcement.

Original source

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 about a new feature that’s coming in Mastodon 4.6, that we’re calling Collections. Collections are a way for people on Mastodon to curate and share bundles of accounts that they’d recommend to others - helping to grow these connections more quickly, instead of newcomers hunting around for the accounts they might be interested in.

The team has been working hard on the feature since then, and in this post we’re providing an update on what you’ll see when Collections start to appear in the next few weeks. Importantly, this is just the beginning for Collections! Think of this as the “version 1” release for feedback - we’re taking a slow and intentional approach to building them out.

We want to give a shout-out to some of the other great resources that help people to navigate and discover new content across the Fediverse - for example, fedi.tips and their @FediFollows account, the starter packs from fedidevs.com, and more. There’s room for all of these to offer alternative discovery options, and we appreciate the community initiatives; we hope Collections will be a useful addition.

Our approach

We had three primary inputs that shaped our thinking as we designed Collections.

Learning from Bluesky

We reviewed public feedback around Bluesky’s Starter Packs to inform our approach before building this feature. The biggest influence this had on us, was that we knew that we needed to have a way to for people to review Collections they are added to, and to remove themselves without having to resort to blocking or reporting.

We made the decision early on that people are not automatically included in their own collections. Curators can add themselves, but it’s not a requirement. This also influenced our choice for smaller Collection sizes, at least at the start - we may revisit this later.

Learning from the Mastodon community

We wanted to understand what information would be most helpful for people in deciding whether to follow accounts within a collection. Accounts currently display in list form, and we can’t show the entire profile - trade-offs must be made.

To understand what information to prioritise, we distributed a survey to people on Mastodon in late 2025. We found, unsurprisingly, that an account’s posts and bio text both have a huge influence on trust and interest. Additionally, being aware of mutuals (e.g. “people I follow who are following this account”) scored high on both points. Interestingly, recency of the account’s last post scored higher than the presence of a verified link, follower count, post count, and several other factors in influencing following behaviour (these findings also informed the redesign of Profiles). This study was conducted with limited resources - while not statistically significant, it offered us a starting point in understanding how Collections would be best represented.

Technical constraints

Technical challenges limit our ability to show posts within a Collection for v1, but we’d like to explore this as the feature matures.

Collections are similar to our existing Lists feature, in that they’re account-based. Many people asked for public, shareable lists, but we don’t currently have the infrastructure to build something of that scale. However, we plan to reduce confusion through naming and navigational updates in a future release of Mastodon.

Collections: What’s included in 4.6

We’re moving intentionally with this feature, using the 4.6 launch as an opportunity to learn more from the community. As such, we’ve taken a lightweight approach.

Creation

People with accounts on participating servers will be able to create Collections. Collections may include a short description and topic – a single hashtag to aid in discovery. Additionally, Collections may be marked as sensitive (this setting hides the description and accounts behind a content warning).

Sharing and discovery

Collections can be set to either Public or Unlisted, and shared via a link.

There’s a caveat here - the initial launch focuses on creation, with search and discovery coming soon. There are three reasons we’re doing this:

1. The number of community-created Collections needs to hit a critical mass before certain discovery experiences become impactful. For example, we’d like server owners to be able to recommend Collections to follow during onboarding (this would be a replacement for the current Recommended Accounts feature).

2. We’d like to observe how the community creates and shares Collections first; this will help us to understand how and where to showcase public Collections.

3. Implementing Collections in search and discovery is technically expensive.

This means that Public and Unlisted Collections will function very similarly at first, except that public Collections are also included in the curator’s Featured tab on their profile.

Privacy and moderation

You can opt out of having your account be eligible for inclusion in Collections by disabling the existing “Feature profile and posts in discovery algorithms” account setting.

If you are opted into discovery, you will be notified when another account adds you to a Collection. From there, you can view the contents of the Collection, and remove your account if desired.

In cases of potential harassment, you are encouraged to report or block the other account. Reporting a Collection allows a decision to be made by server moderators; blocking removes you from any collections curated by the blocked account, and prevents the blocked account from adding your account to future Collections.

What’s not in the initial release

Super large Collections

In this release, Collections can include up to 25 accounts.

Collections on Mastodon will continue to focus on quality over quantity. We suspect that smaller Collections will cut down on the type of spammy behaviour that was sometimes seen on Bluesky (where there is a limit of 150 accounts on Starter Packs). However, we don’t know exactly what the magic number is; we’ve talked to several industry leaders, and suspect the number is between 25 and 80. This is still a wide range, and we’re starting on the lower end because it’s far easier from a technical perspective to increase this limit later, than it is to reduce it.

Find yourself maxing out a Collection and then creating a “Volume 2”? Send us your Collection, if you want; or, tell us about it, so we can understand your use case.

A ‘Follow All’ button

We’re not including a bulk follow action on day one.

This is something we’re considering, but we want to approach it with care. We read feedback that people on Bluesky often found themselves mass following accounts from stale Starter Packs, only to have a subpar feed afterwards.

We also recognise that there are scenarios that require more thought. For example, imagine you follow all accounts in a Collection, but then, some of the accounts are removed from the Collection. Do you expect to be able to bulk unfollow all of the accounts you previously followed from that Collection, even if they no longer exist there? Many people look to Mastodon to be the straightforward and authentic platform, so including a bulk follow action without an “escape hatch” is a dark pattern that we wish to avoid.

In short, we’re open to this in the future, but we’d like to understand the demand first. We hope to hear from the community about the experience of using “Collections v1”, and we may add a ‘Follow All’ button, potentially with proper undo controls, if there’s strong demand for reducing friction in the experience.

Availability

We’ll be enabling Collections on mastodon.social in the coming week. As usual, we take a moment to test out these features on our own servers ahead of a release. This initial release of Collections will become generally available for all Mastodon servers as part of Mastodon 4.6, coming in a few weeks.

note: we plan to add more screenshots to this post soon

Open to feedback

We’re focused on user privacy, and this means that we have very limited analytics to inform decisions. We also believe in community-driven design, and we want to be transparent about our thinking as we build new features. Our small team is counting on the insights from your experiences as you create, use, and test Collections! If you have things you’d like to let us know related to these updates, contact us at [email protected]. We might not be able to respond individually, but rest assured that we’ll be reading every piece of feedback.

Thanks

We are grateful to GCC for a grant that supported the development of this feature.

Original source

Upgrade overview

This release contains upgrade notes that deviate from the norm:

ℹ️ Requires assets recompilation

For more information, view the complete release notes and scroll down to the upgrade instructions section.

Changelog

Security

Insufficient verification of email addresses (GHSA-5r37-qpwq-2jhh)

Updated dependencies

Added

Add trademark warning to mastodon:setup task (#38548 by @ClearlyClaire)

Fixed

Fix definition for quote in JSON-LD context (#38686 by @ClearlyClaire)

Fix being unable to disable sound for quote update notification (#38537 by @ClearlyClaire)

Fix being able to quote someone you blocked (#38608 by @ClearlyClaire)

Upgrade notes

To get the code for v4.5.9, use git fetch && git checkout v4.5.9.

Note

As always, make sure you have backups of the database before performing any upgrades. If you are using docker-compose, this is how a backup command might look: docker exec mastodon_db_1 pg_dump -Fc -U postgres postgres > name_of_the_backup.dump

Dependencies

External dependencies have not changed since v4.5.0.

Ruby: 3.2 or newer

PostgreSQL: 14 or newer

Elasticsearch (recommended, for full-text search): 7.x (OpenSearch should also work)

LibreTranslate (optional, for translations): 1.3.3 or newer

Redis: 7.0 or newer

Node: 20.19 or newer

libvips (optional, instead of ImageMagick): 8.13 or newer

ImageMagick (optional if using libvips): 6.9.7-7 or newer

Update steps

The following instructions are for updating from 4.5.8.

If you are upgrading directly from an earlier release, please carefully read the upgrade notes for the skipped releases as well, as they often require extra steps such as database migrations. In particular, it is very important to read the 4.5.0 release notes.

Non-Docker

Tip

The charlock_holmes gem may fail to build on some systems with recent versions of gcc.

If you run into this issue, try BUNDLE_BUILD__CHARLOCK_HOLMES="--with-cxxflags=-std=c++17" bundle install.

Install dependencies with bundle install and yarn install --immutable

Precompile the assets: RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails assets:precompile

Restart all Mastodon processes.

When using Docker

Restart all Mastodon processes.

Original source

Note

While we continue to support Mastodon 4.4 and release patches for it, please note that Mastodon 4.5 is available with new features, changes and fixes. We encourage administrators to update to the latest 4.5 version when they can.

Upgrade overview

This release contains upgrade notes that deviate from the norm:

• ℹ️ Requires assets recompilation

For more information, view the complete release notes and scroll down to the upgrade instructions section.

Changelog

Security

Insufficient verification of email addresses (GHSA-5r37-qpwq-2jhh)

Updated dependencies

Added

Add trademark warning to mastodon:setup task (#38548 by @ClearlyClaire)

Fixed

Fix definition for quote in JSON-LD context (#38686 by @ClearlyClaire)

Upgrade notes

To get the code for v4.4.16, use git fetch && git checkout v4.4.16.

Note

As always, make sure you have backups of the database before performing any upgrades. If you are using docker-compose, this is how a backup command might look: docker exec mastodon_db_1 pg_dump -Fc -U postgres postgres > name_of_the_backup.dump

Dependencies

External dependencies have not changed since v4.4.1:

• Ruby: 3.2 or newer
• PostgreSQL: 13 or newer
• Elasticsearch (recommended, for full-text search): 7.x (OpenSearch should also work)
• LibreTranslate (optional, for translations): 1.3.3 or newer
• Redis: 6.2 or newer
• Node: 20 or newer
• libvips (optional, instead of ImageMagick): 8.13 or newer
• ImageMagick (optional if using libvips): 6.9.7-7 or newer

Update steps

The following instructions are for updating from 4.4.15.

If you are upgrading directly from an earlier release, please carefully read the upgrade notes for the skipped releases as well, as they often require extra steps such as database migrations. In particular, it is very important to read the 4.4.0 release notes.

Non-Docker

Install dependencies with bundle install and yarn install --immutable

Precompile the assets: RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails assets:precompile

Restart all Mastodon processes.

When using Docker

Restart all Mastodon processes.

Original source

Warning

While we do our best to support Mastodon 4.3 until 2026-05-06, there are known security issues in some of the dependencies we use.

We recommend administrators to update to a newer Mastodon version when they can.

Upgrade overview

This release contains upgrade notes that deviate from the norm:

ℹ️ Requires assets recompilation

For more information, view the complete release notes and scroll down to the upgrade instructions section.

Changelog

Security

Insufficient verification of email addresses (GHSA-5r37-qpwq-2jhh)

Updated dependencies

Added

Add trademark warning to mastodon:setup task (#38548 by @ClearlyClaire)

Upgrade notes

To get the code for v4.3.22, use git fetch && git checkout v4.3.22.

Note

As always, make sure you have backups of the database before performing any upgrades. If you are using docker-compose, this is how a backup command might look: docker exec mastodon_db_1 pg_dump -Fc -U postgres postgres > name_of_the_backup.dump

Dependencies

External dependencies have not changed since v4.3.0, the compatible Ruby, PostgreSQL, Node, Elasticsearch and Redis versions are the same, that is:

Ruby: 3.1 or newer

PostgreSQL: 12 or newer. PostgreSQL versions 14.0 to 14.3 are not supported as they contain a critical data-corruption bug (see v4.3.0 release notes)

Elasticsearch (recommended, for full-text search): 7.x (OpenSearch should also work)

LibreTranslate (optional, for translations): 1.3.3 or newer

Redis: 4 or newer

Node: 18 or newer

ImageMagick (optional if using libvips): 6.9.7-7 or newer

libvips (optional, instead of ImageMagick): 8.13 or newer

Update steps

The following instructions are for updating from 4.3.21.

If you are upgrading directly from an earlier release, please carefully read the upgrade notes for the skipped releases as well, as they often require extra steps such as database migrations. In particular, please read the v4.3.0 release notes, as there have been multiple important changes.

Non-docker

Tip

The charlock_holmes gem may fail to build on some systems with recent versions of gcc.

If you run into such an issue, try BUNDLE_BUILD__CHARLOCK_HOLMES="--with-cxxflags=-std=c++17" bundle install.

Install dependencies with bundle install and yarn install --immutable

Precompile the assets: RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails assets:precompile

Restart all Mastodon processes.

When using docker

Restart all Mastodon processes.

Original source

Upgrade overview

This release contains upgrade notes that deviate from the norm:

ℹ️ Requires assets recompilation

For more information, view the complete release notes and scroll down to the upgrade instructions section.

Changelog

Security

Fix insufficient checks on quote authorizations (GHSA-q4g8-82c5-9h33)

Fix open redirect in legacy path handler (GHSA-xqw8-4j56-5hj6)

Updated dependencies

Added

Add for searching already-known private GtS posts (#38057 by @ClearlyClaire)

Changed

Change media description length limit for remote media attachments from 1500 to 10000 characters (#37921 by @ClearlyClaire)

Change HTTP signatures to skip the Accept header (#38132 by @ClearlyClaire)

Change numeric AP endpoints to redirect to short account URLs when HTML is requested (#38056 by @ClearlyClaire)

Fixed

Fix some model definitions in tootctl maintenance fix-duplicates (#38214 by @ClearlyClaire)

Fix overly strict checks for current username on account migration page (#38183 by @mjankowski)

Fix OpenStack Swift Keystone token rate limiting (#38145 by @hugogameiro)

Fix poll expiration notification being re-triggered on implicit updates (#38078 by @ClearlyClaire)

Fix incorrect translation string in webauthn mailers (#38062 by @mjankowski)

Fix “Unblock” and “Unmute” actions being disabled when blocked (#38075 by @ClearlyClaire)

Fix username availability check being wrongly applied on race conditions (#37975 by @ClearlyClaire)

Fix hover card unintentionally being shown in some cases (#38039 and #38112 by @diondiondion)

Fix existing posts not being removed from lists when a list member is unfollowed (#38048 by @ClearlyClaire)

Upgrade notes

To get the code for v4.5.8, use git fetch && git checkout v4.5.8.

Note

As always, make sure you have backups of the database before performing any upgrades. If you are using docker-compose, this is how a backup command might look: docker exec mastodon_db_1 pg_dump -Fc -U postgres postgres > name_of_the_backup.dump

Dependencies

External dependencies have not changed since v4.5.0.

Ruby: 3.2 or newer

PostgreSQL: 14 or newer

Elasticsearch (recommended, for full-text search): 7.x (OpenSearch should also work)

LibreTranslate (optional, for translations): 1.3.3 or newer

Redis: 7.0 or newer

Node: 20.19 or newer

libvips (optional, instead of ImageMagick): 8.13 or newer

ImageMagick (optional if using libvips): 6.9.7-7 or newer

Update steps

The following instructions are for updating from 4.5.7.

If you are upgrading directly from an earlier release, please carefully read the upgrade notes for the skipped releases as well, as they often require extra steps such as database migrations. In particular, it is very important to read the 4.5.0 release notes.

Non-Docker

Tip

The charlock_holmes gem may fail to build on some systems with recent versions of gcc.

If you run into this issue, try BUNDLE_BUILD__CHARLOCK_HOLMES="--with-cxxflags=-std=c++17" bundle install.

Install dependencies with bundle install

Precompile the assets: RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails assets:precompile

Restart all Mastodon processes.

When using Docker

Restart all Mastodon processes.

Original source

Note

While we continue to support Mastodon 4.4 and release patches for it, please note that Mastodon 4.5 is available with new features, changes and fixes. We encourage administrators to update to the latest 4.5 version when they can.

Upgrade overview

This release contains upgrade notes that deviate from the norm:

ℹ️ Requires assets recompilation

For more information, view the complete release notes and scroll down to the upgrade instructions section.

Changelog

Security

Fix insufficient checks on quote authorizations (GHSA-q4g8-82c5-9h33)

Fix open redirect in legacy path handler (GHSA-xqw8-4j56-5hj6)

Updated dependencies

Added

Add for searching already-known private GtS posts (#38057 by @ClearlyClaire)

Changed

Change media description length limit for remote media attachments from 1500 to 10000 characters (#37921 by @ClearlyClaire)

Change HTTP signatures to skip the Accept header (#38132 by @ClearlyClaire)

Fixed

Fix some model definitions in tootctl maintenance fix-duplicates (#38214 by @ClearlyClaire)

Fix overly strict checks for current username on account migration page (#38183 by @mjankowski)

Fix OpenStack Swift Keystone token rate limiting (#38145 by @hugogameiro)

Fix poll expiration notification being re-triggered on implicit updates (#38078 by @ClearlyClaire)

Fix incorrect translation string in webauthn mailers (#38062 by @mjankowski)

Fix username availability check being wrongly applied on race conditions (#37975 by @ClearlyClaire)

Fix hover card unintentionally being shown in some cases (#38039 and #38112 by @diondiondion)

Fix existing posts not being removed from lists when a list member is unfollowed (#38048 by @ClearlyClaire)

Upgrade notes

To get the code for v4.4.15, use git fetch && git checkout v4.4.15.

Note

As always, make sure you have backups of the database before performing any upgrades. If you are using docker-compose, this is how a backup command might look:

docker exec mastodon_db_1 pg_dump -Fc -U postgres postgres > name_of_the_backup.dump

Dependencies

External dependencies have not changed since v4.4.1:

Ruby: 3.2 or newer

PostgreSQL: 13 or newer

Elasticsearch (recommended, for full-text search): 7.x (OpenSearch should also work)

LibreTranslate (optional, for translations): 1.3.3 or newer

Redis: 6.2 or newer

Node: 20 or newer

libvips (optional, instead of ImageMagick): 8.13 or newer

ImageMagick (optional if using libvips): 6.9.7-7 or newer

Update steps

The following instructions are for updating from 4.4.14.

If you are upgrading directly from an earlier release, please carefully read the upgrade notes for the skipped releases as well, as they often require extra steps such as database migrations. In particular, it is very important to read the 4.4.0 release notes.

Non-Docker

Install dependencies with bundle install

Precompile the assets: RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails assets:precompile

Restart all Mastodon processes.

When using Docker

Restart all Mastodon processes.

Original source

Note

While we continue to support Mastodon 4.3 and release patches for it, please note that Mastodon 4.5 is available with new features, changes and fixes. We encourage administrators to update to the latest 4.5 version when they can.

Upgrade overview

This release contains upgrade notes that deviate from the norm:

ℹ️ Requires assets recompilation

For more information, view the complete release notes and scroll down to the upgrade instructions section.

Changelog

Security

Fix insufficient checks on quote authorizations (GHSA-q4g8-82c5-9h33)

Fix open redirect in legacy path handler (GHSA-xqw8-4j56-5hj6)

Updated dependencies

Added

Add for searching already-known private GtS posts (#38057 by @ClearlyClaire)

Changed

Change media description length limit for remote media attachments from 1500 to 10000 characters (#37921 by @ClearlyClaire)

Fixed

Fix some model definitions in tootctl maintenance fix-duplicates (#38214 by @ClearlyClaire)

Fix poll expiration notification being re-triggered on implicit updates (#38078 by @ClearlyClaire)

Fix incorrect translation string in webauthn mailers (#38062 by @mjankowski)

Fix username availability check being wrongly applied on race conditions (#37975 by @ClearlyClaire)

Fix hover card unintentionally being shown in some cases (#38039 by @diondiondion)

Upgrade notes

To get the code for v4.3.21, use git fetch && git checkout v4.3.21.

Note

As always, make sure you have backups of the database before performing any upgrades. If you are using docker-compose, this is how a backup command might look: docker exec mastodon_db_1 pg_dump -Fc -U postgres postgres > name_of_the_backup.dump

Dependencies

External dependencies have not changed since v4.3.0, the compatible Ruby, PostgreSQL, Node, Elasticsearch and Redis versions are the same, that is:

• Ruby: 3.1 or newer
• PostgreSQL: 12 or newer. PostgreSQL versions 14.0 to 14.3 are not supported as they contain a critical data-corruption bug (see v4.3.0 release notes)
• Elasticsearch (recommended, for full-text search): 7.x (OpenSearch should also work)
• LibreTranslate (optional, for translations): 1.3.3 or newer
• Redis: 4 or newer
• Node: 18 or newer
• ImageMagick (optional if using libvips): 6.9.7-7 or newer
• libvips (optional, instead of ImageMagick): 8.13 or newer

Update steps

The following instructions are for updating from 4.3.20.

If you are upgrading directly from an earlier release, please carefully read the upgrade notes for the skipped releases as well, as they often require extra steps such as database migrations. In particular, please read the v4.3.0 release notes, as there have been multiple important changes.

Non-docker

Tip

The charlock_holmes gem may fail to build on some systems with recent versions of gcc.

If you run into such an issue, try BUNDLE_BUILD__CHARLOCK_HOLMES="--with-cxxflags=-std=c++17" bundle install.

Install dependencies with bundle install

Precompile the assets: RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails assets:precompile

Restart all Mastodon processes.

When using docker

Restart all Mastodon processes.

Original source

Upgrade overview

This release contains upgrade notes that deviate from the norm:

ℹ️ Requires assets recompilation

For more information, view the complete release notes and scroll down to the upgrade instructions section.

Changelog

Security

• Reject unconfirmed FASPs (#37926 by @oneiros, GHSA-qgmm-vr4c-ggjg)
• Re-use custom socket class for FASP requests (#37925 by @oneiros, GHSA-46w6-g98f-wxqm)

Added

• Add --suspended-only option to tootctl emoji purge (#37828 and #37861 by @ClearlyClaire and @mjankowski)

Fixed

• Fix emoji data not being properly cached (#37858 by @ChaosExAnima)
• Fix delete & redraft of pending posts (#37839 by @ClearlyClaire)
• Fix processing separate key documents without the ActivityStreams context (#37826 by @ClearlyClaire)
• Fix custom emojis not being purged on domain suspension (#37808 by @ClearlyClaire)
• Fix users without special permissions being able to stream disabled timelines (#37791 by @ClearlyClaire)
• Fix processing of object updates with duplicate hashtags (#37756 by @ClearlyClaire)

Upgrade notes

To get the code for v4.5.7, use git fetch && git checkout v4.5.7.

Note

As always, make sure you have backups of the database before performing any upgrades. If you are using docker-compose, this is how a backup command might look: docker exec mastodon_db_1 pg_dump -Fc -U postgres postgres > name_of_the_backup.dump

Dependencies

External dependencies have not changed since v4.5.0.

Ruby: 3.2 or newer

PostgreSQL: 14 or newer

Elasticsearch (recommended, for full-text search): 7.x (OpenSearch should also work)

LibreTranslate (optional, for translations): 1.3.3 or newer

Redis: 7.0 or newer

Node: 20.19 or newer

libvips (optional, instead of ImageMagick): 8.13 or newer

ImageMagick (optional if using libvips): 6.9.7-7 or newer

Update steps

The following instructions are for updating from 4.5.6.

If you are upgrading directly from an earlier release, please carefully read the upgrade notes for the skipped releases as well, as they often require extra steps such as database migrations. In particular, it is very important to read the 4.5.0 release notes.

Non-Docker

Tip

The charlock_holmes gem may fail to build on some systems with recent versions of gcc.

If you run into this issue, try BUNDLE_BUILD__CHARLOCK_HOLMES="--with-cxxflags=-std=c++17" bundle install.

Precompile the assets: RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails assets:precompile

Restart all Mastodon processes.

When using Docker

Restart all Mastodon processes.

Original source

Note

While we continue to support Mastodon 4.4 and release patches for it, please note that Mastodon 4.5 is available with new features, changes and fixes. We encourage administrators to update to the latest 4.5 version when they can.

Changelog

Security

Reject unconfirmed FASPs (#37926 by @oneiros, GHSA-qgmm-vr4c-ggjg)

Re-use custom socket class for FASP requests (#37925 by @oneiros, GHSA-46w6-g98f-wxqm)

Added

Add --suspended-only option to tootctl emoji purge (#37828 and #37861 by @ClearlyClaire and @mjankowski)

Fixed

Fix custom emojis not being purged on domain suspension (#37808 by @ClearlyClaire)

Fix processing of object updates with duplicate hashtags (#37756 by @ClearlyClaire)

Upgrade notes

To get the code for v4.4.14, use git fetch && git checkout v4.4.14.

Note

As always, make sure you have backups of the database before performing any upgrades. If you are using docker-compose, this is how a backup command might look: docker exec mastodon_db_1 pg_dump -Fc -U postgres postgres > name_of_the_backup.dump

Dependencies

External dependencies have not changed since v4.4.1:

Ruby: 3.2 or newer

PostgreSQL: 13 or newer

Elasticsearch (recommended, for full-text search): 7.x (OpenSearch should also work)

LibreTranslate (optional, for translations): 1.3.3 or newer

Redis: 6.2 or newer

Node: 20 or newer

libvips (optional, instead of ImageMagick): 8.13 or newer

ImageMagick (optional if using libvips): 6.9.7-7 or newer

Update steps

The following instructions are for updating from 4.4.13.

If you are upgrading directly from an earlier release, please carefully read the upgrade notes for the skipped releases as well, as they often require extra steps such as database migrations. In particular, it is very important to read the 4.4.0 release notes.

Non-Docker

Restart all Mastodon processes.

When using Docker

Restart all Mastodon processes.

Original source

Note

While we continue to support Mastodon 4.3 and release patches for it, please note that Mastodon 4.5 is available with new features, changes and fixes. We encourage administrators to update to the latest 4.5 version when they can.

Changelog

Added

Add --suspended-only option to tootctl emoji purge (#37828 and #37861 by @ClearlyClaire and @mjankowski)

Fixed

Fix processing of object updates with duplicate hashtags (#37756 by @ClearlyClaire)

Upgrade notes

To get the code for v4.3.20, use git fetch && git checkout v4.3.20.

Note

As always, make sure you have backups of the database before performing any upgrades. If you are using docker-compose, this is how a backup command might look: docker exec mastodon_db_1 pg_dump -Fc -U postgres postgres > name_of_the_backup.dump

Dependencies

External dependencies have not changed since v4.3.0, the compatible Ruby, PostgreSQL, Node, Elasticsearch and Redis versions are the same, that is:

Ruby: 3.1 or newer

PostgreSQL: 12 or newer. PostgreSQL versions 14.0 to 14.3 are not supported as they contain a critical data-corruption bug (see v4.3.0 release notes)

Elasticsearch (recommended, for full-text search): 7.x (OpenSearch should also work)

LibreTranslate (optional, for translations): 1.3.3 or newer

Redis: 4 or newer

Node: 18 or newer

ImageMagick (optional if using libvips): 6.9.7-7 or newer

libvips (optional, instead of ImageMagick): 8.13 or newer

Update steps

The following instructions are for updating from 4.3.19.

If you are upgrading directly from an earlier release, please carefully read the upgrade notes for the skipped releases as well, as they often require extra steps such as database migrations. In particular, please read the v4.3.0 release notes, as there have been multiple important changes.

Non-docker

Tip

The charlock_holmes gem may fail to build on some systems with recent versions of gcc.

If you run into such an issue, try BUNDLE_BUILD__CHARLOCK_HOLMES="--with-cxxflags=-std=c++17" bundle install.

Restart all Mastodon processes.

When using docker

Restart all Mastodon processes.

Original source