In a recent post, we shared that one of our priorities for 2025 is to establish a more sustainable financial base for the Mastodon organisation. In 2024, Mastodon gGmbH took over hosting of the European Commission’s Mastodon service. We also signed a support contract with the state of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany. More recently, we started working with the city of Blois, in France. While all of these are public institutions, we’re also very proud having added AltStore as a customer in th...| Mastodon Blog
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 ...| Mastodon Blog
Behind-the-scenes updates from the Mastodon team. A trip to FrOSCon, and a lot of preparation for quote posts.| Mastodon Blog
Project updates from the Mastodon engineering team. This month: quote posts, Starter Packs, and more.| Mastodon Blog
We’re rolling out a donation banner in our mobile apps, to help us test funding options for the future of Mastodon.| Mastodon Blog
It was another busy month in June, as we moved into the final stretch of the 4.4 release process. We also covered a lot of events during the month. Here’s what was happening. Team We welcomed Imani to the team, as our new designer. Very excited to have Imani join us! We also said goodbye to Inga, who has been instrumental in building the team. Thank you, Inga 🙏🏻 Post by @inganomads@mastodon.social View on Mastodon Events Beyond the work of the engineering team:| Mastodon Blog
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...| Mastodon Blog
Here's what developers need to know about the upcoming Mastodon 4.4 release.| Mastodon Blog
This week is UN Open Source Week, and we’re happy to share that today, Mastodon was added to the Digital Public Goods Alliance’s DPG Registry. A goal of the DPGA is to promote digital public goods in order to create a more equitable world. Being recognised as a DPG increases the visibility, support for, and prominence of open projects that have the potential to tackle global challenges. To become a digital public good, all projects are required to meet the DPG Standard to ensure that they...| Mastodon Blog
An update on our strategy.| Mastodon Blog
News and updates from the Mastodon developers. Mastodon 4.4 beta is out, and we had a busy month with events.| Mastodon Blog
Setting up optional Terms of Service, server rules translations and age requirements - new features coming in Mastodon 4.4.| Mastodon Blog
This edition of Trunk & Tidbits marks the one year anniversary of our monthly development updates 🎉 Back at the beginning of 2024, we discussed how regular communication needed to be a part of our team’s culture, as a commitment to the people who help to make Mastodon what it is - everyone that uses Mastodon daily, the administrators who run servers, the moderators that help to manage community discussions, and the people that donate to the project to help us to keep moving forward.| Mastodon Blog
An update on Mastodon’s core team and organisation.| Mastodon Blog
News from the Mastodon engineering team for March 2025 - including some big changes to the main code, updates to the mobile apps, Fediscovery progress, and the end of support for Mastodon 4.1.| Mastodon Blog
Development updates from the Mastodon team. Code changes and updates made during February 2025.| Mastodon Blog
Quote Posts are a popular feature of many social media platforms. They offer the ability to share another person’s post to one’s own followers, while adding a comment. We want to share our thinking process in implementing Quote Posts in Mastodon, and explain why it has taken us some time to do so. Background In the past couple of years, as Mastodon has grown, we’ve spent time meeting with community leaders across a spectrum of interests, to understand their needs. We have learned that m...| Mastodon Blog
News and updates from the Mastodon developers. Technical changes from January 2025, and what the core team did at FOSDEM.| Mastodon Blog
The latest engineering updates from the Mastodon team technical updates covering December 2024: including Fediscovery, FOSDEM... and, holidays.| Mastodon Blog
It is more important than ever that the social web is not controlled by corporations. Today, Mastodon is taking another step towards its founding ideals: independence and non-profit ownership. We're transferring ownership of key assets to a new European not-for-profit entity, ensuring our mission remains true to a decentralised social web, not corporate control.| Mastodon Blog
If you’re curious how Mastodon is doing by the numbers, the 2023 Annual Report is finally here. A bit late in the year, perhaps, but we’ve got a lot more numbers to share this time! Mastodon is a non-profit, and open-source, so we revel in the transparency. How large is our budget, and where does it go? Who works on Mastodon? What have we accomplished, and where are our priorities for the future? For all of this and more, we’ve got an answer–at least as far as 2023 goes.| Mastodon Blog
Mastodon core team technical updates for November 2024: the latest point releases, progress on Fediscovery, FOSDEM planning, and projects from the developer community.| Mastodon Blog
Trunk & Tidbits, October 2024 Welcome back to our monthly engineering series. In October, our long-anticipated plushies got out into the wild (mostly in Europe, for now), and we were busy tuning the code and planning what’s next. This is also a larger entry in our blog series, for updates from around our community. New arrivals We are really excited to welcome Shannon Hughes to our core development team, to work on our iOS experience.| Mastodon Blog
Trunk & Tidbits, September 2024 Hello, friends! It’s time for another installment of our engineering updates series. Here’s what’s been happening in the code this past month. Releases Mastodon 4.3 is here! After 12 months of hard work, several beta versions, and a release candidate for testing, we’re excited to share version 4.3 with you. Check out the full details in our launch blog post. Additionally, we’ve released patch versions 4.| Mastodon Blog
Grouped notifications, notification filtering, better onboarding and a refreshed look await in this new release of our decentralized open-source social media software.| Mastodon Blog
Trunk & Tidbits, August 2024 It was a big month for the Mastodon team, with a lot of work going into getting the first beta release of version 4.3 ready - but that’s not all that we’ve worked on. Here is our monthly update on what we’ve been up to. Releases During August, we released versions 4.2.12 (as well as a short-lived 4.2.11) and 4.1.19, with many bug fixes. If you are running the 4.| Mastodon Blog
Open Letter to the European Commission| Mastodon Blog
The latest updates from the Mastodon engineering team, for progress made in July 2024| Mastodon Blog
Mastodon engineering team updates for June 2024| Mastodon Blog
Today we're launching a new feature that will highlight writers and journalists that are active on the fediverse when their articles are being shared.| Mastodon Blog
Updates from the core Mastodon engineering team for May 2024| Mastodon Blog
Welcome to the first in a planned ongoing series of updates from the core Mastodon engineering team| Mastodon Blog
As part of our commitment to supporting the growth and operational capabilities of Mastodon, we have established a 501(c)(3) non-profit entity in the United States aimed at facilitating our efforts, including being able to receive tax-deductible U.S. donations.| Mastodon Blog
Deliberately friend-sized and friend-shaped, with a soft surface material and soft, squishy stuffing, you will soon be able to have a Mastodon in your home.| Mastodon Blog
In our latest Mastodon for Android release, we're making it easier than ever to share profiles using QR codes, among a number of other usability improvements.| Mastodon Blog
In our most recent Mastodon for Android release, we’re testing a new feature aimed to curb unneccesary negativity that comes from being on the Internet.| Mastodon Blog
Today we would like to thank Sujitech for kindly donating $100k USD to Mastodon, by far the largest single donation to our non-profit so far. Building Mastodon, which encompasses the core software on one end, and two native mobile applications on the other, is not cheap, and we can only afford a handful of full-time positions right now, relying in many ways on volunteer work. Sujitech is a Japanese tech company whose mission is to achieve a truly free and open internet, and that has supported...| Mastodon Blog
The 2022 Annual Report is now available for download! As a non-profit organization supported exclusively by donations, we like to keep our community updated on our yearly progress, and 2022 was an interesting year to say the least.| Mastodon Blog
The news of Elon Musk buying Twitter has put Mastodon into the public spotlight as an alternative social network, rapidly exploding our growth with over 30,000 new users in just a single day. This is because at Mastodon, we present a vision of social media that cannot be bought and owned by any billionaire, and strive to create a more resilient global platform without profit incentives. We believe that your ability to communicate online should not be at the whims of a single commercial company.| Mastodon Blog
From media reports and individual findings that various people have presented to us, it seems that the new social media platform owned by the former president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, so-called Truth Social, is using Mastodon’s source code with various visual adjustments. The platform has not formally launched yet, but it was made accessible ahead of time. Users were quick to note that the terms of service included a worrying passage, claiming that the site is proprietary prop...| Mastodon Blog
On behalf of the EUNOMIA project, in which I represent Mastodon, I am happy to announce that after nearly 3 years of development there is now a public pilot for the Mastodon community. But first, what is EUNOMIA and who is EUNOMIA? EUNOMIA is a “digital companion” for social media, a set of additional functions that aim to combat the spread of misinformation by helping you critically analyze social media posts before re-sharing them.| Mastodon Blog
The new Mastodon release brings you a much better audio player and improved support for different audio and video formats, as well as some additional security mechanisms. The audio player has been completely reworked to have a more eye-catching design. It will extract album art from the uploaded audio file automatically, or allow you to upload a thumbnail of your own choosing to be displayed in the center. Dominant colors from the artwork or thumbnail will then be used to give the player a un...| Mastodon Blog
Detailed notes on REST API changes, new deployment options, new admin settings and how to use them| Mastodon Blog
In this exciting new release: Moving accounts, trending hashtags, private servers and more!| Mastodon Blog
With the sad news that KNZK was shutting down we thought it might be useful for people to have a refresher on the features that Mastodon has built in that make moving instances easy and painless. Backing up Your Data Data export If you are moving to a new instance the first thing you will want to do is to get a backup of all of your data. Thankfully this process is painless with the Data Export tab under the “Import and Export” page.| Mastodon Blog
To provide a safer experience to new Mastodon users, we are changing the joinmastodon.org server picker| Mastodon Blog
Using the Blurhash algorithm in Mastodon 2.8.1 to generate prettier previews for sensitive media| Mastodon Blog
Can you imagine Facebook closing registrations and saying “Sorry, we have too many users already, you can go sign up on Twitter instead”? And yet, this sort of situation comes up with Mastodon every so often, in regards to the mastodon.social server. You see, Mastodon is decentralized. That means there is no “main” server. If mastodon.social actually disappeared from the face of the Earth, it would not bring down the Mastodon network at all.| Mastodon Blog
In this release: New profile directory, new tutorial, new public hashtag pages and more moderation tools| Mastodon Blog
Reasons why you should care about how your social network is run and structured| Mastodon Blog
New Mastodon for Android update finally brings lists and a reworked home tab to the mobile platform.| Mastodon Blog
In this massive update we've added search and removed friction. What's not to love?| Mastodon Blog
Most popular content of the fediverse from 2021 and some numbers| Mastodon Blog
To help us raise more funds for our development efforts, we are launching a new line of merchandise for Mastodon including t-shirts, mugs, enamel pins, and stickers.| Mastodon Blog
There’s been a lot of speculation around what Threads will be and what it means for Mastodon. We’ve put together some of the most common questions and our responses based on what was launched today.| Mastodon Blog
Today, Mastodon for Android has received a complete Material You redesign. We left no stone unturned — tab bars, settings, composing — everything is refreshed and reflects your color palette.| Mastodon Blog
We teamed up with the design agency Oak to give our project a modern and professional presence--and we have succeeded!| Mastodon Blog
We are teaming up with the design agency Oak to update our homepage and our brand. Goodbye social media blue, hello vibrant purple!| Mastodon Blog
We are developing an official Android app which will be free and focused on helping new users get started on the fediverse| Mastodon Blog
Since Mastodon 2.7, it is actually possible to let users sign up through your app, instead of asking them to go to a Mastodon website directly and then return. Let’s go over how this can be done.| Mastodon Blog
In this release: Polls, new tools for managing followers, new frontpage design, new admin features, Keybase integration, and more| Mastodon Blog
We have published a 1-click install image on DigitalOcean. This reduces the initial time investment in self-hosting Mastodon substantially. You create a new droplet, choose the Mastodon image, and once it boots up, you are taken through an interactive setup prompt. The only necessary information for the prompt is a domain name (it should already be pointing at the IP address of your droplet!) and credentials to some e-mail delivery service, like SparkPost, Mailgun, Sendgrid, or something simi...| Mastodon Blog
Inspired by a joke post I decided to go ahead and compile a list of the most shared things on Mastodon in 2018.| Mastodon Blog
I follow many talented artists on Mastodon, and over my 2 years of being on the platform I have noticed some common patterns that may help a newcomer find their audience on here, too.| Mastodon Blog
My name is Eugen Rochko and I’m the creator of Mastodon, a free, open-source federated social network server. The flagship instance mastodon.social has over 23,000 users and is growing fast. You can check it out here. If your organization is hosting a Mastodon instance, it is essentially a self-perpetuating brand awareness campaign. When people from other instances talk to or follow your users, they see your domain name all the time, since it is part of their globally unique usernames.| Mastodon Blog
After crowdfunding millions of dollars, social media platform Gab abandoned its own code and switched to the freely available Mastodon software in early 2019 as a way of circumventing Google’s and Apple’s ban on their own app from their app stores, since offering Mastodon’s client-side API would allow any existing Mastodon app to be used to access Gab. We have never had any sympathy for their thinly (if at all) veiled white supremacist platform so that was not a welcome move on our part...| Mastodon Blog
Today we’re making signing up on Mastodon easier than ever before. We understand that deciding which Mastodon service provider to kick off your experience with can be confusing. We know this is a completely new concept for many people, since traditionally the platform and the service provider are one and the same. This choice is what makes Mastodon different from existing social networks, but it also presents a unique onboarding challenge.| Mastodon Blog
On Dec 16, Twitter suspended our @joinmastodon account after we shared a link to the newly registered Mastodon account of @ElonJet, an account that broadcasts public flight path data of Elon Musk’s private jet, which was previously suspended from Twitter itself. At the same time, accounts of multiple journalists from major publications such as CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, as well as various independent journalists, were likewise suspended for either linking to the account i...| Mastodon Blog
Mastodon is now available on Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. Read about some of the design decisions we made for these apps!| Mastodon Blog
A brand new explore page, post editing, and new moderation features are just some of the additions in this new release of Mastodon!| Mastodon Blog
Starting on Feb 8, 2021, we will be developing an official iOS app for Mastodon together with Sujitech and Lickability, which will be free to download and focused on helping new users get started| Mastodon Blog
It’s Mastodon 3.3 time 🎉 We’ve got security fixes, performance fixes, new moderation tools and quality of life features!| Mastodon Blog
An ever growing problem of the modern social media-rich world is misinformation. The trust that was previously placed into government officials and journalism has eroded; the internet gave everyone a voice but with it made it so much more difficult to distinguish truth from fabrication. The consequences of this are very real: Almost eradicated illnesses are making a comeback because people refuse to vaccinate their children, Covid-19 is continuing to spread because people refuse to wear masks...| Mastodon Blog
The latest release of Mastodon introduces a simplified single-column interface as the new default for new users| Mastodon Blog
A lot of artists have lost their blogs in the Tumblr purge. Here are 5 reasons why Mastodon is the perfect alternative.| Mastodon Blog
After more than a month of work, I am happy to announce the new version of Mastodon, with improved visuals, a new way to assert your identity, and a lot of bug fixes. Verification Verifying identity in a network with no central authority is not straightforward. But there is a way. It requires a change in mindset, though. Twitter teaches us that people who have a checkmark next to their name are real and important, and those that don’t are not.| Mastodon Blog
Mastodon was first announced to the public through Hacker News, a link aggregator site for programmers, on October 6, 2016. Now we’re celebrating the 2 year anniversary! 🎉| Mastodon Blog
Mastodon 2.5 is the 100th released version of Mastodon since the project’s inception almost 2 years ago. It brings a variety of improvements to the software, the full list of which is available in the changelog. Public profile page The public areas of the web interface have been redesigned. The color scheme and design is now more consistent with the logged-in interface. The new profile layout makes better use of space for bio text and increases the value of header images.| Mastodon Blog
So you want to join Mastodon and get tooting. Great! Here's how to dive straight in.| Mastodon Blog
In the previous tutorial we have learned how to send a reply to another ActivityPub server, and we have used mostly static parts to do it. Now it’s time to talk about how to subscribe to other people and receive messages. The inbox Primarily this means having a publicly accessible inbox and validating HTTP signatures. Once that works, everything else is just semantics. Let’s use a Sinatra web server to implement the inbox.| Mastodon Blog
We often tout things like “Mastodon is based on open web protocols” as one of its advantages. I want to elaborate why exactly that’s a good thing.| Mastodon Blog
A committee of members of the European Parliament have voted to approve Article 11 and Article 13, which pose a risk to the decentralization of the web and freedom of creative expression.| Mastodon Blog
Today we’ll be looking at how to connect the protocols powering Mastodon in the simplest way possible to enter the federated network. We will use static files, standard command-line tools, and some simple Ruby scripting, although the functionality should be easily adaptable to other programming languages. First, what’s the end goal of this exercise? We want to send a Mastodon user a message from our own, non-Mastodon server. So what are the ingredients required?| Mastodon Blog
A fresh new release of the federated social network software is here, and while the primary focus of it has been on fixing bugs and improving performance, it brings a couple of notable new features to the board. Delete & Redraft There are legitimate reasons why social media platforms rarely, if ever, have an editing function. In an environment where content spreads like wildfire in a matter of minutes, you could easily conceive of nefarious misuses such as creating a post about something agre...| Mastodon Blog
Deep down you always knew it. On the edge of your perception, you always heard the people who talked about the erosion of privacy, that there was no such thing as free cheese, that if you don’t pay — then you’re the product. Now you know that it’s true. Cambridge Analytica has sucked the data so kindly and diligently collected by Facebook and used that data to influence the US elections (and who knows what else).| Mastodon Blog
The development of the next version of Mastodon coincided with the reveal of Vero, yet another commercial social network silo backed by millionaires with a shady past. Vero has struck a chord, at least until people caught on to its background, and it wasn’t just because of its unlimited marketing budget. It has struck a chord because it promised an alternative to Instagram, which started getting progressively worse for creators after being acquired by Facebook.| Mastodon Blog
This article assumes you’ve read my previous two blog posts, here and here. Why not give them a quick read if you haven’t already? To balance out the doom and gloom of an internet wholly under the thrall of corporate interests and fed through single channels devoid of competition, it’s worth being aware of just how pervasive and powerful an idea decentralization is in the 21st century. The structure of things now are remnants of the way things have always been done: we trust in a singul...| Mastodon Blog
The online space is dominated by a small handful of companies that command a disproportionate amount of power and influence over the entire online experience, not just social media. So much influence that several of these companies have fundamentally altered many aspects of life offline; often described with the floral language of the privileged as ‘disruptive,’ but more clearly understood in the common tongue as ‘destructive.’’ The five most valuable companies at the end of 2017 we...| Mastodon Blog
So you want to be part of the Mastodon network, and you want to truly own your data, independent of anyone else. Perhaps you want to curate a niche community for a specific interest, or maybe for your own family or close circle of friends. You went through the documentation and installed the software, or maybe you chose one of the available hosting options to avoid all the technical nonsense altogether.| Mastodon Blog
Human beings, above all else, are storytellers. It’s how we relate to our own past, or personalities, or each other. It’s how to connect with the world around us, make sense of events, and assess values. We rely on stories to function as agents in the world. These stories are often told in-person: “oh, I did this today, I felt like this, then this happened and I was like ‘whoa no way!| Mastodon Blog
About 6 months have passed since April, during which the major mainstream breakthrough of our decentralized social network took place. From 20,000 users to almost a million! What better time to run through a couple examples of what’s been introduced since then? Mastodon is defined by its focus on good user experience, polished design and superior anti-abuse tools. In that vein, the web app has received numerous updates. Using the latest browser features, the web app receives real push notif...| Mastodon Blog
Mastodon is a free, open-source federated social network spanning over 800,000 users spread across more than 2,000 servers. Mastodon v1.6 is here, and it is the first Mastodon release which fully implements the ActivityPub protocol. ActivityPub is a new federated messaging protocol developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which aims to fix the shortcomings of past standards like OStatus. Mastodon is one of the first platforms, and certainly the first major platform to implement this n...| Mastodon Blog
My name is Eugen Rochko and I’m the creator of Mastodon, a free, open-source federated social network with over 760,000 users. You can check it out here. The Mastodon project is finally well-represented visually. I always felt like the previous logo did not do it justice. To its credit, it was both an M, and 3 sideways speech bubbles, but it did not scale well and overall it was just a circle.| Mastodon Blog
This is an update for my Patreon supporters. It is posted on Medium because of its superiour formatting capabilities. So, April, huh. A lot happened. I was putting off writing an update on here because I knew I had to go into detail on all the things that happened, and that’s quite a daunting task. Before I dive into things, a couple short notices: The way I work with the GitHub repository has changed.| Mastodon Blog
My instance mastodon.social has recently surpassed 43,000 users. I have closed registrations both to have more time to investigate the infrastructure and ensure a good experience for existing users, and to encourage more decentralization in the network (with a wonderful effect — the Mastodon fediverse now hosts over 161,000 people spread out over more than 500 independent instances!) But providing a smooth and swift service to 43,000 users takes some doing, and as some of the other instance...| Mastodon Blog
My name is Eugen Rochko and I’m the creator of Mastodon, a free, open-source federated social network server. The flagship instance mastodon.social has over 22,000 users and is growing fast. You can check it out here. Very early on in the development of Mastodon I’ve decided that centralization and unexpected algorithmic changes were not the only one of Twitter’s problems. Harrassment and tools to deal with it have always been lacking on Twitter’s end.| Mastodon Blog
Mark Zuckerberg’s manifesto might be well-spirited, but one thing in it is fundamentally wrong: In times like these, the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us. Facebook isn’t, and can never be, a platform where people have the power to build anything. Facebook doesn’t even have the pretense of a non-profit like Wikipedia or Mozilla; there is no doubt about the company...| Mastodon Blog
A year ago I wrote about Mastodon’s improvements over Twitter’s lacking protections against abuse and harassment. Development in that area has not been standing still, and it’s about time we do another comparison.| Mastodon Blog
Isn’t it a bit strange that the entire world has to wait on the CEO of Twitter to come around on what constitutes healthy discourse? I am not talking about it being too little, too late. Rather, my issue is with “instant, public, global messaging and conversation” being entirely dependent on one single privately held company’s whims. Perhaps they want to go in the right direction right now for once, but who’s to say how their opinion changes in the future?| Mastodon Blog
In June, I was able to officially register Mastodon gGmbH after nearly 8 months of legal work (“gGmbH” means “non-profit limited liability company”). A non-profit limited liability company in Germany is structered and operates similarly to a for-profit limited liability company with a few key differences. The founding document of the company is written such that the activity of the company is working towards goals that benefit the public; the shareholders may not receive any revenue f...| Mastodon Blog