While our team is working hard on finishing up the 5.0 update for Mastodon, I have something else to share with you. This year, instead of launching sales towards the end of November, leaving very little time for shipping before everything closes down for the holidays, we’re opening pre-orders for our latest #Plushtodon models **right now**. Take a look at them! Pre-order nowShipping expected November 2026 By now, you know the drill: They’re made of soft velboa, are ICTI Ethical Toy Program and Intertek WCA certified, and are suitable for children 3 and older. **Here’s the important info** : We expect to be able to start shipping them beginning of November. If you order something else in the same order with them (and you should, to make the most of the shipping cost, and because we make really cool, high quality merch), everything will be shipped together only once the plushies are ready. If that’s not how you want it, order separately. What else is there that you could attach to your order, I hear you ask? Well, as it happens, this year marks the **10th anniversary of Mastodon itself**. That’s right, we’ve been around for 10 years. October 16, 2026 is when I first publicly shared a link to Mastodon on a link aggregator site, bringing in the first wave of users and officially “launching” the project. To celebrate the anniversary, our artist Dopatwo and I prepared a design, screen printed on hoodies and t-shirts (this time, not just unisex t-shirts, but ones made for women as well, as you requested). If you’re not familiar with fabric printing techniques, screen printing is a really cool one, giving a very vibrant and durable result. And of course we only put them on high quality cotton. We also still have lots of “I write alt text” t-shirts, which have one of my favourite Dopatwo artworks on them. As for the small stuff, we’ve got 3 different enamel pin designs available and some cute sticker sheets. Here you can check out people showing off their Mastodon plushies on Mastodon! Anyway, thanks for sticking with us!

Editorial curation by the real humans at Flipboard

We’ve just released two new t-shirts on our shop, based on slogan suggestions from the community, and featuring lovely artwork from our artist Dopatwo. One is “My friends are not for sale”, and the other is “I write ALT text”. We’ve chosen quality over quantity, as we often do, by screen printing the designs on high-quality, organic cotton. As someone who’s bought a lot of band merch over the years, I can tell you - they feel good to the touch. Our merch is not a big money maker for us compared to direct donations (remember, Mastodon is crowdfunded by the community — there’s no venture capital or investors, no ads or monetization), but it is fun and it helps bring awareness to the platform. We also try to create bespoke, high quality items in limited runs. If we can sell these t-shirts it will allow us to make more cool things in the future, from more cool t-shirt designs, to beanies, hoodies, and more. We’ve also restocked on our enamel pins (have you seen how shiny and glittery the “Live, laugh, federate” pin is?), and there’s some leftover stock of various other items as well. Take a look around the store! On a related note, if you’d like to help spread awareness of Mastodon in real life, **we now offerprintable poster designs in multiple languages**. Check it out! ### Join the mailing list Get notified when new merch becomes available for sale Subscribe See our privacy policy

Welcome to the _24th edition_ of Trunk & Tidbits 🎉 We’ve been publishing this monthly series, “behind the scenes of the code” from the Mastodon team, for a whole two years now! We’re getting close to the release of Mastodon 4.6. In the past few weeks we published two feature updates about things you’ll see in the next version: * firstly, there was a post about a redesign for profile pages, now available to try out on `mastodon.social` and coming to other servers with version 4.6; * we also posted a more detailed update on Collections (previously briefly known as “Packs”). Our goal in posting these updates is to offer a community-driven design process, and to provide visibility into _how_ and _why_ we reached implementation choices - similar to the transparency we’ve been offering via Trunk & Tidbits, but at a slightly less technical level. One more thing on a related topic - Imani spoke at FOSS Backstage Design, about the journey of being a designer at Mastodon, and some of the challenges and opportunities of working on federated software at scale. You can watch the talk on YouTube. ## Releases Last month, we released updates for the Mastodon server software across the three active branches. These point releases all include security updates, as well as fixes to compatibility with GoToSocial features. * 4.5.8 * 4.4.15 * 4.3.21 As usual, we strongly encourage server owners to update to the most recent version, in order to get the most stable and secure code and up-to-date user experience. > Note that this is the final month for the 4.3.x branch - the end of support date for this version is May 6th 2026. ## Backend and Web In March 2026 we reviewed and merged 347 Pull Requests (268 with translation and dependency updates removed), from 13 contributors. We’re continuing to focus on the new profile design work, and Collections, both of which will be major features of Mastodon 4.6 - so again this month, much of the work has been around these two areas. Thank you for the feedback shared about the updates to profiles, in particular - this is being used to shape the final full release version. We’ve also worked on improving the accessibility of the Mastodon Web UI. This has involved focusing on the sign-up and login flows, better colour contrast, and improved navigation with skip links, with more to come in the near future. — PR #38006 (by diondiondion) — PR #38188 (by diondiondion) — PR #38036 (by diondiondion) Hidden behind a feature flag for now, we’ve added the ability for account owners to allow anonymous visitors to subscribe to their posts via e-mail, without a Mastodon account. This feature is _not yet ready for testing_ - we are working on the missing pieces right now. The work has been funded by an NGI0 grant through NLNet, to improve Mastodon’s suitability for use by institutions. Mastodon now supports two additional Fediverse Enhancement Proposals, FEP-2c59 (_Discovery of a Webfinger address from an ActivityPub actor_ — PR #38239 (by ClearlyClaire) ) and FEP-3b86 (_Activity Intents_ — PR #38120 (by Gargron) — PR #38130 (by ClearlyClaire) ). This will improve interactions with other Fediverse servers. On the API side, as part of the profile redesign we are introducing a new dedicated `profile` endpoint, allowing client apps to access the current profile and update it. App developers are encouraged to add support for this new set of functions - they also allow brand new capabilities, such as setting a text description for profile pictures and header banners. Lastly, there have been a lot of technical improvements and refactoring in the codebase, including: support for Ruby 4.0; the removal of the `oj` gem for JSON handling in the backend; and, an upgrade of our web client toolchain to Vite 8, which should make the web assets build step both faster and more memory efficient. ## Android We continued working on the profile redesign, and made two releases with minor bug fixes. ## iOS We shipped version 2026.02 with a number of technical improvements that will help us keep moving forward, and some visible fixes as well: * You can now manage multiple logged-in accounts from the Settings screen (this has always been accessible by long-pressing the current account avatar, but was not easy to discover). * Fix for No audio while playing videos or audio before going full screen * Fix for Quoted posts that are _long_ are not truncated * Fix for Encoded HTML entities in display names are applied ## Community One of the benefits of building open platforms is that people can build interfaces that work well for different scenarios. We’ve got a number of client apps listed on our website (and you can add your own, if it is not listed there yet - send a pull request on our website repository). Not everyone uses the latest and greatest devices, and even if you do, maybe you also like small and simple interfaces as well? In these cases, check out smolfedi - a lightweight, cross-fedi-platform front end that works with Mastodon as well as with several other Fediverse services. If you run a Mastodon server, or any kind of Fediverse server - or even if you ran a server, and then closed it down - the Social Web Foundation has a new survey to gather data for a sustainability report. The Fediverse Sustainability Survey is anonymous, and the report will be published on the SWF site in the future. ## Thank you As the initiator and author of twenty four editions of Trunk & Tidbits, and on behalf of the Mastodon team, I’d like to say, directly to _you_ - Thank You, for all of your support over the past couple of years. Please do “chip in” with a recurring donation to the project - Open Source, not-for-profit software and movements like ours, need to be sustained. ### 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. Donate to the project View our sponsors

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 (`@user@domain.com`) now displays beneath the account’s display name, even if the account is on the same server as yours. The updated explainer for profile handles. #### 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. A more compact design for custom fields. #### 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. ## 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. A screenshot of the redesigned profile editing experience on desktop web. The page shows sections for profile and cover photo editing, display name and bio editing, custom fields, featured hashtags, and profile tab settings. ### More control during image upload You can now crop images, and add alt text to profile and cover photos. A screen recording showing a user zooming and cropping a profile photo within a modal, then clicking on the “Next” button. On the next step, the modal displays a preview of the cropped image and a text field where the user can enter alt text. ### 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. A zoomed-in view of the interface for editing custom fields, which contains buttons for adding, reordering, changing, and deleting custom fields. Beneath the custom fields, a hyperlinked text reads “How do I add a verified link?” ### 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. A screen recording showing the interaction of a user viewing a banner on their own profile that contains suggested hashtags with options to add or dismiss. The user clicks on “Add” and the suggested hashtags are immediately added to their profile. ### 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. A screenshot of the Profile tab settings modal, which contains three settings allowing users to show/hide the Media tab, show/hide replies on the Media tab, and show/hide the Featured tab. A banner at the bottom of the modal explains that displays may vary on other 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 **feedback@joinmastodon.org**. 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.

Have you ever wondered why news articles around the web have buttons to share to some of those other social sites, but not on Mastodon? There used to be a legitimate reason for this: unlike legacy social, Mastodon isn’t a single monolithic website you can link to; there are over 8,000 places where a person could have a Mastodon account! Their account could be on `mastodon.social`, the large, official server run by us. Or `hachyderm.io`, a sizeable server for tech enthusiasts operated by Nivenly. Or `social.coop`, a Mastodon server operated like a co-operative, where all members pay towards the costs and vote on decisions together. Some people run their own Mastodon servers, on their hardware at home. The distributed nature of the network is the greatest strength of Mastodon, but it also means that having a share button that takes you to the “correct” Mastodon server for your account, is a lot more involved than a simple hyperlink. Third party solutions have existed before now, but none of them have become ubiquitous, or easy to discover for website owners. This changes today, with our new official Share tool. If you are a website owner, you can go to share.joinmastodon.org to find instructions describing how to integrate this on your website. Of course, we’ve also made the code available and open source, the same as the rest of Mastodon’s code. That means you can check how it works, and even host a share page of your own (you don’t need to host anything, but you can, if you don’t want to use the version that we’re hosting - it’s your choice). To try out what sharing something looks like right now, click “Share on Mastodon” on this very blog post (there’s a button to do it, at the top right of the page). The tool itself works entirely in your browser: there is no tracking data, and it does not store any information on the server. If you have multiple Mastodon accounts, you can add more than one, and choose which one to share to when you post. One more thing to mention here: back when we released Mastodon version 4.4, tucked away in the release notes, we mentioned that server administrators have the option to send a referrer header when a link is clicked. If the owner of your server has enabled that setting, then websites whose links get shared will see traffic coming from Mastodon - yet another way to share how the community is growing. We’re looking forward to seeing the Mastodon logo on more websites - possibly, alongside other social media platforms; and maybe even as the “main” sharing link, like here on our blog.

Immer am ersten Sonntag im Monat #DIDit #DUTgemacht

Hi, I’m Hannah. I’m a community builder and long-time professional social media poster, though most of my “greatest hits” weren’t under my own name. I’ve managed and contributed to social accounts for a blowtorch manufacturer, a fancy hand soap maker, a Chicago-based foodservice company, and ultimately, tech companies. (That last one is how I found my way to open source — but that’s a rerun episode for another day) Now, I’m Mastodon’s Community Director. I joined because this work is personal to me. My early professional experience gave me a front-row seat to the ways traditional social media companies do harm to people and society. I believe that the social web, and Mastodon as part of it, has a vital role to play in charting a new path forward for our digital social spaces. I’m thrilled to be here building with you. Alright — enough about me. :) Let’s get to the part where we talk about what Mastodon is doing for you this year! ## Introducing the Mastodon.social Help Centre Our team runs mastodon.social to provide a safe landing place for anyone, especially for newcomers to the social web. It’s also an important example to others of what a Mastodon server looks like when it’s up and running. For those reasons, and because we feel it’s the right thing to do, we want mastodon.social to be accessible and safe for anyone who chooses to host their account there. Today, we’re announcing a new resource for mastodon.social users: the Help Centre. We intend for the Help Centre to be a place where people can learn how to use Mastodon’s software. It will also include more information about participating on mastodon.social in a healthy, safe, and accessible way. In the future, we’re planning to migrate this site to a free and open source software (FOSS) backend, and integrate links to user-facing tutorials directly into Mastodon’s software. We have a lot of ideas about the kinds of resources we want to add to the Help Centre. We’re announcing it now because we think it’s important to show our work as we go, and we want your help. Throughout 2026 community team members Zora and Amelia will continue to add guides and tutorials about Mastodon, and we’ll ask for your input along the way: What kinds of resources should we add? Are we on the right track? How can we improve? Let us know by getting in touch with @staff@mastodon.social. We also haven’t forgotten about mastodon.online. We want to do something wildly different there and push the limits of what the software can do. We have some thoughts, but we don’t really know what this looks like yet! If you have ideas about neat or useful things we could do with mastodon.online, send a message to @staff@mastodon.online. ## Default server recommendations and server discovery As people fled from traditional social media in late 2022, we made a strategic decision to send new sign-ups directly to mastodon.social. This choice was driven by our desire to reduce cognitive load for new users and ensure a stable onboarding experience. While we want people to feel safe and welcome on mastodon.social, we also know we can do more to help deliver on Mastodon’s decentralised promise. Our ultimate goal is to reimagine Mastodon’s onboarding process (you heard about that yesterday from Renaud and Imani). For now, we want to run some onboarding experiments to test our ideas and learn what can work for us and for everyone on the network. Our first experiment is Default Server Recommendations. (If you were at FOSDEM or following along at home, you may have seen Andy Piper and I announce this or post about it!). Practically, we will replace the “join mastodon.social” button with a button that recommends a server from an opt-in pool that we will be hand selecting to start. At first, we’re planning to recommend the closest geographic server in the correct language based on data surfaced by the app store, so it will only be available initially on the Android and iOS apps. We may also experiment with other logic for recommending a server, including random distribution. We’re listening to your feedback as we move forward with our planning. (We hear you on open sign-ups and spam. We’re already talking about what we can do.) No matter how we’re routing sign-ups, the experiment will be designed to ensure that server admins remain in control: meaning, they will have the power to opt in and out as needed, or reduce the percentage of sign-ups flowing their way. If you want to be a part of these experiments, complete this form. We also intend to improve server discovery by improving our Server Directory. This starts with moving the directory to a new pull-request-based system so admins can submit, update, or remove entries themselves. Another change we want to make is to add more and new ways to “classify” different types of servers including demographics, interests, and geographic regions. Once we have that kind of information, we can start to explore new ways to incorporate it into the onboarding process. ## We’re getting off Discord: Join us on Zulip We’re taking concrete steps to demonstrate our commitment to our values by moving as much of our digital infrastructure to FOSS as possible. This is a long-term project. We’re going to move slowly, and we’re not committing to moving everything to FOSS. We’re taking our time because we need to balance achieving our mission with evolving our operations. That being said — today, we’re taking an important step that we feel will make a big difference for us and for our community: We’re starting the process of moving our community chat space from Discord to Zulip. Our first step will be to migrate the people on our existing Discord servers to Zulip, which we plan to do soon. Currently, only Patreon donors are granted access to the Discord. On Zulip, we’ll grant access to donors no matter where their gift comes from. We also want to extend access to more and different kinds of people who are deeply engaged and actively contributing to Mastodon and the social web. However, we want to be thoughtful about how we do that. Running these spaces is important, but they do add coordination and moderation overhead to our small team. We’ll keep you updated as we make progress. * * * ## Stay tuned That’s all for now, folks! Thanks for reading and stay tuned: We plan to start sharing more stories and exciting things happening from across Mastodon and the social web right here on our blog. If you liked the projects and direction you read about here and over the last two days, please consider sending a donation our way to support this work and Mastodon’s future. If you’re already a donor: Thank you! Next up: a feature interview of Yehuda, the server admin of turtleisland.social. See you there 👋 ### 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. Donate to the project View our sponsors

Hello everyone! I’m Renaud, and I’m the Technical Director at Mastodon. I’ve also been the technical lead for delivering Mastodon releases for several years now. This post is co-written with Imani, our lead product designer. Mastodon continues to grow as more people seek alternatives to centralised social media and closed social networks. Today, we’re sharing our vision for making the Fediverse more accessible, diverse, and empowering for everyone—from first-time users to established creators. At its core, Mastodon remains a microblogging, or short form text app. We’re building an app that enables anyone to connect with their friends, and share their thoughts and creativity. We are part of an ecosystem of interconnected social apps known as the Fediverse - built on common standards and protocols, a space where you can choose the apps and communities that are the right fit for how you want to express yourself, and participate how and where you are most comfortable. Over the past 18 months, we’ve focused on growing our core development team and improving our processes to set us up for this phase of the project. We’ve gone from having one or two full-stack developers, to a broader team with expertise and experience across backend, web, and mobile apps, working with a dedicated designer who helps us to think deeply about how people encounter and use the social web. You’ve seen us increase the rate of updates over the past eighteen months - three major new versions (4.3, 4.4 and 4.5), each with headline new features that the community has been waiting for: improved discovery; better onboarding; list management upgrades; new tools for server owners; and, of course, Quote Posts! We’re far from done, and we plan to continue to deliver regular updates. It is important to understand that Mastodon is vital infrastructure for many, so we will also continue to spend a large proportion of our time on ensuring that the platform remains safe, stable and secure. This is a key reason why we take our time when it comes to evaluating new features. ## The broader roadmap We recently reworked our roadmap, to make it more specific about what we are working on in the immediate future (three to six months). The roadmap on our site represents what we’re directly building in the current and following release cycles: we deliberately keep it focused, and want to avoid committing to add functionality when we may not yet be ready to support it. As we think about our plans, we recognise that we are also part of the broader Fediverse. We make an effort to implement features in an open and interoperable manner, creating new specifications when needed. Recent examples include Quote Posts, Collections, and the Fediverse Auxiliary Service Provider specification - we’re excited to see other people build new implementations. It’s also useful to provide a longer-term view of where we are going, so with that in mind, here’s a broader view of what we’re planning to build over the next 1-2 years. ### A social web for everyone A thriving Mastodon ecosystem is one where anyone can participate, regardless of technical knowledge. We’re redesigning core parts of the experience to make this a reality: a streamlined sign-up flow that explains server choice without overwhelming newcomers, improved search and discovery tools to help you find communities and conversations, and clearer navigation throughout the app. ### Promoting indie servers Right now, too many newcomers default to the largest servers. We want to change that - because Mastodon is best when communities are spread across many independent servers, each with its own character and focus. We’ll be shipping new admin tools to help independent server operators manage moderation and maintenance more easily, like a feature to use external blocklists, extensible ways to set up content scanning to detect illegal content or spam, and ways to reduce your media storage usage by delegating serving remote posts media files from a trusted third party. We’ll also be redesigning server discovery to showcase the diversity of communities available. You’ll hear more about this from Hannah, our Community Director, in tomorrow’s post. ### A decentralised platform for content creators Public figures, journalists, and institutions are looking for alternatives to mainstream platforms – and we want Mastodon to be their first choice. We’re introducing features designed specifically for creators: a redesigned profile view that better showcases their work, and an enhanced compose experience. For organisations like public institutions, we’re working on a new email notification option that allows people to follow their updates even if those people don’t have a Mastodon account yet. This means creators can reach their audiences wherever they are – whether they’re active in the Fediverse or still exploring their options. Our goal is to give audiences and creators a way to connect on their own terms, free from algorithmic manipulation. ### Onward, together These upcoming changes represent our commitment to building a social web that puts people first. Mastodon won’t ever harvest your data or chase engagement metrics. We’re focused on creating spaces where authentic connection can flourish. If you have thoughts on software improvements, send us an email. ### Support Mastodon We’re a small team building software to power the Fediverse. Unlike ad-driven platforms, we operate entirely on donations – and _every contribution matters_. See our donation page for ways to support us. ### 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. Donate to the project View our sponsors

Over the past couple of decades, the concept of the “social” internet has come a long way - from the first interactive websites and the Web 2.0 era, blogs and self-publishing, the ability for people to create and share their own content online, through microblogging to broadcasting at scale. Today, what we know as “social media” is having a huge impact on society - often, taken advantage of in unhealthy ways. We believe that the open social web can be better than this. We’ve seen the _positive_ impact that online social platforms can have, and we treat our roles as builders of resources in this space with great responsibility. Our focus on community ownership, trust & safety features, organic user & server growth, and financial sustainability - for the non-profit project, the server administrators, the moderators, the developers and translators, and the creators in the Fediverse - will enable us to build a better way of being online. To begin, we sat down together to figure out who we are, what we do, and how we operate. This is a first step in building community ownership and governance, which we kicked off in November last year. We may seem to be moving slowly compared to our better funded competitors and even friends in our space, but we think this is the right speed for something as important as the digital fabric of our society. Today we’re sharing our Vision, Mission, and the Pillars for our 2026 strategy. ## Our vision > A human-centred social web that serves the common good. ## Our mission > Connect the world through thriving online communities. ## Our strategy Here’s how we’re going to do it: ### Governance: Create obvious pathways and opportunities for the social web community to help shape the future of Mastodon First, we will finalise a governance model that makes everyone feel consulted and informed about the future of Mastodon. Second, we’re forming and founding an EU-based non-profit parent entity to ensure Mastodon stays European forever. Third, we are developing a funding strategy to reach sustainable operations, including building capabilities into Mastodon that allow users to donate easily without leaving the app. Fourth, we will be moving more of our team and project infrastructure to open platforms for greater autonomy - with the first example being a migration (soon) from Discord to Zulip for our community discussions. Finally, we are investing in our internal systems, to remain a welcoming and well-functioning workplace for our team. ### Network Health: Redefine what it means to be safe on Mastodon Everyone on today’s internet is directly exposed to regulations like GDPR, the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and lately numerous age verification (or assurance) laws and related social media bans for minors. We will perform a regulatory audit to ensure full legal compliance of our own servers, and explore how this knowledge can be shared with the community. We are also forming an interdisciplinary age-verification working group, to help us navigate the complex nature of these international laws. Simultaneously, the team will draft and publish new community guidelines and moderation policies for the servers we operate. Additionally, we are updating the terms of service (we ran a community consultation on this in October 2025) and privacy policy for our own servers. ### Product & Ecosystem Growth: Build a beautiful and intuitive social networking application that helps people discover the fediverse and find their friends The Mastodon project is planning a global redesign to improve usability and discovery across the next software versions. These releases will include shipping our extension capabilities to all servers (initiated thanks to the EU-funded “Fediscovery” project); creating a specification for automated content detection; and establishing processes to support network growth and health. Additionally, the team will focus on improvements for server administrators, by making Mastodon easier to install, update, and administer, with efforts to reduce hosting costs and enhance documentation. Over the next two days, my fellow directors will share more information about their plans for the coming year. Stay tuned, and let us know what you think about this plan by posting to us on Mastodon via @mastodon@mastodon.social or by sending us an email.

In November 2025, we shared our new organisational structure, and explained that the process to establish a new, non-profit, home for the project in Europe is well underway. In the same post, we also mentioned that our German-based organisation has had its former charitable status removed. As a result, we are making necessary changes to some of the legal terminology across the project, and on our websites. Specifically, in most places where Mastodon gGmbH was previously mentioned (including in the about pages of Mastodon servers) we’re revising the text, to refer to Mastodon GmbH. The “g” stands for non-profit (German: _gemeinnützig_), and this adjustment is being made to reflect the change of status of this part of our organisation structure, in Germany. Furthermore, Marius Rothermund was appointed in January 2026 as second managing director of Mastodon GmbH, in addition to Felix Hlatky. The reason for this is to distribute management tasks over more shoulders and ensure full compliance during this critical phase of restructuring. The imprint for our German organisation now reflects this change. Marius will accompany us until we establish our new European non-profit holding structure. These changes are to fulfil legal requirements, and reflect our current operational status. There is no change to our mission, or direction (mentioned in our recent FOSDEM presentation, with more to come on the blog next week); overall, Mastodon remains a non-profit with a fiscal sponsor in Germany (via WE AID) and via our 501(c)(3) entity in the United States. The next steps will be to form a Belgian non-profit parent organisation. You can expect to see more news before the Summer.

This year, the Mastodon team returned to FOSDEM for the third time. FOSDEM is an annual gathering of open source developers, held in Brussels. We’re excited to report that the Fediverse is feeling vibrant! FOSDEM has become a central element of EU Open Source Week - a series of events, meetups and workshops that have formed around the conference itself. The range of events makes this trip to Brussels valuable for our team, with opportunities to meet other projects, non-profit organisations, open source foundations, and policymakers. On Friday evening before FOSDEM, a group of around forty Fediverse supporters, builders and enthusiasts got together for a social meetup. This was the first time that several prominent developers across the ActivityPub ecosystem had met in person, and there was an immediate sense of excitement and anticipation! We enjoyed the chance to meet up with both community members, and also developers working on other ActivityPub-related projects. FOSDEM itself runs across Saturday and Sunday. The team had a table with handouts that explained the project; a slideshow covering improvements since last year’s event as well as our roadmap; and some pins and stickers for sale. A few lucky visitors were able to pick up a special _limited-edition_ sticker featuring a “My friends are not for sale” tagline. The Plushtodons also made an appearance, for photo opportunities - unfortunately we were not able to transport any for sale, but folks were able to order new friends directly from the online store. My friends are not for sale stickers - only available at FOSDEM (so far) Reflecting on our third trip to FOSDEM, we’ve been thinking a lot about how things have developed in only three years: * in 2024, Mastodon was the first (and so far, remains the only) Fediverse project to get a stand at the event… and there was no specific conference track for Social Web discussions; * last year, the Social Web track - partly created from the popular demand seen the previous year - was a (packed) half-day affair, with spill over birds of a feather and after hours events; * this year, the track ran throughout the day on Saturday, with _29 speakers_ from countries worldwide, covering both technical and non-technical topics - _and_ there were additional meetups and sessions outside of that! Hannah (Community Director) and Andy (Head of Communications) co-presented a session on Mastodon’s mission, governance and community, and they also announced a forthcoming experiment to extend default server recommendations. > Post by @Mastodon@mastodon.social > > View on Mastodon Overall, this year’s Social Web track highlighted the diversity of projects and discussions in the Fediverse ecosystem. It was also a hub of conversation around the need for greater autonomy in technology choices in Europe. It was a very exciting day. Some speakers at the end of the Social Web track (thank you to @Sturmsucht for being with us throughout the day and for sharing the photo!) On Sunday, our Executive Director Felix was part of a discussion about the Fediverse and the EU’s Digital Services Act. Conversations like these provide opportunities to share our mission, and they help to educate policymakers on the values of the Fediverse. Members of the team also took part in other sessions related to the Fediverse; and the others were kept busy with conversations at our table - although, by Sunday, we’d run out of most of the merchandise items we’d taken along… > Post by @Mastodon@mastodon.social > > View on Mastodon At Mastodon, we value everyone across the community - our fellow developers, people who run Fediverse servers, and the people who use Mastodon and other connected applications every day. We were happy to be back in Brussels for FOSDEM, and we hope to return to continue the important conversations that happen there. Thank you to everyone who visited our table, for their interest and kind words about the project. We’re building a better social web for everyone, and we were happy to see you there! If you’re curious about what you missed, have a look at the recordings from the Social Web track. ### 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. Donate to the project View our sponsors

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