Mastodon 4.3 (Patreon)

Hi Patrons and Mastodonians,

Hope you all had a great, restful summer. We’re not quite sure how it is October already? With less than 3 months until the end of 2024, we wanted to give you another update on our latest developments from August and September.

Disclaimer: We promise, this will be a much shorter update than the last! We still recommend grabbing something warm and snuggly (a cat, perhaps?) and giving this a read.

1. Tech update - Mastodon 4.3 release

So many of you’ve been waiting and we’re happy to finally deliver it:

Mastodon 4.3 release - after releasing the first and second beta, we’re happy to announce that Mastodon 4.3 is finally out!

We've made notifications easier to manage, improved the look and feel of the whole app across the board, enhanced the onboarding and discovery experience for new users and added a feature to highlight writers and journalists on the fediverse.

For more details, read our latest blog here or check our release notes here.

Fediverse Discovery Providers - during Fediforum this September, we announced and launched a new project that will help small and medium-sized fediverse servers and their users have better access to search and discovery through the use of pluggable Fediverse Discovery Providers. This project is supported by a grant from the European Commission, through the NGI Search program. See our new dedicated website for more details.

Also, in case you’ve missed our monthly Trunk & Tidbits series, you can dive into more detailed updates from our technical team below:

Trunk & Tidbits, July 2024

Trunk & Tidbits, August 2024

Trunk & Tidbits, September 2024

2. Hiring update

We’ve had great success with recruitment and made 2 more hires in the last 2 months!

Philip joined our team last week (1 October) as our part-time Strategic Finance and Operations Associate. He will be supporting our leadership team Felix and Eugen with all things finance (accounting, reporting, budgeting) as well as fundraising activities!

Fun fact: Out of 122 candidates who applied for the role, only 2 made it to the final stage - that’s 1.6%! Good job, @Philip!

We have also just hired our first full-time iOS Developer, who will be starting with us in 2 weeks, taking the lead and ownership of developing our official Mastodon iOS app!

We received our first application on 25 July and closed the role just over 9 weeks later - a great turnaround given our recruitment team was away for 3 weeks this summer. Special thanks go to Renaud and Marcus during this hiring process.

Also, thanks to our incredible community and strong network, the quality of candidates was the strongest we’ve ever seen!

Fun fact: Out of 46 applicants that applied, we interviewed 39% of them(!) - the highest conversion from the application form to a screening interview we’ve had!

Recruitment of these hires is only made possible thanks to the regular donations we receive, which have a huge impact on our capacity to move faster in developing the Mastodon product.

There are many more technical hires (we’re still only a team of 3 full-time engineers) and growth hires we would love to make but for now, Mastodon will be pausing any recruiting efforts until we can secure more funding for 2025.

3. Founding supporter of the Social Web Foundation

On 24 Sep, leaders of the open social networking movement have formed the Social Web Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to making connections between social platforms with the open standard protocol ActivityPub.

We’re proud to back the Social Web Foundation as one of their industry supporters (alongside other great teams at Flipboard, Fastly, Ghost, IFTAS etc.). It’s great to see more organisations being built to push the Fediverse forward, committed to building a stronger, more open and dynamic social web for all.

On that note, we want to clarify our role:

Our aim is to educate and onboard more people to the fediverse, and collaborating with SWF is just one of many steps within the broader community to achieve this goal.

Mastodon's role so far has been strictly limited to participating in discussions - nothing beyond that. We do not create or implement strategies, nor do we endorse or seek funding on behalf of SWF. While we are not involved in every decision SWF makes, we believe its mission is important and worth supporting.

We believe in strengthening partnerships with many organisations, as long as their goals align with growing and sustaining the fediverse. In the case of SWF, their goals clearly do.

For more information, you can navigate to their website and launch update here.

4. Fundraising

Last but not least, as we’re approaching the end of 2024 - our team is ramping up a couple of fundraising campaigns. We’ve set ourselves a pretty ambitious goal until the end of 2025, because we realised we need to start planning further ahead than a couple of months at a time.

Our recently launched Android in-app donation banners have been successful at bringing us some additional funds. Our team is now working on launching them for our iOS app. For now the banners are only enabled for users on our own servers (mastodon.social & mastodon.online), but we plan to extend this to other servers in the future to help server admins in funding their infrastructure and the ecosystem.

As a non-profit in such a demanding space, we’re noticing that higher-value recurring donations enable us to really plan ahead and support our future hiring efforts the most. We would be extremely grateful if you considered increasing your monthly pledge even if just by a few dollars. Because there are almost 7 thousand of you - a small difference in a donation will have a big impact on our ability to plan for more technical hires, and as result, will help us improve your Mastodon experience a lot faster!

Well, it looks like “shorter” updates aren’t that short after all! Regardless of the summer holidays, as you can tell - our team has been keeping busy.

Thank you for reading, for your consistent support and for being part of our journey!

—

The Mastodon team