Annual Report 2023 and last update of 2024 (Patreon)

Hello Patrons,

Yes, we can’t believe it ourselves.a. That it’s almost the end of 2024 andb. That we finally managed to release our Annual Report for 2023.

It’s been a couple of wild months on our end and our team is ready to take the deserved break over Christmas to snuggle up with Plushtodons and hot cocoa (anyone else?).

Possibly you too want to grab your Mastodon plushie and tuck into our last update of 2024!

Annual Report 2023

We know the 2023 Annual Report is arriving later than planned. With so many high-priority projects for our small team, it didn't make it to the top of our list until much later in the year. While there’s no excuse, it is fair to say our focus was simply elsewhere.

Going forward, we aim to release these reports in Q1 of the following year and have already started preparing for the 2024 Annual Report.

A lot of effort went into creating this report - from gathering detailed data on donations and user statistics to summarising all the engineering updates from 2023. Big thanks to Pierre Vincent and Dopatwo for their quick design turnaround, just in time for you to enjoy it over Christmas! Click here to read it.

Tech Update

Following our big Mastodon version 4.3 release, in October and November combined, we reviewed and merged 428 Pull Requests (300 with translation and dependency updates subtracted from the total) from 33 authors. We also made significant progress on:

1. The Fediscovery Project

For those who don’t know, Fediscovery stands for Fediverse Discovery Providers and it’s a project to explore decentralised search and discovery for the fediverse as a whole. This is a new service for ActivityPub-compatible platforms. We’ve been able to publish the first draft for a provider to register to data updates from a configured instance, and are keen to have other fediverse projects start to explore these new services with us.

2. iOS App

Thanks to Shannon, who joined at the end of October, we were able to ship a donation banner at the bottom of members’ timelines in our iOS app. Moreover, our 2024.11 version update saw several improvements to the onboarding experience, privacy after logging out, the display of filters, and content warnings.

3. #Wrapstodon

Inspired by Spotify’s wrapped, we released #Wrapstodon, a fun “year-in-review” feature showcasing your most engaging post in 2024 with other statistics; which we were able to test on mastodon.social and mastodon.online.

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

Trunk & Tidbits, October 2024

Trunk & Tidbits, November 2024

SMALL WINS 🥳

NGI (the Next Generation Internet Initiative from the European Commission) is making Mastodon and PeerTube its primary communication channels.

We secured a stand at FOSDEM 2025 with plans to attend with some of our team. David will talk about the Fediscovery project in the Social Web devroom on Saturday.

Andy from our team was a keynote speaker at RubyWorld 2024 in Japan(!) and was featured on FLOSS Weekly Episode 805 to discuss the 4.3 release.

Organisational Update

On the organisational and operational front, there has also been plenty of movement.

1. Team

At the end of October, we got most of our team together on a call (across five time zones) to welcome our three new members: David, Philip, and Shannon. It was so good seeing everyone’s faces and sharing our interests and passions beyond work.

For instance, we learned that:

Both of our recently joined developers have big families, with three kids each, which—to no surprise—requires a lot of time;

Our Ops team (Felix, Inga and Philip) are all tennis fanatics — hoping to form MTC (Mastodon Tennis Club) sometime in the summer of 2025;

Andy (who leads Developer Relations) has an art studio for pen plotting!

2. Recruiting for a Front-end Developer in 2025

Last week, we also started a hiring process for a new role: a Front-end Developer. This person would be highly skilled in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and solely dedicated to elevating the UI/UX experience for users of our web interface.

We haven’t published the role yet but hope to do so before the end of the year, so please keep your eyes on our @MastodonEngineering account for more updates.

3. Finance

We won’t bore you with all the accounting jargon but, Philip has been an incredible support to our team these past 2+ months - updating our cashflow forecasts weekly, creating a Year-End Forecast for 2024, supporting Eugen with merchandise sales, and so much more. Many processes are running in the background that often don’t get seen.

Fundraising and Donor Initiatives

We’ve also had good progress on some of our fundraising initiatives, such as:

Applying to more grants, e.g. Craig Newmark Philanthropies, FLOSS;

Finalising a donor deck and starting our outreach to larger donors;

Launching a Giving Tuesday campaign in the U.S.

When it came to our donor initiatives, we also:

Published a Donor Policy for Mastodon gGmbH and Mastodon, Inc.;

Opened a Benevity account for the U.S. and German entities, allowing employees to donate through their payroll and have their employer match their contribution;

Began communicating with our donor community on a more regular basis.

#Plushtodon

Last but not least, Mastodon’s stuffed toy became available for sale on October 15 and took the world by storm!

The adorable plushie got sold out in the EU in a matter of days with 610 units sold in total!

We released a batch for the UK at the end of November and made 500 units available for our U.S. supporters—they are still up for grabs here.

The hashtag #Plushtodon is widely used to show all the plushies in their new homes.

For many, the plushie became more than a toy—it became their work companion, emotional support, and cuddle buddy during the cold winter months. We love seeing how you spend time with yours, so please remember to tag #Plushtodon in your holiday photos!

That’s all for now.

Thank you for taking the time to read our final update for 2024, and we wish you a wonderful Christmas and upcoming New Year! Thank you for being our loyal supporters and see you in 2025 🐘

Merry Christmas 🎄

—The Mastodon team