Trunk & Tidbits, October 2025
We started the Trunk & Tidbits series to provide greater visibility into what we’re building, and the decisions that go into making Mastodon. At the start of October, we published our ideas on an upcoming feature - that we’re _temporarily_ describing as “Packs”, or collections or lists of people to recommend to follow. As with our work on Quote Posts, we’re publishing our thinking early, and intend to follow up with a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal to share with the broader Fediverse community.
Also, following on from our announcement of service offerings, we were excited to share the news that AltStore are making the Fediverse their home, including generous donations to a number of projects, and the launch of a new Mastodon server.
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On a completely different note, we also shared that the adorable #Plushtodon is making a comeback 🥳 this time in two colours and a more compact form factor, but still perfectly squeezable. Look out for new mug designs, too - all of these should be hitting the merch store later this month 🤞🏻
## Events
October was a busy month of events for the team.
We kicked off with Andy speaking at Berlin Fedi Day in Germany, to talk about sovereignty, freedom, and hope.
Andy was also on stage at EmpoderaLIVE in Malaga, Spain, to talk about Mastodon and the Fediverse. You can watch the interview (on YouTube) in English, or with a Spanish translation.
> Post by @espiritusanto@mastodon.social
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Several members of the team dropped in to sessions at Fediforum online, and hosted a conversation about Packs.
Felix attended a number of discussions around policy, cooperation, and healthy online spaces at OSCE on his “home turf” in Vienna, Austria. It remains vital that we engage in these conversations with organisations to spread awareness and understanding of the Fediverse.
> Post by @mellifluousbox@mastodon.social
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## Releases
Mastodon **4.5** is now available as the latest stable release of the software. This follows three release candidates during October. Mastodon 4.5 brings the long-awaited consent-respecting quote posts feature (FEP-044f), as well as greater customisation for server owners, and other features (see the announcement post).
As we approached the release, we published a blog post all about the changes that developers need to know about in Mastodon 4.5.
For previous stable release branches, we also shipped:
* version **4.4.8** (and 4.4.6 and 4.4.7 before that)
* version **4.3.14**
* version **4.2.27**
As always, we recommend that all Mastodon server owners should be running the latest point version for their release branch, and ideally, to upgrade to the newest stable version of Mastodon. There are a lot of new features in version 4.5, particularly since this release makes display and authoring of quote posts available to everyone.
The release of Mastodon 4.5 also updates our list of supported versions, and upcoming end-of-life dates. In particular, the 4.2 branch will no longer receive updates after January 8, 2026, and the 4.3 branch will reach EOL on May 6, 2026.
### Looking ahead
You will find that the Roadmap page on the website has had a complete overhaul. We know that the previous roadmap was outdated and did not reflect what we are currently working on, or considering for future versions - particularly with our expanded team and the increased pace of development.
The page is now simplified into:
* features we’ve recently shipped (current stable release);
* those we are actively working on (for the next major release);
* and those we are exploring (this may include research and specification work, usually for a version after the next major update).
The road map is simply to provide a little more insight into where the team’s efforts are directly focused. The existence of this page and its contents, does not exclude other changes and adjustments that we make along the way.
## Backend and Web
Reflecting the pace of change in the final weeks before 4.5 shipped, we reviewed and merged 202 Pull Requests (134 with translation and dependency updates removed) from 21 contributors. It was a huge month. We appreciate the support and contributions from the community.
* interface The refactor of Mastodon’s UI colours to use semantic theme tokens is almost complete. We’re planning to merge this change in two phases starting soon after Mastodon 4.5 is released. This is a large PR with countless changes across our SCSS files, and very likely to affect third-party themes and forks. Please let us know your feedback or any concerns directly in the Pull Request. — PR #36640 (by diondiondion)
* interface We updated our supported emoji to 16. — PR #36501 (by ChaosExAnima)
* interface Refactored the Emoji handling code to be more efficient, simpler to work with, and allow rendering native emojis instead of the Twemoji SVGs, depending on the user browser and preference.
* admin Added granular settings for the various live feeds. — PR #36338 (by ClearlyClaire) — PR #36607 (by ClearlyClaire)
* interface Improved display of CWs, link previews and quote posts in the admin UI. — PR #35958 (by ThisIsMissEm) — PR #35935 (by ThisIsMissEm) — PR #35964 (by ThisIsMissEm)
* new feature Small fixes and improvements to the ‘fetch all replies’ widget, and periodic checks for new replies. — PR #36334 (by diondiondion) — PR #36383 (by diondiondion) — PR #36547 (by diondiondion)
* developer Changed the identifiers used in ActivityPub URLs for new users to not contain the username, which will enable account renames (for these accounts) in a future version. — PR #36316 (by ClearlyClaire) — PR #36365 (by ClearlyClaire)
* new feature Added a new setting to allow one-click boosting, which moves the quote option into the status three dots menu. — PR #36516 (by diondiondion)
* new feature Changed the minimum characters required for a logged out account search from five to three. — PR #36487 (by Gargron)
* api Enabled receiving “modern” RFC 9421 HTTP signatures for all servers. — PR #36610 (by oneiros)
* api Added support for `Update` to non-natively handled ActivityPub object types. — PR #36322 (by ClearlyClaire)
## Android
There were two small updates fixing some crashes during October.
## iOS
We shipped an all-new timeline layout and support for quote posts in the 2025.06 release at the start of October, and followed up with several important bug fixes in 2025.07. More coming soon!
## Community
On the community side of things, the project now uses the Contributor Covenant version 3 as the Code of Conduct for contributors and community members.
As usual, we wanted to highlight a few fun things we’ve seen on the internet this month, built using the Mastodon API.
* The Hall of Toots is an immersive way to explore your Mastodon feeds!
* TootSDK continues to follow our API updates closely, and has been updated to support quote posts and timeline visibility options. Thanks to Dale Price and other contributors.
_Important note_ there are a range of other libraries available for the Mastodon API - let us know if we are missing something 🙂
* The prolific Stefan Bohacek continues to impress, with a game to see how well you know your Fediverse Follows (there’s a brief explanation on his projects page). Stefan also has a collection of typographical experiments around the Fediverse.
## Onwards, with thanks
The Mastodon team is deeply grateful to everyone for their support of what we’re building. We do this thanks to your donations. If you’re able to help us, please consider adding a recurring donation. Thank you!
### 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 through platforms like Patreon.
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