loading . . . Trunk & Tidbits, November 2025 Hello, friends! Last month was momentous and exciting: we announced a new organisation structure; Eugen changed roles; and, we also announced a new path for donors to support us in Europe, thanks to fiscal sponsorship from WE AID.
Alongside these changes, we’ve also started a series of social posts to encourage folks to visit the new donation portal. You may see these posts, with a #SupportMastodon hashtag - feel free to boost them, to spread the word about our mission 🙏🏻
Oh, and also, this happened… 🎉
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## Events in November, and ahead
Andy was at Decidim Fest in Barcelona, as part of the panel “Can Decentralization Fix Social Media?”. There were some lively conversations about digital sovereignty and technical standards, but the core of the event itself was participatory technology for democracy. The concept that civic institutions should own their own social channels, aligns strongly with Mastodon’s own vision and values.
Felix joined the in-person Fediforum track at SFSCon in Bolzano, Italy. It was great to connect with a number of our friends from around the Fediverse.
Last month also saw the European Digital Sovereignty Summit held in Berlin. Our new Executive Director Felix, and our Chief of Staff, Philip, were able to attend, and connect with other organisations that share a similar mission to Mastodon.
Looking ahead into early 2026, we will have a stand at FOSDEM. We’re excited to be heading back to Brussels, where we will also be present in the Social Web Devroom.
## Releases
The current stable release of Mastodon is **4.5.3**, released yesterday (alongside 4.4.10, 4.3.16 and 4.2.28):
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During November, we shipped two fixes for the 4.5 release (4.5.1, 4.5.2), and backported equivalent updates for the 4.4 and 4.3 branches: version 4.4.9 and version 4.3.15.
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.
> Please pay attention to the upcoming end-of-life dates. 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**.
## Backend and Web
In November 2025 we reviewed and merged 237 Pull Requests (159 with translation and dependency updates removed) from 20 contributors. This was huge. We appreciate the contributions!
* interface The experimental `theme_tokens` feature flag as well as our legacy styles have been removed from our codebase, and our new theme tokens (based on CSS variables) are now live on mastodon.social and mastodon.online (and any other servers using our nightly builds). If you are maintaining a third-party theme or a server with custom CSS, now is a good time to ensure your styling tweaks play well with this update. — PR #37056 (by diondiondion)
* new feature Implementation of “Collections” (our take on Starter Packs) has begun. We are slowly laying foundations, so nothing to see yet, but we are getting there! — PR #37049 (by oneiros) — PR #37020 (by oneiros) — PR #37005 (by oneiros) — PR #36977 (by oneiros)
* interface Added notifications about interactions between quote posts and Direct Messages — PR #36696 (by ChaosExAnima)
* interface Updated the media modal with smoother scrolling experience — PR #36673 (by ChaosExAnima) (and multiple others)
* interface Fixed issues with emoji caching and web worker — PR #36808 (by ChaosExAnima) — PR #36897 (by ChaosExAnima)
* interface Fix post and keyboard navigation issues — PR #37052 (by diondiondion) (and multiple others)
* interface Move “Privacy and reach” from “Public profile” to top-level navigation in settings — PR #27294 (by ChaelCodes)
* interface Fix duplicated counters in some languages — PR #32614 (by xatier) — PR #36844 (by ChaoxExAnima)
* interface Improve viewing non-public hashtag pages when not logged in — PR #36961 (by diondiondion)
* interface Prevent vertical videos from overflowing the viewport — PR #36966 (by diondiondion)
* developer Fix Accept headers when fetching ActivityPub objects to match spec (AP integrity/interoperability) — PR #30354 (by TheOneric)
* api Fix `/api/v1/statuses/:id/context` sometimes returning Mastodon-Async-Refresh without result_count — PR #36779 (by ClearlyClaire)
* admin Increase HTTP read timeout for expensive S3 batch delete operations — PR #37004 (by ClearlyClaire) — PR #36971 (by ClearlyClaire) — PR #36996 (by ClearlyClaire)
* admin Increase nginx proxy_read_timeout to avoid long-request failures — PR #30599 (by shleeable)
* admin Optimize nginx location blocks — PR #19644 (by Izorkin)
* admin Fix `tootctl status remove` removing quoted posts and remote quotes of local posts — PR #37009 (by ClearlyClaire)
* admin Separate remote thumbnails into cache/ directory — PR #36911 (by shugo)
* admin Add systemd service file for Prometheus exporter — PR #35130 (by ThisIsMissEm)
* admin Rely on Puma default environment and remove legacy AR connection boot from Puma config — PR #36760 (by mjankowski) — PR #36757 (by mjankowski)
## Android
We released an update that adds loading all replies, and several smaller updates that improve the stability of the app.
## iOS
We shipped version 2025.08 on December 1st, with better loading and scrolling performance, an all-new audio player, and improvements to video playback. Major work on rewriting/refactoring is starting to pay off as more areas of the app are replaced with new multi-purpose code and old code files are deleted. This version also saw us replace our complex and outdated localization system with modern `.xcstrings` format files, which will be much easier for developers and translators moving forward.
## DevOps
If you have an interest in our Helm charts to deploy Mastodon, we would like to hear from you.
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## Documentation
Shout-out to Matt Jankowski for a huge effort on issue triage & merge support, closing 81 issues in total (most of which merged fixes and updates), backed by 13 contributors in total.
## Translations
We’ve posted a call for proofreaders for translations across our apps and website. If you are already translating our apps and would like to coordinate the work for your language, see this discussion post. If you would like to help translating Mastodon into your language, you can join the many volunteers who already do so on Crowdin: for the web app, the iOS app and the Android app.
## Community
* Version 3.2.0 of Pachli for Android was released just over a week ago; it includes support for Quote Posts, and makes lots of useful search options available.
* Version 7 of Mona for iOS will be available soon.
Reminder that if you’re building on the Mastodon API, we’d love to hear about your project.
## Thanks
That’s it for another month of behind-the-scenes updates. We’re grateful for your support for our mission. Please donate to help us if you are able.
### 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 https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/12/trunk-tidbits-november-2025/
