May update

Hi everyone! It’s been a while since my last proper Patreon update, and before I head out on my honeymoon (I got married in March!), I’d like to share what we’ve been up to. It has been amazing to see so many fun and diverse conversations happening across Mastodon with new and interesting people joining every day, and to see the adoption among well-established organizations like Mozilla, Medium, Flipboard, Ars Technica, the German national television network ARD, and more (welcome again!). As you can imagine, this growth has kept our small team very busy over the past few months and we’ve been working hard to keep the bar high while meeting the demands of a growing community. The good news is that the team isn’t so small anymore!

Organization

After working with Claire on a contract basis for multiple years, she has joined us as a full-time software engineer at Mastodon. We’ve also been joined by Inga Driksne (thanks to David Slifka) who’s taken charge of our hiring process, and as a result of said process we’ve hired Timothy Campbell, our first full-time DevOps engineer. We’ve also welcomed Julie Inouye to lead our communications efforts and Sean Garrett for advice on a contract basis, and Andy Piper to guide us in our developer relations. Additionally Amir Ghavi and multiple of his colleagues from Fried Frank helped us navigate a diverse set of legal topics on an extremely generous pro-bono mandate. Last but not least, my wife Amelia has taken on a part-time role to help with customer support, fielding the many e-mails from users and fellow server administrators who need help.

Infrastructure

We’ve done a lot of work on our infrastructure. As you may be aware, we are hosting the homepage of the project, the documentation, the API powering the lists of servers displayed in our apps and on our homepage, as well as Web Push relays that provide push notifications for our increasingly popular apps. To increase the reliability and scalability of these resources we’ve upgraded our entire setup to Kubernetes and Terraform, and thanks to Fastly’s Fast Forward program they’re not only available much faster across the globe, but are also better defended against DDoS attacks (of which unfortunately we have experienced a few).

Our incredibly manual setup for our mastodon.social and mastodon.online servers was not cutting it anymore either and was long due for a clean-up. We’ve embraced the Helm charts for Mastodon originally developed by the community and took on the task of ensuring they work for a large-scale setup like ours so other server admins can more easily replicate it. The switch from manually managed root servers to Kubernetes and Terraform has been night and day in terms of being able to scale our servers to the traffic and usage they experience and has made our service more reliable overall.

We’ve also invested heavily into ensuring that all of the infrastructure is monitored properly to make troubleshooting issues much easier. Running Mastodon at this scale also gives us unique insights into potential performance issues and areas for improvement before they affect other servers. We created status pages for every resource we operate, so that no matter what, you can find out if something’s wrong and what we’re doing to address it. We’ve also setup a helpdesk system for support inquiries.

Development

We’ve been busy making a bunch of product improvements too. On iOS, we’ve made account switching more obvious, rolled out hashtag following, post translation, a few home screen widgets, and preview cards for links, improved the server list with new filter options, reworked the onboarding process to make it easier for new users, and added action extensions for opening Mastodon links in the app. We’ve also completed an accessibility audit which has allowed us to improve our app for those who rely on VoiceOver features and dynamic font sizes. We’re now surfacing verified links more prominently across the app to help people distinguish accounts better, and showing you the upload progress when posting media and allow you to easily retry on failures. We’ve also finally rolled out post editing, bookmarks, and the ability to view image descriptions. And generally speaking, the look of the app has changed quite a bit from how it was when we launched it.

Android was not left behind as we’ve mirrored most of the improvements with a Material twist, and it’s become a truly delightful app to use. Android users now have access to post editing, verified links, image descriptions, and upload progress and retrying. We’ve made the login screen different enough from the sign-up screen so people don’t confuse them, made the server list work and look better with new filter options, and updated the whole onboarding experience. As we move to Material design, more updates to the look and feel are underway, including a much more advanced settings area that will house many more customization options so you can make Mastodon work the way you prefer, and of course some of the features still missing like pinned posts, lists, and post translations are coming soon.

On the main product, we’re focused on addressing the usability issues that the much wider exposure to the public has uncovered. Our work to ensure Mastodon works seamlessly for millions of people never ends! We’ve made threads easier to read by adding visual indicators, we’ve made direct-visibility posts stand out more and renamed the whole feature to “Private mentions” following Ivory’s lead to conceptually separate them from “DMs,” and increased media upload and quality limits. We’ve also made verified links surface in more places like search results to help people distinguish real accounts, dramatically improved the search interface, started showing better error pages across the web app, added caching for a lot of the public APIs and optimized a number of things, and improved and iterated on the whole onboarding flow in the web app. Most of these things haven’t made their way into a stable release yet, but we’ve begun publishing nightly builds for those who want to try them out.

You can always stay up to date on our product development progress on our public roadmap.

Other

We get asked about this a lot, so we’re launching merch! We have original art and have partnered with FRESH Merch with preproduction under way. I did a poll of what items are most desired by the community, and you can expect ethically sourced t-shirts, mugs, enamel pins and stickers with cute and unique designs to be available later this summer. We’re also in the process of founding a 501(c)3 entity in the U.S. and assembling a governing board to unlock more fundraising opportunities, since delivering what people expect from and rely on us for will require growing the team further.

I know this update is getting long and there’s still a lot of stuff that’s been happening or in the works that I haven’t even touched upon. Most importantly, I’ve been meeting with a lot of people the past few months to discuss needs, features, strategies, and it’s been rewarding to hear how deeply people are connecting to the Mastodon community and its larger purpose. While we’re playing a leading role, what we’re building towards is not just about us. It’s about the Internet and making it decentralized, interoperable, and open. It’s about the social web. It’s something we all own and are building together. Thanks for being here and building with us.

— Eugen