Versions

The overwhelming majority of Mastodon servers are running the standard "tagged" releases from the Mastodon project, and look something like v4.1.6, but as explained before we do things a little different here.

Mastodon, like most Ruby programs, use something called "semver" or Semantic Versioning to represent it's version number. This is represented as vMAJOR.MINOR.PATCH such as with Mastodon v4.1.6 as mentioned above.

Mastodon uses GitHub as its source code repository. Developers from all around the world work on modifying and improving the code. All of the reviewed and approve Mastodon code in GitHub is stored in what is referred to as the main branch.

Using git, anyone can fork the main Mastodon code, make changes to their fork, and then submit those changes back to the project. The process of submitting those changes is called a pull request. Once a pull request has been approved by the project team, it's merged back into the main branch.

Once the project team has determined that all of the features they want to include in a new MAJOR.MINOR version of Mastodon is ready for public consumption, the current status of the main branch is tagged, and starts its own stable/release branch. For example, when Mastodon 4.1.0 was released, there was a new branch called stable-4-1 that was created.

Work then begins on Mastodon 4.2.0, with pull requests being merged into main and as bugs are found and fixed that impact previous stable releases, those changes are also merged into the other supported stable branches, and then tagged for release as v4.1.1, v3.5.7, etc.

In order to get new features, Mastodon administrators must upgrade to the next vMAJOR.MINOR release.

Pre-releases

Some Mastodon servers, including vmst.io, run pre-release versions of Mastodon to get quicker access to new features as well as to help with testing before they're released to the community for administrators who want to only run stable releases. Our users feedback helps shape the Mastodon product for everyone!

Starting with Mastodon 4.2, the project is standardizing the use of alpha, nightly, beta and rc pre-releases.

• alpha.X is used to identify servers running directly from the main branch on GitHub, either compiled from source directly or using their own container images.
• nightly is used to identify servers running typically from the project compiled container images which are automatically published with the current status of main every night.
• betaX or rcX will identify servers running from a soon to be finalized release of Mastodon, from a tagged pre-release on GitHub or from a project compiled container image.

Servers which run on alpha.X or nightly are typically running the latest code available when it went into production, and not waiting for an official release.

Additional "metadata" about the release can be added after the pre-release flag, such as a GitHub commit or PR. (Ex: v4.3.0-alpha.0+pr-41231)

Forks & Metadata

Forks or other local code modifications are indicated by additional +text at the end of the version string. One popular soft-fork of Mastodon, called Glitch, is typically identified by +glitch at the end of the version.

Once 4.2 has been released, servers which are running a non-tagged release version of Mastodon through any of the methods described above, will increment to the next major version, likely 4.3. (Ex: v4.3.0-nightly.2023-11-09 is the nightly format which would commonly be seen on servers like mastodon.social)

Our Versions

Version information is visible in the lower left corner of the web interface on desktop, or at the bottom of the About page on mobile.

In the image example, vmst.io is running the 4.2.0-dev.0 version of Mastodon, which the dev.0 indicates it was being built from the main branch on GitHub, at commit ecd76fa (represented by the first seven characters of the hash), plus minimal local changes specific to vmst.io as noted by +io.

Once Mastodon 4.2 is officially released, and work starts on the next minor.major release, our version will increment to something like v4.3.0-alpha.0+io automatically. Our custom Mastodon build includes the commit ID as part of the about page display code but not in actual the version string.