Now that summer is coming to an end soon, here are the September Updates, namely the plan to upgrade or rather migrate the current server that hosts Mastodon to a new one. You might be wondering, why we need to do this. There are two issues, Debian 11 EOL and upgrading the Mastodon software, which needs testing before the new fork of 4.5, based on the Treehouse fork with additional features added back in.
The plan is to do the migration in parallel. The first thing is to do some testing on RHEL 10 to make sure the old and new fork of Mastodon fork works properly before deploying it. It will also require the database to be replicated to the new server and a cutoff period when everything gets moved over. There will be some downtime scheduled, but that will probably happen in October.
So why is it taking so long? Well, 2025 was a chaotic year if you haven’t known, so the current fork only had security fixes applied and the codebase is a mess. The 4.5 branch is based on the Treehouse fork, and I simply cherrypicked all the features back to that fork. Progress is slow since early last year due to return to office, which means less time. Also, the themes are broken on the newer versions of Mastodon, so that adds some of the difficulties.
As for what changes 4.5 will bring, is namely official quote support. There is a patch that will convert all local quotes from the old system to the new ones, so if you made any quote posts, they should get migrated over. The estimated time for this to completed is by the end of October of this year.