This release of Mastodon focuses entirely on technical improvements that are not necessarily visible on the user side, ahead of the ambitiously user-focused Mastodon 5.0 release later this year. Our goal is to improve compatibility with other fediverse platforms, improve performance, and fix various bugs that we’ve found. So this post will be very technical. If you’re into that, read on.

This release features multiple long-running database migrations, as we tackled several long-standing issues in our database structure that made some features difficult or even impossible to implement, and made some migrations unnecessarily complicated. Zero-downtime migration from Mastodon 4.6 to 4.7 is supported, as will be zero-downtime migration from 4.7 to the next version. However, Mastodon 4.7 will be a required stop for zero-downtime migrations.