Contributing

Thank you for considering contributing to Mastodon 🐘

You can contribute in the following ways:

• Finding and reporting bugs
• Translating the Mastodon interface into various languages
• Contributing code to Mastodon by fixing bugs or implementing features
• Improving the documentation

Please review the org-level contribution guidelines for high-level acceptance criteria guidance and the DEVELOPMENT guide for environment-specific details.

API Changes and Additions

Any changes or additions made to the API should have an accompanying pull request on our documentation repository.

Bug Reports

Bug reports and feature suggestions must use descriptive and concise titles and be submitted to GitHub Issues. Please use the search function to make sure there are not duplicate bug reports or feature requests.

Translations

Translations are community contributed via Crowdin. They are periodically reviewed and merged into the codebase.

Pull Requests

Size and Scope

Our time is limited and PRs making large, unsolicited changes are unlikely to get a response. Changes which link to an existing confirmed issue, or which come from a "help wanted" issue or other request are more likely to be reviewed.

The smaller and more narrowly focused the changes in a PR are, the easier they are to review and potentially merge. If the change only makes sense in some larger context of future ongoing work, note that in the description, but still aim to keep each distinct PR to a "smallest viable change" chunk of work.

Description of Changes

Unless the Pull Request is about refactoring code, updating dependencies or other internal tasks, assume that the audience are not developers, but a Mastodon user or server admin, and try to describe it from their perspective.

The final commit in the main branch will carry the title from the PR. The main branch is then fed into the changelog and ultimately into release notes. We try to follow the keepachangelog spec, and while that does not prescribe how exactly the entries ought to be named, starting titles using one of the verbs "Add", "Change", "Deprecate", "Remove", or "Fix" (present tense) is helpful.

Example:

Technical Requirements

Pull requests that do not pass automated checks on CI may not be reviewed. In particular, please keep in mind:

• Unit and integration tests (rspec, jest)
• Code style rules (rubocop, eslint)
• Normalization of locale files (i18n-tasks)
• Relevant accessibility or performance concerns

Documentation

The Mastodon documentation is a statically generated site that contains guides and API docs. Improvements are made via PRs to the documentation repository.