[!NOTE]
While we continue to support Mastodon 4.4 and release patches for it, please note that Mastodon 4.5 is available with new features, changes and fixes. We encourage administrators to update to the latest 4.5 version when they can.

This release is made solely to update FFmpeg in our docker container images to fix CVE-2026-8461 (critical severity). It is critical to update if you use our docker container images.

If you are not using our docker container images, please make sure your system FFmpeg is updated to a fixed version, that is, 8.1.2, 7.1.5, 6.1.6, or 5.1.10.

For the recently released v4.4.19, see 4.4.19 release notes for information.

Upgrade overview

This release contains upgrade notes that deviate from the norm:

ℹ️ Requires assets recompilation

For more information, view the complete release notes and scroll down to the upgrade instructions section.

Changelog

Security

• Update FFMpeg version used in the container image to fix CVE-2026-8461 (critical severity)

Upgrade notes

To get the code for v4.4.20, use git fetch && git checkout v4.4.20.

[!NOTE]
As always, make sure you have backups of the database before performing any upgrades. If you are using docker-compose, this is how a backup command might look: docker exec mastodon_db_1 pg_dump -Fc -U postgres postgres > name_of_the_backup.dump

Dependencies

External dependencies have not changed since v4.4.1:

• Ruby: 3.2 or newer
• PostgreSQL: 13 or newer
• Elasticsearch (recommended, for full-text search): 7.x (OpenSearch should also work)
• LibreTranslate (optional, for translations): 1.3.3 or newer
• Redis: 6.2 or newer
• Node: 20 or newer
• libvips (optional, instead of ImageMagick): 8.13 or newer
• ImageMagick (optional if using libvips): 6.9.7-7 or newer

Update steps

The following instructions are for updating from 4.4.19.

If you are upgrading directly from an earlier release, please carefully read the upgrade notes for the skipped releases as well, as they often require extra steps such as database migrations. In particular, it is very important to read the 4.4.0 release notes.

1. Restart all Mastodon processes.