Dear Federation, the Friendica DevTeam is pleased to announce the release of Friendica *Asparagus* 3.5.3.

Aside of the ongoing performance enhancements and code refractoring, some note worthy changes in this release:

• We ironed out some problems with the federation towards Mastodon and enhanced Diaspora and OStatus federation, as well as the bridges to other systems.
• We marked several old addons as *unsupported*. This includes the `retriever`addon due to unwanted side effects, as well as old “frontend” cron addons as their functionality is in core for some time now.

Additionally we fixed numerous bugs that the community had found and we polished some quirks.
For the complete list of changes, please see the CHANGELOG file.

How to Update?

Make sure to have MySQL 5.5.3+ or a compatible version (e.g. MariaDB) installed on your server.

If you used `git` to install your copy of Friendica and use the master or develop branch, a git pull is enough to upgrade.

If you have helped to iron out quirks for this release and used the 3.5.3rc branch of the repository you just need to pull from the repository and switch to either the master or develop branch. Edit: there seems to be a problem with the development branch, so please use the master branch for now. Edit 2: you can now use the develop branch as well, the problematic changes are reverted.

If you had downloaded the source files in an archive file (zip or tar.gz) please download the current version of the archive from GitHub (friendica-3.5.3.zip and friendica-addons-3.5.3.zip) and unpack it on your local computer. As many files got deleted or moved around, please upload the unpacked files to *a new directory* on your server (say `friendica_new`) and copy over your existing `.htconfig.php` file. Afterwards rename your current Friendica directory (e.g. `friendica`) to `friendica_old` and `friendica_new` to `friendica`.

Please note that there are some changes to the database structure that will take some time to be applied.

How to contribute?

If you want to contribute to the project you don’t need to have coding experience. There are a number of tasks listed in the issue tracker with the label “Junior Jobs” we think are good for new contributors. But you are by no means limited to these – if you find a solution to a problem (even a new one) please make a pull request at Github or let us know in the development forum.

Contribution to Friendica is also not limited to coding. Any contribution to the documentation, the translation or advertisement materials is welcome or reporting a problem. You don’t need to deal with git(hub) or Transifex if you don’t like to. Just get in touch with us and we will get the materials to the appropriate places.

Thanks everyone who helped making this release possible and have fun 🙂