Mastodon is a decentralized open source social network His latest release is RollingVersion 4.5, which brings support for quote posts for all server operators, along with other features for administrators, conversation improvements, and more.
The addition of quote posts is a big change in how Mastodon’s social network works, as the social network tries to compete against larger rivals like X and Thread. Quotes can be a conversation driver and are considered a baseline feature for text-first social networks But Mastodon wanted to make sure the feature rolled out with more user protections so it didn’t change the culture of its network.
At X, quote posts (formerly known as retweets when X was Twitter) contributed to a culture of “dunking,” where users would often mock others by responding to their posts with cruel jokes or insults. This is a concern today among other new competitors such as Threads and Bluesky.
To combat this problem, Mastodon’s version of Quote Posts comes with additional security controls.
Mastodon’s latest software update
The feature was initially introduced on the larger Mastodon servers as well mastodon.online And mastodon.social In September, before the 4.5 software update, give users time to adjust the format.
Mastodon offers users several ways to control how their posts are cited. For example, users determine who can quote them through feature settings. Here, you can choose from options like “Anyone,” “Only Followers,” or “Only Me.” Additionally, users can control the visibility of quote posts to make them visible to the public, only to followers, or set a setting to “quiet public” which makes quotes public but removes them from Mastodon’s search, trending, and public timelines.
Also, users can override their default settings on a post-by-post basis if needed, which can come in handy when you want to quote someone without attracting unwanted attention.
Mastodon will alert the user to be quoted in the app, so they can remove their original post from another person’s quoted post if needed. Also, users can choose to block others to prevent them from seeing and quoting their posts in the future.
While the major addition is the broader rollout of quote posts in the 4.5 software release, the update also fixes issues where users on older servers running 4.4 and earlier versions would sometimes miss seeing replies.
Server operators are gaining new tools to optionally disable content feeds, set a local feed as their homepage, block specific users, and more. The moderation interface has been updated to display necessary context, such as link previews and quote posts in messages, to aid decision making.
Meanwhile, the 4.5 release brings native emoji support to Mastodon’s web interface.
Mastodon continues to be one of the larger networks in Fediverse, the name of the open social web powered by the ActivityPub social networking protocol. Overall, Fediverse has about 12 million users, according to Growth Tracker feddbMastodons are north of 8 million of that number. However, its monthly active user count is only ~670,000.
Thread, which integrates with ActivityPub, is not counted in these figures because it is not a full integration. Thread has over 400 million monthly users and 150 million daily active users.