Decentralized open source social network Mastodon is rolling out its latest release, version 4.5, which brings support for Quote Posts to all server operators, along with other features for admins, conversation improvements, and more.
The addition of quote posts is one of the bigger changes to how Mastodon’s social network operates, as the social network attempts to compete against larger rivals, like X and Threads. Quoting can be a conversation driver and is considered a baseline feature for text-first social networks. But Mastodon wanted to ensure the feature launched with more user protections so as not to change the culture of its network.
On X, quote posts (formerly known as retweets when X was Twitter) contributed to a culture of “dunking,” where users would often deride others by responding to their post with cruel jokes or insults. That remains a concern today, and other new competitors, like Threads and Bluesky.
To address this problem, Mastodon’s version of quote posts come with added safety controls.
The feature was also initially rolled out to the larger Mastodon servers at mastodon.online and mastodon.social in September, ahead of the 4.5 software update, giving users time to adjust the format.
Mastodon gives users several ways to control how their posts can be quoted. For instance, users decide who can quote them through the feature’s settings. Here, you can choose between options like “Anyone,” “Followers only,” or “Just me.” Additionally, users can control the visibility of quote posts by setting them to be visible to the public, to followers only, or a setting called “quiet public,” which makes the quotes public but removes them from Mastodon’s search, trends, and public timeline.
In addition, users can override their default settings on a post-by-post basis, if need be, which could be useful at those times when you want to quote someone without attracting unwanted attention.
Mastodon will also alert the user being quoted in the app, so they can remove their original post from the other person’s quote post, if they feel the need to. Plus, users can opt to block others to prevent them from seeing and quoting their posts in the future.
While the broader rollout of quote posts is the major addition 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 also 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 needed context, like link previews and quote posts in messages, to aid in decision-making.
Meanwhile, the 4.5 release also brings native emoji support to Mastodon’s web interface.
Mastodon continues to be one of the larger networks on the fediverse, the name for the open social web powered by the ActivityPub social networking protocol. Overall, the fediverse has nearly 12 million users, according to growth tracker FediDB, with Mastodon accounting for north of 8 million of that figure. However, its monthly active user number is only ~670,000.
Threads, which integrates with ActivityPub, isn’t counted in these figures because it’s not a full integration. Threads has more than 400 million monthly users and 150 million daily active users.