The decentralized open source social network Mastodon has published its latest release, version 4.5. This provides quote posting support for all server operators, as well as other features for admins, conversation improvements, and more.
The addition of quote posts is one of the big changes to the way Mastodon’s social network operates, as the social network looks to compete with larger rivals like X and Threads. Quotes can drive conversations and are considered a baseline feature in text-first social networks. However, Mastodon wanted to release this feature with more protection for users without changing the culture of the network.
On X, quote posts (known as retweets when X was Twitter) contributed to a culture of “dunking,” in which users often mocked others by responding to their own posts with cruel jokes and insults. This is still a concern among new competitors such as Threads and Bluesky.
To address this issue, Mastodon’s version of quote posting comes with additional safety controls.
The feature was also initially rolled out to the large 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 provides several ways to control how users can cite your posts. For example, users decide who can quote through feature settings. Here you can choose from options such as “Everyone,” “Followers Only,” and “Just Me.” Additionally, users can control the visibility of their quote posts by making them public, visible only to their followers, or with a setting called “Publish quietly.” This will make the quote public, but it will be removed from Mastodon’s searches, trends, and public timelines.
Additionally, users can override default settings on a per-post basis if desired. This is useful when you want to quote someone without drawing unwanted attention.
Mastodon also alerts users who are quoted within the app, so you can remove the original post from other people’s quoted posts if you wish. Additionally, users can also block other users from seeing or quoting their posts in the future.
The 4.5 software release’s main addition is the broader rollout of quote posts, but the update also fixes an issue where users on older servers running versions prior to 4.4 could miss replies.
Server operators are also getting new tools that allow them to optionally disable content feeds, set local feeds as home pages, and block specific users. The moderation interface has been updated to give you the context you need, including link previews and in-message quotes, to help you make decisions.
Meanwhile, the 4.5 release also added native emoji support to Mastodon’s web interface.
Mastodon remains one of the larger networks on the Fediverse and is the name of the open social web powered by the ActivityPub social networking protocol. Overall, Fediverse has nearly 12 million users, with Mastodon accounting for more than 8 million of them, according to growth tracking company FediDB. However, it only has around 670,000 monthly active users.
Threads integrated with ActivityPub are not counted in these numbers as they are not fully integrated. Threads has over 400 million monthly users and over 150 million daily active users.
