The latest update to Mastodon provides bid posts for all server operators

The open source decentralized social network Mastodon is Release its latest versionversion 4.5, brings support for quote shares for all server operators, along with other features for administrators, chat improvements, and more.

The addition of quote posts is one of the biggest changes to how the Mastodon social network operates, as the social network attempts to compete against larger competitors, such as X and Threads. Quoting can be a driver of conversation and is considered an essential feature of social networks that prioritize text. But Mastodon wanted to make sure it launched the feature with more user protections so it wouldn’t change the culture of its network.

On X, quote posts (formerly known as retweets when X was Twitter) have contributed to a culture of “Dipping“, where users would often make fun of others by responding to their posts with cruel jokes or insults. This is still a concern today, and other new competitors, such as Threads and Bluesky.

To address this issue, the Mastodon version of Quote Posts comes with additional safety controls.

It was an advantage too It was initially introduced To the largest Mastodon servers in Mastodon.online and Mastodon. social In September, before the 4.5 software update, giving users time to adjust the format.

Mastodon offers users several ways to control how their posts are cited. For example, users decide who can quote through feature settings. Here, you can choose between options like “Anyone,” “Only Followers,” or “Only Me.” Additionally, users can control the visibility of quote posts by setting them to be visible to the public, followers only, or a setting called “Quiet Public,” which makes quotes public but removes them from Mastodon’s search, trends, and public timeline.

Additionally, users can override their default settings on a post-by-post basis, if necessary, which can be useful for those times when you want to quote someone without attracting unwanted attention.

Mastodon will also alert a user who has been quoted in the app, so they can remove their original post from the other person’s quote post, if they feel the need to. Additionally, users can choose to block others to prevent them from seeing and citing their posts in the future.

While wider publishing of quote posts is the main addition in software version 4.5, the update also fixes issues where users on older servers running version 4.4 and earlier could sometimes lose sight of responses.

Server operators are also gaining new tools to optionally disable content feeds, set a local feed as their home page, block specific users, and more. The moderation interface has been updated to display needed context, such as link previews and quote posts in messages, to aid in decision making.

Meanwhile, version 4.5 also brings native emoji support to Mastodon’s web interface.

Still one of the largest networks in the world, Mastodon is the name of the open social network powered by the ActivityPub social networking protocol. Overall, fediverse has nearly 12 million users, according to growth tracking Federal Reserve Bankwith Mastodon accounting for north of 8 million of that number. However, the monthly active user number is only around 670,000.

Topics, which integrate with ActivityPub, are not counted in these numbers because they are not fully integrated. Topics have more than 400 million users per month and 150 million daily active users.