The Mastodon open source decentralized social network is releases his latest releaseversion 4.5, which brings support for offer posts to all server operators, along with other features for admins, chat improvements, and more.
The addition of offer posts is one of the biggest changes to how Mastodon’s social network works as the social network tries to compete with bigger rivals like X and Threads. Citation can be a conversation guide and is considered a key feature for text-based social networks. But Mastodon wanted to make sure the feature launched 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 “sinking,” where users often mocked others by replying to their post with crude jokes or insults. This remains a concern today among other new competitors such as Threads and Bluesky.
To address this issue, Mastodon’s version of offer posts comes with additional security checks.
The feature was also originally released on the larger Mastodon servers on mastodon.online and mastodon. social in September, ahead of the 4.5 software update, giving users time to adjust the format.
Mastodon provides users with several ways to control how their posts can be cited. For example, users decide who can list them through the feature’s settings. Here, you can choose between options such as “Anyone”, “Followers only” 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 needed, which could be useful for those times when you want to mention someone without attracting unwanted attention.
Mastodon will also notify the referring user in the app so that they can remove their original post from the other person’s offer post if they feel the need. Additionally, users can choose to block others to prevent them from seeing and reporting their posts in the future.
While making offer posts more widely available is the major addition in software version 4.5, the update also fixes issues where users on older servers running version 4.4 and earlier would sometimes not see responses.
Server operators also get new tools to optionally disable content streams, set a local stream as their home page, block specific users, and more. The moderator interface has been updated to show necessary context, such as link previews and quote posts in messages, to aid decision making.
Meanwhile, version 4.5 also brings native emoji support to Mastodon’s web interface.
Mastodon continues to be one of the largest networks in the fediverse, the name for the open social web powered by the ActivityPub social networking protocol. In total, fediverse has nearly 12 million users, according to growth tracker FediDBwith Mastodon accounting for 8 million of that amount. However, its monthly active user count is only ~670,000.
Threads, which is integrated into ActivityPub, is not counted in these numbers because it is not a full integration. Threads has more than 400 million monthly users and 150 million daily active users.
