After 11 months of testing, releases one of the biggest updates of the year. a The nonprofit organization, attributed to CEO and founder Eugen Rochko, detailed release 4.3 on Tuesday, which promises improvements to nearly every part of the social media experience.
Perhaps most significantly, Mastodon has fundamentally overhauled how notifications work. To begin with, the platform will now group boosters and favorites so users don’t get notified when one of their posts goes viral. At the same time, Mastodon introduces new filters to make it easier to ignore notifications from people you don’t follow, newly created accounts, and those who send you unsolicited personal notes. With the new feature, you can choose to see those notifications, prevent them from ever reaching your phone, or send them to a separate inbox for viewing later.
Mastodon also introduces a new set of notifications designed to inform users when a server moderator makes a decision that affects their account. In particular, if a mod takes direct action against your account, you’ll receive an in-app message saying “you won’t miss”. The platform will also notify users when they lose followers due to moderator decisions and offer the option to export a list of affected accounts.
Along with these changes, Mastodon has redesigned several different parts of the app. Starting with the composition window, the company says the new interface makes it easier to rearrange media, as well as see content warnings and word filters.
Elsewhere, Mastodon has updated the software’s web client, tweaking its color palette, iconography and link previews. Utility emails, including those users receive after password resets, are also available once. On the interface front, Mastodon has reworked the confirmation dialogs to better describe how muting and blocking will affect the user. For example, if you are about to block a server, the program will give you detailed information about how many followers you will lose from this decision.
On the topic of Followers, Mastodon has added a new recommendation carousel that users will see after scrolling past the first post that is older than four hours. At the same time, the company changed the recommendations to be more suitable for people. Rounding things off, Mastodon has updated the website layout and made it easier to follow the author of a trending news article.
The improvements come after how X recently changed a move that some argued made the platform even more undesirable to use. Rochko doesn’t specifically mention Xi — or Meta and Bluesky — but points to a general desire to make Mastodon more appealing to everyday users.
“One [our] ongoing efforts to make Mastodon easy and enjoyable to use. We’ve spent a significant amount of time and money working with professional designers and running user tests over the past few years, but we’re really ramping up our efforts in 2023,” he wrote. “Mastodon is a fairly large application and our resources remain very limited compared to our enterprise competitors, but we have made significant progress in improving the overall look and feel of Mastodon.”
