GoKawiilMastodon is making changes in the hopes of making its social networking service more appealing and easier to use, especially for more mainstream users looking for an alternative to X or Threads.
On Thursday, the decentralized social networking software maker said it’s redesigning a key part of its platform by giving people’s user profiles a new look, which it hopes will appeal to organizations, as well as individuals.
Built on the ActivityPub protocol, Mastodon became better known after Elon Musk acquired Twitter, now called X, which led some to seek alternatives. The platform’s appeal is its decentralized nature, meaning a single company doesn’t have control of the algorithm, and users can move their accounts if they don’t like how a particular server operates or moderates its community.
However, this system is also more complicated compared with signing up for a traditional social network like X. On Mastodon, users have to pick a server to join, and have different timelines (local and federated), which can be confusing to newcomers. The process for following others on the service can be cumbersome, too.
That’s left Mastodon struggling to pick up more users, numbers that now hover at around 800,000 monthly actives, down from a million at the height of the Twitter drama.
Mastodon has been working in more recent months to address various pain points that could alienate users. In February, it simplified the onboarding process and added other features users expect, like Quote Posts or “starter packs” called Collections.
Now, it’s tackling user profiles. The revamped version makes several changes, many of which are visual in nature.
What’s Changing
Instead of offering two views of a person’s posts (“posts” or “posts and replies”), similar to X, profiles feature just one “Activity” tab with a dropdown menu. This lets users configure other combinations of posts, by toggling on or off replies and boosts — the latter being Mastodon’s version of the repost.
Hashtags also now appear at the top of this Activity tab, allowing users to filter the posts on that account by the tag they click on.
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