Mastodon, the open-source, decentralized social network offering an alternative to Elon Musk’s X and Meta’s Threads, is rolling out a number of updates with Tuesday’s release of Mastodon 4.4.
Most notably, the app is taking the first steps towards implementing a change that will bring it on par with other networks, but may also impact user behavior: it’s preparing to integrate Quote Posts, or what Twitter used to call Quote Tweets.
This type of repost allows users to quote another person’s post, and then add their own two cents and commentary above it. On Twitter, now called X, the feature’s addition led to a culture of “dunking,” where users would deride another person by quoting a post and responding with snark or insulting humor. Some argued that while dunking made Twitter entertaining, it led to more negativity on the platform instead of encouraging conversations or healthy debates.
Mastodon’s implementation of the Quote Post, however, aims to implement the feature in a way that will limit its ability to be used for hate and harassment.
As the company explained earlier this year, it will accomplish this by letting users control whether their content can be quoted, and even let users withdraw their posts from the quoted context at any time. Plus, users will get notifications when someone quotes their posts.
But Quote Posts aren’t being fully rolled out with Mastodon 4.4.
Instead, the organization is releasing the code that supports displaying Quote Posts, which will allow users to see quotes from compatible Fediverse platforms, including future Mastodon releases.
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Users won’t actually be able to quote posts until Mastodon version 4.5 releases later this year.
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