Mastodon is. Making changes Hoping to make their 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 maker of decentralized social networking software said it was 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 Activity Pub protocol, Mastodon became more popular after Elon Musk acquired Twitter, now called X, which led some to look for alternatives. The appeal of the platform is its decentralized nature, meaning no single company has control of the algorithm, and users can move their accounts if they don’t like how a particular server runs or moderates its community.
However, the system is also more complicated than signing up for a traditional social network like X. On Mastodon, users have to choose a server to join and have different timelines (local and federated), which can be confusing for newcomers. Following others on the service can also be cumbersome.
That left Mastodon struggling to pick up more users, with numbers now hovering around 800,000 monthly actives, down from a million at the height of the Twitter drama.
Mastodon has been working in recent months to address various pain points that can alienate users. In February, it simplified the onboarding process and added other features that users have come to expect, such as quote posts or a “starter pack” called Collections.
Now this is it Dealing with user profiles. The updated version makes several changes, many of which are visual in nature.
What is changing?
Rather than offering two views of a person’s posts (“Posts” or “Posts and Replies”), like X, Profiles features only an “Activity” tab with a drop-down menu. It also lets users organize other collections of posts, by turning replies and boosts on or off — Mastodon’s version of the latter repost.
Hashtags also now appear at the top of the Activity tab, allowing users to filter posts from that account by the tag they click on.
Mastodon also removed the pinned posts carousel, which many users disliked. The goal of this feature was to balance the needs of people who wanted to pin multiple posts with the needs of profile visitors to quickly access a user’s recent posts. Mastodon users with multiple pinned posts will now have one featured, while the rest can be displayed by clicking the new “See All Pinned Posts” button.
Another change is designed to explain Mastodon handles to newcomers. Unlike X or Threads, where users are just @username, Mastodon handles two @s – one referring to their account name and the other to their server name. A new informational popup explains this.
Users have more control over how their profile appears, with options to hide the “Media” or “Featured” tabs if they want, or hide replies from their “Media” tab if they want to show their work.
Custom fields on the profile, where users add things like links, nicknames and other information, are displayed side by side, which means more vertical space is available on the screen. These fields can now be changed on iOS and Android as well, not just on the web.
Other design changes make profiles look less cluttered — like removing the “following you” badge and moving the optional “personal note” users add to their profiles to the overflow menu.
Profile edits can now be made from a single place in Account Settings, allowing users to manage things like their featured hashtags (which Mastodon now recommends), links and other profile information.
Link Verification — Mastodon’s tool for establishing someone’s reputation without being a central authority (or requiring payment, as on X) — is no longer buried in Settings. Users can crop and add alt text to their profile images and cover photos.
The changes will initially be available to the mastodon.social server and other servers that choose to run a nightly build. More servers will receive the update when the Mastodon 4.6 software update arrives in a few weeks.