Mastodon 4.4 is out now, and it brings a bunch of changes for things like profiles and lists and also lays the groundwork for quote posts.
With profiles, you can now feature specific hashtags so that people can see all the posts you’ve tagged with those hashtags, the Mastodon says. Mastodon is also making a change to how pinned posts work: you can still pin up to five posts onto your profile, but they’ll now show up as a single carousel so you don’t have to scroll down as far to see new posts. When you’re looking at a profile, Mastodon can now tell you how many people you follow also follow that person.
For lists, Mastodon says that creating and managing them has been “significantly streamlined” and that “it’s easier than ever to add and remove accounts from your lists both directly from profiles and from your own follows and followers listings.”
And with quote posts, which Mastodon already said were in the works, the platform is doing what it calls “part one” of implementation. “Since Mastodon runs on over 8,000 independent servers that together form the platform you know, releasing features like this requires a two-pronged approach: first we release code that supports processing and displaying this new format, and then release code that allows our users to actively use the feature,” Mastodon says.
With 4.4, “you will be able to see quotes from compatible Fediverse platforms (including future Mastodon releases),” but you won’t actually be able to quote posts until Mastodon’s 4.5 release.
Other new features include a reminder to add alt text to images and video that you post, updating Mastodon’s mobile web UI to make it “mimic native apps,” and streamlining onboarding.
