Mastodon, a decentralized alternative to X, plans to target creators with new features

Mastodon, a decentralized, open-source social media platform and alternative to larger apps like X and Threads, on Wednesday announced its plans to make its app more accessible to newcomers while also targeting creators with the launch of new features.

The changes come on the heels of expanding Mastodon’s core development team over the past 18 months to include people with web, mobile, and backend expertise, as well as the hiring of a dedicated designer, according to a new blog post co-authored by Mastodon’s art director, Renaud Chaput, and product designer, Imani Joy. The post outlines the future direction of the app.

The app, which is part of Federated — a larger decentralized social network running on the ActivityPub protocol — was thrust back into the spotlight when Elon Musk acquired Twitter, now called X, in October 2022. Since then, it has seen occasional growth spurts, but often struggles to retain new users due to its more complex setup. At Mastodon, you can’t simply create an account with a username and password; You also have to choose a server to join – an extra step that often confuses newbies to decentralization.

Today, Mastodon sees between 750,000 and 1 million monthly active users, depending on the source. One third-party tracker puts the number closer to 750,000, while another puts it as high as 1 million. Mastodon’s own website says the number is around 785,000.

As part of its upcoming updates, the organization says it will try to make this setup process more understandable, while also promoting smaller servers.

Until now, new users have often defaulted to the largest servers, but this undermines the power of the decentralized web. As the blog post notes, “Mastodon works best when communities are spread across many independent servers, each with its own character and focus.”

New management tools will help standalone server operators handle maintenance and oversight duties more easily, including the advantage of using external blocklists. The organization will also provide ways to set up content scanning to detect illegal content and spam, along with other tools to reduce media storage usage by remotely serving media posts through a trusted third party.

Additionally, Mastodon will look to attract more content creators, including public figures, journalists and organizations, through a series of updates to its app. To do this, it offers a redesigned user profile that allows individuals to showcase their work as well as an improved authoring experience. There’s also a new email notification option that allows anyone to follow their updates, even if they don’t have a Mastodon account yet. This may attract those who want to follow newsletter writers, reporters, thought leaders and other creatives, while allowing those creatives to reach a broader audience.

The changes follow the rollout of other new features in recent months, including quote posts, similar to the one on X and others, but with more user controls, and plans of its own for Starter Pack-style user recommendations, called Collections.

The updates come on the heels of a leadership shift at Mastodon: Founder Eugene Rushko stepped down as CEO after the platform announced its transition to a nonprofit structure at the beginning of the year. In his place, Felix Hlatky, based in Austria, took over as CEO. In addition, Mastodon recently announced that it will share Hlatky’s duties with Dr. Marius Rothermund, a certified German lawyer. Dr. Rothermund will primarily provide legal expertise during the restructuring process, which includes three markets – the United States, Germany and Belgium.