The latest update to Mastodon provides bid posts for all server operators

The open source decentralized social network Mastodon is rolling out its latest release, version 4.5, which brings support for quote posts to all server operators, along with other features for admins, chat improvements, and more.

The addition of quote posts is one of the biggest changes to how the Mastodon social network operates, as the social network attempts to compete against larger competitors, such as X and Threads. Quoting can be a driver of conversation and is considered an essential feature of social networks that prioritize text. But Mastodon wanted to make sure it launched the feature with more user protections so it wouldn’t change the culture of its network.

On X, quote posts (formerly known as retweets when This remains a concern today, and other new competitors, such as Threads and Bluesky.

To address this issue, the Mastodon version of Quote Posts comes with additional safety controls.

The feature was also initially rolled out to larger Mastodon servers at Mastodon.online and mastodon.social in September, ahead of software update 4.5, giving users time to fine-tune the format.

Mastodon offers users several ways to control how their posts are cited. For example, users decide who can quote through feature settings. Here, you can choose between options like “Anyone,” “Only Followers,” or “Only Me.” Additionally, users can control the visibility of quote posts by setting them to be visible to the public, followers only, or a setting called “Quiet Public,” which makes quotes public but removes them from Mastodon’s search, trends, and public timeline.

Additionally, users can override their default settings on a post-by-post basis, if necessary, which can be useful for those times when you want to quote someone without attracting unwanted attention.

Mastodon will also alert a user who has been quoted in the app, so they can remove their original post from the other person’s quote post, if they feel the need to. Additionally, users can choose to block others to prevent them from seeing and citing their posts in the future.

While wider publishing of quote posts is the main addition in software version 4.5, the update also fixes issues where users on older servers running version 4.4 and earlier could sometimes lose sight of responses.

Server operators are also gaining new tools to optionally disable content feeds, set a local feed as their home page, block specific users, and more. The moderation interface has been updated to display needed context, such as link previews and quote posts in messages, to aid in decision making.

Meanwhile, version 4.5 also brings native emoji support to Mastodon’s web interface.

Still one of the largest networks in the world, Mastodon is the name of the open social network powered by the ActivityPub social networking protocol. Overall, Federated has roughly 12 million users, according to growth tracker FediDB, and Mastodon accounts for north of that number with 8 million. However, the monthly active user number is only around 670,000.

Topics, which integrate with ActivityPub, are not counted in these numbers because they are not fully integrated. Threads has over 400 million monthly users and 150 million daily active users.