Mastodon, the open source and decentralized social media platform, released version 4.3 to users. With this new update, the platform aims to make users’ interaction processes easier and more efficient. Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko stated that the innovations introduced in version 4.3 will significantly improve users’ discovery processes and experiences on the social network.
One of the most notable changes in this latest version of Mastodon is the more effective suggestion of new accounts for users to follow. The carousel, presented in the “People to Follow” section on the home page, brings together both generally popular accounts and personalized recommendations tailored to users’ interests. This change aims to create a richer social media feed, especially for new users. In previous versions, a common issue was noted where users skipped following recommended accounts, causing social feed to slow down. The new carousel system is expected to solve this problem.
Notification system and new features
Another important improvement in Mastodon version 4.3 was the arrangements made for the notification system. In previous versions, notifications reached the user one by one, which made notifications complicated, especially when it came to popular posts. In the new version, notifications are now presented in groups. For example, a post that is liked or shared by many users is displayed as a notification that shows how many people collectively performed this action. This allows users to manage their notifications faster and more efficiently.
Notification filters are also among the new features. Users can now choose which notifications to delete directly or which notifications to redirect to a different inbox. Filtering notifications, especially from new accounts or unfollowed accounts, allows users to reduce notification intensity. Thus, it is possible to make the social media flow cleaner and more organized.
In addition, Mastodon also introduced some important changes in terms of design. While the photo sorting option has been added to the post creation screen, users can now preview whether they will follow that account or not when they hover over their account name. This feature makes interactions on the platform more user-friendly and speeds up profile reviews. In addition, the newly added dialogue boxes and icons aim to make the overall design of the platform more modern and useful.
Although these new features of Mastodon have been gradually rolled out over the last 11 months for users on the mastodon.social server, users on other servers need their servers to be updated before they can access these features. Due to its decentralized structure, the different update speeds of each server may cause some differences between users. However, overall this new version of Mastodon aims to improve user experience and increase engagement on the platform.