{"id":53624,"date":"2026-10-23T16:38:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-23T20:38:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=53624"},"modified":"2026-10-23T18:58:52","modified_gmt":"2026-10-23T22:58:52","slug":"mastodon-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/23\/mastodon-5\/","title":{"rendered":"Mastodon 5"},"content":{"rendered":"

Imani Joy<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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We’re moving away from the embedded composer and adopting a pop-out composer with new controls for visibility and other post settings. Navigation is simplified and organised in a more intuitive way and create space for future new features.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

In your feeds, the posts themselves have been rebuilt from the ground up, giving a fresh look to the places we all spend the most time. We’re also excited to roll out a few new colour themes, which took a truly monumental effort from our engineering team since the start of the year to tokenise our design system.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The new design includes many small affordances, such as hiding a user’s boosts directly from the post menu, following and unfollowing hashtags right from the post, and hiding your own posts and boosts in your home feed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Via Jeff Johnson<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Incredibly, Mastodon’s own announcement shows the massive amount of wasted space in the new UI, and they’re fine with it!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Joe Fabisevich<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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The Mastodon 5.0 design looks more Tumblr than Twitter, and I really dig it! Nice to see them take an approach to social media that is more differentiated than just “it’s tweeting but federated”.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

To me it looks more<\/em> like Twitter than before. Stars are now hearts. The layout is basically the same down to the empty right column where Twitter’s algorithmic features would be.<\/p>\n\n

CM Harrington<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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[The] toot button (the one that makes the toot window appear in the first place) is at the bottom of a list of everything else, including all your saved\/followed hashtags. <\/p>\n

It’s all such a mess. From what I can see (limited) they’re ‘just trying things’ that other sites have done — but without a reason or goal — so it’s all just a mash of disparate concepts.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

The new composer slides up on top of the bottom post\/message, so I can’t see what I’m replying to.<\/p>\n\n

Matt Birchler<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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There’s some interesting data here, but at a high level, you see a social network that gained over 2 million new active users in the 31 days after Musk closed on buying Twitter. A lot of those users bounced and we dropped to about 1.1 million active users by the following summer, when we saw a second spike as Twitter started to require logins to see anything and that rate limits were being applied. Since then, we’ve seen a slow but steady decline in number of people using Mastodon.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

As a fan of Mastodon, these numbers are hard to look at. Not because I think a social network must have hundreds of millions of users to be valuable, but because it paints a picture where many people have tried Mastodon, but almost none of them stick around. Also, while infinite growth isn’t a requirement, constant decline isn’t what you want to see in a social network either.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Jeff Johnson<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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To be honest, I’m not sure I want Mastodon to grow. I actually never wanted Twitter to grow. I originally joined Twitter in 2008 for a developer conference (C4 in Chicago) to network with other software developers. As far as I’m concerned, Twitter was ruined by the influx of celebrities and celebrity worshippers. Thankfully the celebrities have mostly ignored Mastodon. A crucial difference between the two social networks is that Twitter needed<\/em> masses of people to join, because Twitter was a publicly-traded, for-profit corporation, financed by advertising. The goal of Twitter, like other such social networks—Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok—was to maximize attention and thus eyeballs on ads.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

This raises an important question: should you give your attention to social media? Is social media use healthy? […] In other words, Mastodon respects its users, doesn’t intend to waste their time. If Mastodon users decide to leave, I say good for them!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

John Gruber<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Just after writing the preceding paragraph, I took a break to pick up some sandwiches for lunch. Get out of the house, enjoy at least a few minutes of a beautiful autumn afternoon, and stretch my legs. Waiting for the sandwiches to be prepared at the bagel joint, I took the Duo out of my pocket and checked NetNewsWire. First article up was a good one. Started reading. Screen’s too small. Do I want to open the Duo? Sandwiches aren’t going to take long. I clicked the side button to sleep the Duo and put it back into my jeans pocket (where it sank like the brick that it is). I spent the rest of the wait alone with my thoughts, pondering how to finish this review.<\/p>\n

Apple isn’t going to start an ad campaign with a slogan like “So cumbersome you’ll keep it in your pocket”, but that’s part of my experience.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

That’s kind of how I feel about Mastodon. It works OK, at least for the Mac\/iOS community, without being very addictive. I wish the discovery and search were better, but that’s sort of antithetical to the federated model.<\/p>\n\n

Rob Shearer<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Mastodon isn’t, and won’t ever be, a good platform for “asynchronous ephemeral notifications of any kind”. I’d also argue (more controversially) that it’s simply not good infrastructure for social networking of any kind<\/a>. There are lots of interesting people using Mastodon, and I’m sure it will live on as a good-enough space for certain niche groups. But there is no question that it will never offer the fun of early Twitter, let alone the vibrancy of Twitter during its growth phase. I’ve long since dropped Mastodon from my home screen, and have switched to Bluesky<\/a> for text-centric social media.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

I’m not saying federation “won’t” work or “can’t” work. Merely that in 2025, nine years after deployment, federation does not work for the Mastodon use case. […] Crucially, the posts did not exist even if I visited the profile page of the account: even after weeks of daily posts, the profile page displayed by mastodon.social claimed the account had never posted, and the posts would only begin appearing after someone on mastodon.social began following the account.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

When you “private mention” someone, only you and they can see the post. And they can reply with a “private mention” of their own. But if anyone in that “private” thread accidentally mentions any other Mastodon account by name, that is itself considered a “private mention”, and that person is invited into the thread. It is an absolutely insane UI design that makes it extremely<\/em> easy to share private conversations with exactly<\/em> the people you don’t want reading them.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The problem that did manifest is that all of this moderation is entirely opaque to users. If you explicitly follow a particular account, you may not see posts from that account because its instance doesn’t like its content, because your instance doesn’t like its content, or simply because one of the two instances doesn’t like the other.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Dave Winer<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The only way for the others to compete with Twitter is to start innovating. Get rid of the limits. The funny thing is Twitter, the dominant leader, is moving forward and getting rid of character limits, and introducing styles and links. They’re acting like the little guy while the others, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, aren’t doing anything to be more useful. That whole market is stuck in 2006 and the myth that 140 chars somehow was magic. It wasn’t. It killed the web as a writer’s platform.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Inbound and outbound RSS 2.0, is the way to go. And Markdown is the way you do text<\/a>. This is what matters, you all are making something that’s really simple so unbearably complicated.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

My first choice would be to see more people blogging on their own sites. But having longer and richer posts on Mastodon would be preferable to many of the alternatives. I still wish it supported RSS for my timeline and replies.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n