Mastodon

News and updates from the Mastodon developers. Technical changes from January 2025, and what the core team did at FOSDEM.

Is there a way to up the char count on a self-hosted (redundant I know) Mastodon that I control?

Or do I HAVE to use Glitch Soc?

So, if you want to follow a Lemmy community from your Mastodon account you can simply do so as you would follow any other account. It will treat both posts and comments on that community as boosts. This quickly clogs up the feed and is very confusing to navigate.

Is there a way to have it show only the posts in my feed?

Has anyone ever considered the potential creation of a Labeler similar to Andrew Lisowski's Bluesky Politician Labeler, but for the Mastodon platform?

This tool, which has been developed for Bluesky, provides valuable transparency by listing top contributors to US politicians.

The Bluesky Politician Labeler

(https://github.com/hipstersmoothie/us-gov-contributions-labeler)

is an innovative Open-Source feature that enhances political discourse on social media.

It automatically labels posts from US politicians with information about their top financial contributors, offering users immediate context about the potential influences on these public figures.

Key benefits of implementing a similar feature on Mastodon could include:

Increased transparency: Users would have easy access to information about political funding sources.

Enhanced political discourse: This feature could lead to more informed discussions about politics and campaign finance.

User empowerment: Mastodon users would be better equipped to critically evaluate political content.

Platform differentiation: This unique feature could set Mastodon apart from other social media platforms.

It could be designed to respect Mastodon's federated nature, possibly allowing instance administrators to opt-in or customize the feature for their communities.

Given Mastodon's focus on user privacy and data control, any implementation would need to be carefully considered to ensure it aligns with these core values.

The feature could potentially be developed as an optional plugin that users or instance administrators could choose to enable.

I personally believe that something like this could SIGNIFICANTLY enhance the political discourse on Mastodon while providing valuable transparency to users.

It would be an innovative addition that aligns with Mastodon's ethos of empowering users and fostering meaningful conversations.

I would consider doing something like this, but, unfortunately, I personally lack the time, energy, and technical knowledge.

https://bsky.app/profile/hipstersmoothie.com/post/3lbl2lgnq7c2f

https://bsky.app/profile/us-gov-funding.bsky.social/lists/3lbgx3lqlwk2d

https://bsky.app/profile/hipstersmoothie.com

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/22551453

A little procedure I follow to help noobs get seen by others. I used to do what most people do and boost their # introduction posts, but I think most people want to see more natural engagement and sort of glaze their eyes over when they see the intro tag, so here's what I do:

1. Create a list called "noobs," hidden from home timeline.
2. Go to # introduction
3. Follow every poster with fewer than say 25 followers and add them to "noobs" 
4. Periodically browse "noobs" for interesting* toots, boost them
5. Periodically unfollow accounts in "noobs" (do not remove from list! That puts them in your main stable of follows!)
6. Repeat

I don't consider it spam-following, because I'm actually giving these accounts a good deal of attention and a good shot at being seen by a few hundred more people. Often I'll genuinely like an account and remove them from the list instead of unfollowing them. I haven't really tested this method's effectiveness, but I thought I'd put it here for others to consider.

*I have a fairly eclectic profile, so I'll boost just about anything that's not asinine.

I am mentally preparing to be called an idiot and/or causing a shitstorm, but I really want to get the answer.

I really want to completely get out of all other social media platforms and to become more involved in the Fediverse, but there is one thing that still bugs me about the underlying concept or at least the frontend behavior.

Let's say I get to discover a very interesting account. Why is it that I cannot just click on the "Following" stat and see what other accounts that person or organization is itself interested in and then just click on follow from there? Every time I have to open a browser, and I only get to look at them since I don't have an account on that instance. And the same thing with followers of course.

I completely understand the interest to remain federated, but the federation being reflected in this kind of UX is, IMHO, a terrible hindrance to growth, or, in the most optimistic scenario, cause a slow migration to a single server.

I would be ok with keeping the power for servers to completely obscure even all the rest of the Fediverse if they want, but if you are showing me a bit of information and allowing me to click on it, you shouldn't then punish me for being interested.

I have no idea whether this is due to ActivityPub, to the single servers (I am on Mastodon.uno btw) or to the clients, but it's, as of now, the only thing I can think of still keeping me from letting myself go and truly join the Fediverse.

Apparently openvibe isn't open source, you might say sorasns but my iPhone 8 doesn't get iOS 18, I can't be bothered to Download an app for both Mastodon & Bluesky each

Several times per day, i get a message with "Load missing posts" besides the usual "New posts". If I click the message the app seems to get confused and I'm not anymore on the last missing post. Is this some sort of bug?

The beta for the next major Mastodon release is now available for testing.

I'm looking for Mastodon accounts which have a Picture of the Day concept similar to https://botsin.space/@APoD (Astronomy Picture of the Day via NASA feed) suggestions.

Open to all types of content - animals, art, abandoned stuff, photography, etc. Needs to be "of quality" is all I ask, think "create a mastodon List called Gallery and put all the accounts there to get some daily eye candy, but not overload on any one subject" to get a taste of everything. One a day (plus iron), but not memes or hardcore stuff (hentai, hard porn, etc.) but general fringe, lowbrow, abstract etc. are all on the menu.

I know there are many specific mastodons dedicated to art, photography, etc. the problem is sifting through thousands of possible accounts to find something I'd be organically interested in which doesn't include "post chatter" and is just pure one picture a day content.

Threaded is a very simple Mastodon client, that is meant to look like the newest social media Threads made by Meta Platforms. It integrates perfectly with your Mastodon account, and matches the Threads vibe, while having Mastodon-only features.

Threaded is free, open-source, available on iOS and has a little integration with watchOS, and is made in pure SwiftUI.

Learn more about Threaded
Follow @[email protected]

I had no prior knowledge of what these #mastodon app numbers were but found myself pretty surprised at

* Mastodon's dominance (~34% counting web and apps) ... compared with
* How little market share "celebrated" iOS (ivory & icecubes) and web apps (elk, phanpy) have (4.3% total, 0.7% for elk+phanpy)
* But all that (and the other listed items) are only ~50% with the rest consisting of "thousands" more!

Genuinely sad to see elk and phanpy not get more love.

https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/112662023734261452

@mastodon

Advocates for the use of trigger warnings suggest that they can help people avoid or emotionally prepare for encountering content related to a past trauma. But trigger warnings may not fulfill either of these functions, according to an analysis published in Clinical Psychological Science.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21677026231186625

Should the Fediverse welcome its new surveillance-capitalism overlords? Opinions differ! If you're one of the fediverse influencers who sees Threads arrival it as "historic" and "a glimpse of the future" ... well, you might want to skip this post.

But if you're one of the many many people on the fediverse who doesn't want to deal with Threads, read on!

Threads is rolling out a beta of its fediverse integration in the US, Canada, and Japan. In a post on Thursday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that toggling on the feature will let you cross-post and view likes from other federated platforms, like Mastodon.

I'm moving across to Mastodon for my main instance.

@[email protected]

Over the next few days, I will slowly remove my activity from other instances, including Mbin.

In the Mastodon app, there is a News tab, why is that ? Is it a way do monetize the service or just a help to check up on the hot news going on on Mastodon ?

I never used Twitter. Reddit was the only social media I engaged/posted on for years, moved to Lemmy a couple months ago. I made an account on Mastodon, downloaded moshidon, followed a bunch of hashtags, now I don't know what to do. Do I just start posting "Facebook status" type posts? Is Mastodon basically like individual Lemmy comment threads with hashtags being the main post?

Now I know how my parents feel when I try to explain anything outside of Facebook to them.

I'm thinking about joining mastodon, but I don't know what server to go with, and the list of servers seems to have very little information about each. Right now I think I'll open an account on mastodon.social.

I'd prefer a server with a high character limit and that has access to most other servers.