Mastodon switches things up to make its app a little easier to use

Mastodon just released version 4.3 of its web app, and CEO Eugen Rochko says its new updates, like grouped notifications, should make the open social network easier to use.

For example, a "Who to follow" carousel that shows up in the home tab now recommends a mix of "generalized results" such as profiles that are popular in your language and personalized recommendations based on who you follow, making it easier to find new people you might like to follow, too. And as a little treat, there are explanations for why you're seeing those profiles when you click "view all."

Rochko says Mastodon is improving these personalized recommendations because it found its earlier version wasn't really helping users with discovery: "We found that people would skip follow recommendations during onboarding and end up with a boring feed that doesn't offer anything new for hours or days."

Mastodon will also now let you know when you've lost followers because of a moderator's action on a server and give you the option to export a list of those followers.

Instead of delivering them one at a time, notifications are now grouped, showing how many people boosted or favorited a viral post. And Mastodon has updated its notification controls so you can choose whether you want certain types of notifications to be trashed immediately or dropped into a separate inbox.

For example, you can filter out notifications from new accounts or accounts you don't follow:

Additional design tweaks include new dialog boxes and icons and the ability to reorder photos in the post composer. And you can now preview and follow or unfollow accounts by hovering your mouse over their name.

The changes have been rolling out over the last 11 months in nightly updates for people with accounts on the mastodon.social server. But in the decentralized fediverse, people who use other servers or host their own will have to wait until that server is updated to see the new features.