Mastodon's new notifications won't blow up your phone after a viral post anymore

Following 11 months of testing, Mastodon is releasing one of its biggest updates of the year. In a blog post attributed to CEO and founder Eugen Rochko, the non-profit detailed its 4.3 release on Tuesday, promising improvements for nearly every part of the social media experience.

Perhaps most significantly, Mastodon has overhauled how notifications work. To start, the platform will now group boosts and favorites together so that users aren’t bombarded with notifications when one of their posts goes viral. At the same time, Mastodon is introducing new filters to make it easier to ignore notifications from people you don’t follow, newly created accounts and those who send you unsolicited private mentions. With the new feature, you can choose to see those notifications, prevent them from ever reaching your phone or send them to a separate inbox for later viewing.

Separately, Mastodon is introducing a new set of notifications designed to inform users if a server moderator made a decision that affects their account. Specifically, if a mod takes direct action against your account, you receive an in-app message “you can’t miss.” The platform will also notify users when they lose followers due to moderator decisions and offer the option to export a list of affected accounts.

Alongside those changes, Mastodon has redesigned a few different parts of its app. Starting with the compose window, the company says the new interface makes it easier to rearrange media, as well as see content warnings and word filters.

Elsewhere, Mastodon has refreshed its web client, tweaking the software’s color palette, iconography and link previews. Utility emails, including those users receive following a password reset, have gotten a once-over, too. On the interface front, Mastodon has reworked confirmation dialogues to better describe how muting and blocking will affect the user. For example, if you’re about to block a server, the app will detail exactly how many followers you stand to lose from that decision.

On the subject of followers, Mastodon has added a new recommendation carousel that users will see after scrolling past the first post on their feed that’s older than four hours. At the same time, the company has tweaked recommendations to make them more relevant to people. Rounding things out, Mastodon has refreshed website embeds and made it easier to follow the author of a trending news article.

The enhancements come after X recently changed how its block button works, a move some have argued has made the platform even less desirable to use. Rochko doesn’t mention X specifically – or Meta and Bluesky, for that matter – but does point to a general desire to make Mastodon more attractive to everyday users.

“One of [our] ongoing efforts is to make Mastodon easy and delightful to use. We’ve invested a significant amount of money and time into working with professional designers and performing user testing over the last few years, but we really ramped up our efforts in 2023,” he wrote. “Mastodon is quite a large application, and our resources remain very constrained compared to our corporate competitors, but we’ve made significant progress on improving the look and feel of Mastodon across the board.”