Mastodon has announced plans to improve onboarding for newcomers and launch new features targeting content creators, following an 18-month expansion of its core development team, including hiring a dedicated designer and experienced developers.
The decentralized social media platform currently hosts between 750,000 and 1 million monthly active users, with Mastodon’s own website citing a figure of approximately 785,000 monthly active users, while third-party trackers provide estimates ranging from 750,000 to 1 million users.
A longstanding pain point for the platform is the requirement for new users to choose a server during the signup process. Mastodon plans to make this step more understandable and will actively promote smaller servers, as the organization notes that new users often default to choosing the largest servers, which undermines the decentralized nature of the network. According to the blog post co-authored by technical director Renaud Chaput and product designer Imani Joy, “Mastodon is best when communities are spread across many independent servers, each with its own character and focus.”
New administrative tools will assist independent server operators with moderation and maintenance, including the ability to use external blocklists and set up content scanning to detect illegal content and spam. Additionally, Mastodon will introduce tools to optimize media storage usage by serving remote media posts through a trusted third party.
For content creators, Mastodon is introducing a redesigned user profile to showcase work and an enhanced compose experience. A new email notification option will allow non-users to follow updates from creators, such as newsletter writers and journalists, aiming to help creators reach a wider audience without requiring followers to have a Mastodon account.
These updates follow recent feature rollouts, including Quote Posts, which offers more user controls than the equivalent feature on X. The platform also plans to launch “Collections,” a feature for user recommendations similar to Starter Packs found on other networks.
The announcement comes after a shift in leadership at Mastodon, with founder Eugen Rochko stepping down as CEO following the platform’s transition to a nonprofit structure earlier this year. Felix Hlatky took over as executive director, and Mastodon recently announced that Dr. Marius Rothermund, a certified German lawyer, will co-share duties with Hlatky, focusing on legal matters during the organization’s restructuring.
The restructuring process spans three markets: the United States, Germany, and Belgium. Mastodon is an open-source, decentralized alternative to larger platforms like X and Threads, operating as part of the fediverse using the ActivityPub protocol. The platform gained renewed attention following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in October 2022 but has struggled with user retention due to its complex setup process.
