Mastodawn

Mastodon Sep 11, 2025

Today, we’re ready to show you the upcoming quote posts feature in more detail. We’ve put together a blog post with examples of how quote posts will work on Mastodon, ahead of early access on our own servers next week 💬 Full launch to come, in Mastodon v4.5

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/09/introducing-quote-posts/

Introducing quote posts

Over the years, we’ve learned just how essential quoting is to many of you. Here's a deep dive on how quote posts will work on Mastodon.

Mastodon Blog

Mastodon Sep 11, 2025

We’ve thought carefully about building this feature, and we hope it broadens your use of Mastodon!

However, you're in control: if you don’t want your content to be quoted, you can find the setting to prevent future quotes of your content under Settings -> Preferences -> Other (in Mastodon 4.4).

JuLY LION Sep 12, 2025

There’s documentation available today, along with an FAQ. If you’re a developer, draft documentation is available as well.

Quote posting will be available on mastodon.online and mastodon.social next week! We will be listening to your feedback on our new feature.

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/quote-posts/

Quoting other posts - Mastodon documentation

All about quoting content (your own posts, or those made by other people).

@Mastodon Where do we add that feedback the best?

Dev Sep 11, 2025

@Mastodon is there a plan to have similar control over replies ? The quote post controls seem pretty handy. It would be very useful to limit replies to followers or no one

kolya Sep 11, 2025

@dev @Mastodon you can already do that by limiting visibility to followers.

Dev Sep 12, 2025

@kolya @Mastodon sure, but it is a different use case to express something publicly that you don’t want strangers (or anyone) replying to

kolya Sep 12, 2025

@dev @Mastodon if you want unidirectional communication, you have a lot of options. but that's not what a social network is for. it's not social.

Dev Sep 12, 2025

@kolya @Mastodon I’m not sure if you’ve used other social networks like twitter or bluesky, both of them have the feature and it is widely used.

Bùi Minh Đức Sep 12, 2025

@dev @kolya @Mastodon Genuinely curious as to what other use cases are there besides "expressing something publicly", and whether or not they're acknowledged on Twitter/X or Bluesky. Because it's also very much well known for promoting scandalous content without getting into trouble.

Dev Sep 12, 2025

@duc @kolya @Mastodon I would simply like anything that I post which gets some traction filled with replies “well actually” or explaining my post to me. Or filling the replies with more unrelated misery about something bad that happened to me. Or having arguments.

The issue is never regular posts. It is important sometimes to indicate to people outside my circle that they don’t need to weigh in on something or I’m not asking for advice.

el Celio 🇪🇺 🇺🇦Sep 12, 2025

@dev @duc @kolya @Mastodon

Why do you want people outside your circle to read your posts, but to do not be able to say what they think about them?

What's the meaning?🤔

Bùi Minh Đức Sep 12, 2025

@elCelio @dev @kolya @Mastodon Most people position Mastodon (and even they position themselves) as a social networking platform, but some others may associate it with the likes of Twitter/X, Threads, Bluesky, Tumblr etc. as a microblogging platform, aka a quicker alternative to maintaining a dedicated blogging website. Mastodon happens to be the most popular out of the platforms built on the ActivityPub protocol. For those people, they see they should have interaction control over the content.

Bùi Minh Đức Sep 12, 2025

@elCelio @dev @kolya @Mastodon I also believe abuse/harassment reply issue mentioned is valid, regardless of whether you see Mastodon as a social platform or not. Disabling or limiting responses to a post is a good way to address that, though it won’t totally get rid of every opportunity. If you agree to a post, like it. If you don’t, move on. If you find the post disturbing, mute or block the person posting. You don’t need to be able to reply.

https://neilzone.co.uk/2024/12/i-think-fedizens-should-be-able-to-disable-replies-to-some-or-all-of-their-posts/
https://localghost.dev/blog/twitter-reply-guys-were-bad-but-mastodon-is-no-better/

I think fedizens should be able to disable replies to some or all of their posts

Every so often, there is a bit of a debate in the fediverse about whether a person should be able to make a post to which other users cannot reply.

kolya Sep 12, 2025

@duc @elCelio @dev @Mastodon if this ever gets implemented, don't forget to add the filter for no-reply posts as well. because I'm not interested in people who aren't interested in social feedback.

Bùi Minh Đức Sep 12, 2025

@kolya @elCelio @dev @Mastodon Many problems with this mostly stem from the ability for post authors to abuse reply restrictions (this is true on those other platforms!) But Mastodon primarily constructs feeds from what you follow, so I imagine in most cases it’s someone you know sharing grieving personal news. You already have the options to mute, block or unfollow keywords/authors should you see someone abusing this feature.

I agree granular controls might be helpful if this happens a lot. :)

kolya Sep 12, 2025

@duc @elCelio @dev @Mastodon I'm not talking about the problems this feature also entails. I'm just generally not interested in one-way rants. if I want that I'll read a newspaper opinion piece or a blog or go watch TV. But I'm on Mastodon to interact with people. Not to be objected to their opinions.

Undead Zeratul Sep 12, 2025

@duc @elCelio @dev @kolya @Mastodon

I feel like people forget that the Fediverse isn't simply a birdsite replacement, but an entire social protocol with different apps and ways to engage in the concept of online social interaction. If this is done at the protocol level, it's an enhancement for everything, not just "the app/client people want to engage with as if it were birdsite". More controls over how you want your content to be engaged with is never a bad thing.

If you stand up your own Mastodon instance to be used as a blogging site, a photo portfolio, even a short form vertical video platform, you should be able to only allow your followers to engage with your own posts.

WHY you choose that is your own prerogative, and we shouldn't blindly dismiss it because we ourselves don't wish to utilize it.

Bùi Minh Đức Sep 12, 2025

@dev @kolya @Mastodon I see.

re: plans, in the technical sense, this needs to be implemented at the ActivityPub protocol level first, and while the contributors and maintainers agreed to the idea of reply controls, there are still some roadblocks on how it should be implemented.

FEP-5624: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-5624-per-object-reply-control-policies/2723

FEP-5624: Per-object reply control policies

source: Showing its internal error page. --- authors: @Claire status: DRAFT dateReceived: 2022-08-23 --- FEP-5624: Per-object reply control policies Summary Sometimes, users may want to share an information or a story without inviting replies from outside their circles or from anyone at all. In particular, individuals may want to restrict who can reply to them in order to avoid “reply guys” or limit outright harassment, while instutions may want to disable replies on their posts to provid...

SocialHub

Teoh Han Hui Sep 12, 2025

@duc @dev @[email protected] @Mastodon It was already withdrawn: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/pulls/632

Withdraw FEP-5624

This FEP has seen no updates for the last 2 years.

Codeberg.org

Bùi Minh Đức Sep 13, 2025

@teohhanhui @dev @Mastodon It got stalled, but there are new proposals based on FEP-5624, like FEP-7888, FEP-7458 and FEP-0391. You should check them out near the end of FEP-5624's discussion.

Sky Leite Sep 12, 2025

@dev My god people are being insufferable to you in these replies over a completely reasonable request lmao

memo 📎Sep 12, 2025

@duc @dev @kolya

Pixelfed has had the ability to turn off replies for a long time and they seem to be doing okay

Sean Sep 14, 2025

@dev @Mastodon followers is easy. Go private.

gudenau Sep 11, 2025

@Mastodon The Java approach? I can get behind that.

eobet Sep 11, 2025

@Mastodon this still doesn't affect someone just copying a link to a toot and pasting it somewhere in their own toot, right? So anyone can still "quote" anything just without the fancy formatting (and without notifying the original poster about it)... and of course, you can always just grab a screenshot, which is what many people seem to do anyway.

Cliff Sep 11, 2025

@eobet I mean, you literally can't prevent that from happening, ever, at all.

But this isn't about that in any way. It's about a feature that's coming that you do have a way to prevent if you'd like. It's not a feature to stop all the ways, and should never be looked at like that.

Kaizo Hellhound

@cliffwade @eobet @Mastodon honestly imo this is kind of ridiculous when there isn't even a way to limit/delete abusive replies, which target you directly. plus, most other software already implements quote posts using regular links (they just check if it's a link to a Fedi post, and display a special link preview if so), so it won't even work to prevent that embedding behaviour if either the OP, quoter, or viewer isn't running Mastodon

RandomMusickMayhem (ON HOLD)Sep 13, 2025

@eobet @Mastodon Or you can just use some other Fediverse software that has quoting implemented for ages and have been around much longer than Mastodon. Friendica, Hubzilla and Misskey to name a few.

Kuba Suder • @mackuba.eu on 🦋Sep 11, 2025

@Mastodon where can I find the developer docs?

GunChleoc Sep 11, 2025

@mackuba https://github.com/mastodon/documentation/pull/1710

Add documentation for Mastodon 4.5 quote post features by ClearlyClaire · Pull Request #1710 · mastodon/documentation

An updated implementation guide is available here: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/client/quotes/ While Mastodon 4.4 added support for verifying and displaying quote posts through a new quote attrib...

GitHub

Thibaultmol 🌈Sep 11, 2025

@mackuba @Mastodon there's a link in the blogpost they linked

Pete Sep 11, 2025

@Mastodon thank-you!

Tyler Fisher Sep 12, 2025

@Mastodon Quick question that I'm not seeing in the FAQ or docs: when is something a `Quote` and when is something a `ShallowQuote`? In what cases should I expect each?

Eugen Rochko Sep 13, 2025

@tylrfishr @Mastodon Quotes can be nested. The nested quote will be shallow to prevent recursion.

Tyler Fisher Sep 13, 2025

@Gargron @Mastodon Thanks!

❀𝓪𝓵𝓬𝓮𝓪𖤐

@Gargron Wdym by "shallow" ? Surface Level ?
That is not the actual technical term I hope ? 🙀 Furthermore what limit(s) does nesting Quotes have ? (This could be a nightmare ... i'd like to see the Json-D)