Some nice updates coming to Mastodon profiles!
"We want people who are new to Mastodon and the Fediverse to be able to discover and connect with interesting accounts, without having to understand the details of decentralisation."
Already available on mastodon.social, and other servers running the latest code.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2026/03/a-redesign-for-profiles/
Side by side comparison. I particularly like the more compact design of custom fields.
Alright, definitely don't agree with this though.
"The ‘Following you’ badge no longer displays on the profile. People we surveyed ranked this information remarkably low in terms of establishing both trust and interest an account."
Yes, I also rated it as lower than the other signals...but that didn't mean I wanted it removed?
@stefan oh! What I can say here is, we’re still listening. And I’m listening especially hard when the community says, “wait, that’s not what I meant!”
Help me to understand how this badge serves you in ways the other indicators fall short. When do you find yourself using this information? What does it allow you to achieve?
Your feedback is appreciated – we want to get this right. If it turns out that this is essential information to display up front, we’ll certainly find a solution for it.
@imanijoy @stefan I hadn’t explained how I exactly use both the Follows You and Following badges. When I go to decide on a request to follow me I look first at their profile page and if I am following them already, it tells me I already vetted them and boom-done I click Approve. And it’s very interesting if I get such a request a long time after I originally began to follow them.
So if I want to know better why I’ve gotten a request to follow me, is it my recent posts or exchanges with others (shows up in current Post and Replies)? Maybe I can see that I have replied on their recent posts. Maybe I’ll guess it is because the topics I am currently posting/boosting are interesting to someone who normally doesn’t interact with me.
And before I forget, it was not intuitive at all to me that there are now dropdown options on hover for most headings/buttons. Have these been tested with screen readers to work well for the growing number of members who use them and the alt text too?
Stefan Bohacek
Imani
cobalt