102

Survey Respondents

27

Roundtable Participants

48+

Servers Represented

700+

Unique Data Points

The insights that follow are distilled into a simplified user journey:

1. Discovery (finding people and content),
2. Reading (or interacting with other forms of content, mainly on one’s feed), and
3. Engagement (posting, replying, messaging).

DISCOVERY

“I feel like I’m in a desert.”

– Roundtable 2 Participant

READING

“I'm in a vortex that cannot be stopped.”

– Roundtable 1 Participant

ENGAGEMENT

“To engage is to be exposed.”

– Roundtable 5 Participant

Response

Count

Percentage

Yes

102

97.1%

No, but I used Mastodon in the past

2

2%

No, I’ve never used Mastodon

1

<1%

Response

Count

Percentage

YouTube

61

61%

Signal

55

55%

Discord

45

45%

Instagram

34

34%

Bluesky

31

31%

Reddit

31

31%

WhatsApp

30

30%

Pixelfed

17

17%

PeerTube

16

16%

Facebook

15

15%

Telegram

12

12%

Lemmy

10

10%

TikTok

9

9%

Discourse

8

8%

Pinterest

7

7%

Threads

6

6%

X/Twitter

6

6%

None of the above

4

4%

Other^[73]

21

21%

Response

Count

Percentage

Mastodon’s official web app

64

63.4%

Mastodon’s official Android app

28

27.7%

Ivory

20

19.8%

Mastodon’s official iOS app

16

15.8%

Tusky

13

12.9%

Ice Cubes

12

11.9%

Phanpy

12

11.9%

Moshidon

9

8.9%

Mona

6

5.9%

Other^[74]

Response

Count

Percentage

mastodon.social

24

24.5%

mas.to

5

5.1%

mastodon.online

4

4.1%

indieweb.social

3

3.1%

aus.social

3

3.1%

plialle.fr

3

3.1%

mastodon.gamedev.place

2

2%

mastodon.nl

2

2%

blorbo.social

2

2%

toot.wales

2

2%

Other

48

49.0%

Response

Count

Percentage

Man

68

67.3%

Woman

22

21.8%

Nonbinary

8

7.9%

Genderqueer

7

6.9%

Genderfluid

5

5%

Prefer not to say

3

3%

Prefer to self-describe^[75]

2

2%

Response

Count

Percentage

No

90

89.1%

Yes

7

6.9%

Prefer not to say

4

4%

Response

Count

Percentage

Heterosexual/Straight

66

65.4%

Bisexual

14

13.9%

Queer

13

12.9%

Prefer not to say

7

6.9%

Gay

5

5%

Asexual

3

3%

Lesbian

2

2%

Prefer to self-describe^[76]

5

5%

Response

Count

Percentage

European

80

80%

Mixed Heritage

5

5%

Prefer not to say

4

4%

Middle Eastern / North African (MENA)

3

3%

Latin American / Hispanic

3

3%

Central Asian

2

2%

East Asian

2

2%

Indigenous / Aboriginal Peoples

2

2%

South Asian

1

1%

Southeast Asian

1

1%

Sub-Saharan African (West, East, Central, or Southern Africa)

1

1%

Afro-Caribbean

1

1%

African Diaspora / Black (diaspora identity not tied to a specific region)

1

1%

Pacific Islander / Oceanian

1

1%

Prefer to self-describe^[77]

3

3%

Response

American

Dutch

Dutch heritage

Ecuadorian

English

Filipino and Bahamian

French

German

German

German/French/Irish

i'm half-Russian (from my mother's side) half-Bashqort (from my father's side) but I prefer to identify as Bashqort

Migrant from the UK to Germany.

Scandinavian-Slavic

Welsh

Welsh/Celtic (Cymro/Celtaidd)

Response

Count

Percentage

United States

28

32.9%

Germany

16

18.8%

France

12

14.1%

United Kingdom

3

3.5%

Australia

3

3.5%

Canada

3

3.5%

Netherlands

3

3.5%

Poland

2

2.4%

Portugal

2

2.4%

Romania

2

2.4%

Austria

1

1.2%

Costa Rica

1

1.2%

Denmark

1

1.2%

India

1

1.2%

Italy

1

1.2%

Response

Count

Percentage

I do not identify with a disability or impairment

57

57%

A long-term mental health condition (e.g., depression, anxiety)

21

21%

A learning disability or other diagnosis that interferes with your learning or ability to concentrate (e.g., dyslexia, auditory processing disorder)

11

11%

A sensory impairment (vision or hearing)

10

10%

A sensory processing or integration disorder

10

10%

A long-term medical illness (e.g., epilepsy, cystic fibrosis)

9

9%

A mobility impairment

5

5%

Prefer not to say

4

4%

An intellectual disability

1

1%

Prefer to self describe^[78]

7

7%

Response

Count

Percentage

35-44

38

38%

45-54

26

26%

25-34

16

16%

55-64

9

9%

18-24

4

4%

65-74

4

4%

75 or older

2

2%

Prefer not to say

1

1%

Response

Count

Percentage

Private mentions

51

63.8%

Quiet public

43

53.8%

Followers

30

37.5%

None – I only create public posts

16

20%

Response

Count

Percentage

Private mentions

27

42.2%

Quiet public

25

39.1%

Followers

12

18.8%

Response

1

I'm trying to have real conversations.

2

Most of my posts are public but when I've used private mentions occasionally it's to message someone I know IRL to privately respond to something

3

Sharing stuff that I only want my friends to know.

4

To avoid flooding public timelines mostly

5

I want to hide some posts with more personal details and opinions from being publicly visible to anyone and especially not visible for crawlers/bot.

6

I couldn’t explain why but I'm more confortable this way

7

If I'm replying to someone, I try to always use "quiet public" to be considerate of others, since they may not be interested in the conversation.

8

I want to privately message someone.

9

I almost always post publicly with no limitations, but I do occasionally DM (private message) people.

10

the internet became miserable when we collectively got viral-brain. i have no desire to ‘do numbers’ and i dread the direction masto seems to be taking in this regard. also ‘quiet public’ still makes me nauseated to read

11

I want to send a private message to someone

12

Not wanting to flood timelines with replies to my own posts

13

When it’s a “DM” meant only for the recipient.

14

People sharing private information that I feel should not get any further

15

Some of my posts are not intended for the public sphere, but rather for my followers. I carefully curate my followers list to avoid bots and, as much as possible, emphasize interactions with actual people. I review their bios and posts before allowing them to follow me formally. Sometimes, I want to just share with that audience.

16

To not clutter the timeline of others.

17

Not to pollute others' timelines with discussion only relevant to a particular friend

18

Don't want to appear in search results

19

Only very occasionally. >99% of posts are public.

20

Limited interest for others. I find it boring (best case) or confusing (worst case) to discover bits and pieces of discussions in the public timline and want to avoid posting like this.

21

To stop replies to threads ending up randomly spawning / spamming on my instance's timeline, ending up being interspersed with other people's posts but now appearing out of context

22

My conversations aren't necessarily private, but I don't want to shout them in everyone's face. I don't want them to show up for uninterested followers

23

I primarily use private mentions in replies to someone. I rarely get into a public discussion of any topic. The replies are usually relevant to the folks who get mentioned.

24

Sharing deeply personal stories that I don't want to be searchable via the internet, or be too widespread.

25

I'm not really sure what "quiet followers" is. I limit who can follow me and who can quote me because i don't want to lose my job for my opinions

26

I don't know what "quiet followers" means. I limit who can follow me and who can quote me because i don't want to lose my job.

27

I'm not sure I understand it well, but I don't want my replies in a conversation to appear to people who follow me but not the other person, and I believe "quiet public" is the way to do that

28

Sometimes I don't need all the randos to chime in.

29

It's been work related conversations specific to projects that no one else need to chime in on. Also in asking for tech support from some apps where I did not feel it appropriate to air my questions/issue with the community at large.

30

Not to clutter my timeline with things people may not want to see. Many times I am responding to someone's post and what I say will only interest them.

31

To send a private message.

32

not wanting to share with everyone

33

To not spam followers' timelines with irrelevancies.

34

It’s the default. I find it frustrating that I reply and sometimes it seems that others won’t be able to see my posts. Quiet public is confusing. Ice cubes doesn’t let me change this once a post or reply is out.

35

Sometimes, I don't want my posts to clutter too much of the timelines. Especially for replies to my own that just add information to posts. E.g.

* I do an announcement (should have good visibility)

* I add more information to it (should only be visible when people open the original post)

36

I want to say something privately to someone. Sharing a secret, for example

37

I want to speak to someone in particular. It's the equivalent of DMs even though I know they're not encrypted.

38

Sometimes I ask followers to help test a new project before releasing it publicly. I also use Mastodon for private conversations regularly.

39

Want to avoid the post “breaking containment”/context collapse and starting too many debates with strangers

40

I assume everything in Mastodon is public, I just want to restrict who do I get replies from or if I can be reposted. Honestly, I think I’m pretty safe from becoming viral (I only went viral once on Twitter, I wasn’t proud of what I posted and I got told to kill myself). If a take is too spicy for the masses, I will keep it to Signal with a select few that will call me on my bullshit. But I am part of an ongoing conversation in private messages, which is fascinating.

41

Sending private mentions.

Otherwise I often try to remember to set *replies* to public posts as “Quiet public” because I don’t really want them to resurface outside of the conversation.

42

There's stuff I don't want to share with the whole world!

43

Varies from having 1-to-1 conversations to feeling weird, unprepared, shy...

44

Quiet public to limit the scope of a minor reply or discussion. Followers-only to keep a more private corner.

45

Interpersonal plans (Dates, Times, Locations) being shared in private.

46

Group conversations in "Private Mentions".

47

DM someone

48

I don’t necessarily want replies to things to also show up on followers’ timelines because they won’t make sense out of context.

49

 i use quiet public to avoid bugging strangers in the local timeline with posts about my mental health and [redacted sensitive info] and similar stuff

i use followers only very rarely with posts i dont want anyone to see, like the last time i used it i posted about the feeling that i should not sleep for a few days to punish myself

i only use private mentions to contact people who don't read the chats we have in common for a while if i have something urgent for them

50

To cut down on Reply Guys or avoid my post showing up in a tag I need to mention in it

51

Quiet public when adding to a post a reply that makes sense only in the original context.

52

Not clogging up Main

53

Writing threads and not wanting to spam the hashtag feeds with all individual posts of that thread.

Or if I am writing an opinion where I fear that a stranger browsing the hashtag feed might hackle/troll me if they read it

54

I want to communicate something to someone but not risk embarrassing them, or myself, in public.

55

I use Mastodon a lot for water cooler/small talk type conversation, I don't want to sort of engage with the whole world. Also, some people can be really judgemental towards random strangers on this social network and love to pick on anything, I'm trying to avoid these kinds of interactions.

56

I think I set it as my default when I first created my account and didn't really think much about it. I wasn't sure what to pick or why.

57

I don't feel comfortable sharing info/anecdotes about my personal life, health, or work with a larger audience.

58

Keeping certain topics out of the local timeline in accord with community standards. Limiting the virality of posts on sensitive topics (e.g. politics).

59

When I write a thread, I usually only want the first post to appear on public timelines, because that can get overwhelming otherwise. So I set replies to to my own threads (and replies in general) to quiet public.

Often I want to add additional, less public, information to my threads that goes beyond the stuff in the initial post, that's usually followers only.

60

question that feels rude to ask everyone

61

DM

62

i don’t want to attract unwanted attention

63

It feels like it’s encouraged behavior to mark replies to public posts as “quiet public” … truth be told, I can’t explain exactly what that even does, but it seems to be the right thing to do. I always thought Twitter’s way of hiding replies from people you didn’t follow, but showing those of people you do follow, was quite smart.

I sometimes use private mentions when replying to something, but generally I don’t see Mastodon as a “messenger” app and prefer to take conversations elsewhere. Still handy, of course.

Response

Count

Percentage

I usually reply publicly

57

72.2%

I usually limit who can see my replies

14

17.7%

I don’t usually reply to posts

8

10.1%

Response

Count

Percentage

My followers

49

62.8%

The followers of the person I’m replying to

1

1.3%

Both

8

10.3%

I’m not sure

20

25.6%

Response

Count

Percentage

Yes

53

68%

No

14

18%

I don’t know

11

14.1%

Response

1

N~o, I thought their followers would see too. I'm ambivalent either way.

2

It would be useful if I could include the followers of the person I'm replying to, but that would have to be a separate option and explained thoroughly and transparently.

3

To be honest, if I reply to someone, I follow their rules. If they post publicly, I reply publicly, if they post privatly, I reply as well.

The main problem in that case is that some people won't see the whole thread.

4

I expected it to be visible to followers of both, and I feel like the replies are probably more relevant to followers of the original tooter than to my followers.

5

It feels like if I'm replying to someone else I'm trying to join a conversation and it may be more relevant for others who wish to participate in that conversation to see it, not just people who happen to be following me.

6

the alternative makes no sense???

7

I don't usually reply with limited visibility except if it's a private message, so I don't end up in this scenario. But I know this would be a great way to pile on someone invisibly. I don't see how this use case leads to anything benevolent.

8

I curate my followers list, so I really only want to share with them. If an ADDITIONAL option to share with "followers and their followers" were there, I **might** select it occasionally to boost engagement from people in that curated community. But I do prefer words mean what they say, and in this case I appreciate the limited scope.

9

It would also make sense for people following the conversation to see my reply.

But my intuitive understanding of the setting is that only my followers can see the post.

10

I'm not sure that's helpful and could be used for brigading

11

Tricky. But on balance, this is a possible abuse vector, and bad behaviour should be exposed.

12

It's hard to gauge + vet the potentially large numbers of followers that everyone else tagged on that thread may have. So, really, I only want those that I know can / should have access (i.e. those explicitly tagged in the reply, along with those I know who follow me)

13

it would feel right for the other person's followers to see it too. it feels like I'm replying in “their” world

14

I feel like this opens the window to abuse, if only my followers and the person I tag see the post.

15

That's the behaviour I'd expect, but I have no idea how it would all wash out with different/competing settings on a toot.

16

I feel like a reply should always be visible to the person who is tagged. Then if I limit it to my followers, only my followers plus that person should see it. Is that how it works? I don't know. I don't use it because it's confusing.

17

It creates a patchy thread where no one can see the full conversation. Since I am replying to something the posters followers have seen, they are in on the conversation, not my followers.

18

The control should be on the person that created the thread imo.

19

This means that the people who follow the other person can't see what I'm saying, despite it being a reply to someone they follow and almost certainly care what they have to say. If the person I'm replying to doesn't change their visibility settings when replying to me (which afaik is the case by default), it means the entire conversation goes unnoticed. That's fine in my case because I don't harass anyone, but that gives harassment such a bigger chance to go unnoticed by the people who would care the most (aka followers of the person being harassed). It also puts the onus on the person being harassed to pay attention to post visibility to make something public that wasn't when they reply, and only then, I still have the power to hide my side of the conversation.

20

Followers-only replies with a non-follower tagged are a popular abuse vector and is at best mislabeled. There should at least be an option to opt out of it, but a "just you and my buddies here" visibility level is inherently very threatening and should not be an option.

People who want to reply privately can use private mentions. If they want to share their thoughts with their followers, they can already do that. "Followers + this one person who doesn't know me" should not be an option.

21

I don’t understand why anybody would want to do that except to dunk on someone where only their followers can see it.

22

How did I get to control another person’s followers list? I just reply privately if I’m sharing personal stuff and/or the poster is asking people to. I don’t mind my followers seeing me reply to other people (I follow a lot more accounts that the ones following me - and a lot of those are not active anymore.) Also, in the Fediverse time of posting counts so changes are my followers will miss most of my replies to others anyway

23

I never used that option for replies so don’t have an opinion besides that I do expect it to work like that. I’m not sure why that would be an option for replies really. I do see the point of having a way to show it to the mentioned’s followers too? Or maybe the overlap and only the overlap between all sets of followers?? This quickly gets tricky to think about!

24

From a privacy perspective, it lets people who aren't the followers of the original poster see a discussion that wasn't intended for them.

From a usability perspective, it means I see disembodied replies in situations where I'm following the replier but not the original poster -- and the UI doesn't handle this well, which makes the situation even worse (although I don't think it's only a UI problem)

25

I assume it’s also visible to the person I’m replying to?

26

Replies should keep the original context of the post they are replying to. Making a reply visible only to the replier’s followers when using that setting breaks the obvious expectation AND allows bad actors to limit the visibility of their attacks to only people they’re already friends with.

27

"Followers" mean "my followers", I think that is easily understandable. I never use that setting though.

28

I would assume that if I'm replying to a post, the original visibility of that post applies to my response. Even if I limit it to my followers, that seems more like a quote than a reply?

29

It is what I'd expect, since that's what it says, but I think a “my followers + OP's followers" visibility setting could be useful too.

30

If I change the visibility of a reply, it's almost always to Private Mention, so it's difficult to say what I would expect or want in the case of changing it to Followers.

31

I think there's a case to have the option to "only followers of me or them"

Response

1

This is EXTREMELY confusing. I /understand/ it, but no one likes this. However, I think the big problem is actually on the end of the person being replied to. If I make my post followers only, and you reply to it without changing the publicity settings... I don't want your followers to be the ones who can see it! This leaks information about my post you may not have wanted to leak and I probably didn't want you to leak either! This is especially visible to me as someone who uses other activitypub software still. This is not an uncommon way for this feature to work on activitypub software, but the way Akkoma currently works, I see these replies on my timeline. This makes me feel uncomfortable and like I'm invading everyone's privacy, but if I disable them I lose self-reply threads. While this is a flaw with Akkoma... why are these visible to me to begin with? Neither person involved in the conversation wanted me to be able to see this, and yet nearly all if not all software in the ecosystem agrees that it thinks I should be able to see it regardless. IMHO the expected behavior is likely that the post is visible to the intersection between both users' followers. Allowing a couple options between the possible interpretations (yours, theirs, either, shared) is probably fine too, but the default selection when matching privacy should be either the thread starter's followers or the intersection between theirs and yours.

Response

1

Private mentions should be totally separated in the UI conceptually. It's still too prone to mix it up in the "normal" timeline and between different replies. I'd like to see it as a inter-user-messaging system on the separate screen/tab and not intertwined in public conversations at all.

2

I'd like to set a default visibility for replies separate to normal toots, so I don't have to remember to change it every time, because I set "public" for toots, but "quiet public" for replies. I also don't feel confident about how private/direct mentions/messages work and whether they're truly private, so I avoid using them.

3

I really want direct messages to work as a separate use case, e.g. I don't get a heart attack because it's in the feed, or if I mention another account, they shouldn't get invited immediately into the conversation.

4

I’m accustomed to mutual followers being able to see Followers only posts, but I’m confused when I see replies from Followed accounts to those I don’t follow.

5

Having a UI that better allows selection of intended audience would be nice. I don't like that when I reply to someone, and their post has other at-tags in it, the reply goes to all of them as well. The UI seems to assume "Reply All" and not just "Reply" ... which has consequences.

6

I think replies should not be displayed out of context on my main timeline, there is little value in seeing "@foo @bar Agreed!" without also seeing what they replied to

7

Make the visibility of *initial* replies like on Twitter. (sending a reply without a parent post. so a first message)

That is, make them visible only to people who follow both me and my recipient.

8

Detach unwanted replies! Blocking is insufficient since the reply stays, but is simply hidden from you.

9

If quiet public works how I think, I think this should be the default for all replies.

10

When you click Reply on a toot, the box comes up for your reply. If you don't decide to reply, you can click the "X" button in the top right corner. I would expect that to dismiss the reply and take me back to previous screen I was on (whether that's the toot, or my timeline). Instead it switches from "reply" to "create new" and that's never a workflow I would follow.

11

Can I untag myself? I want to do that sometimes. Not just mute, but untag entirely.

12

The illogical follower rules.

13

It’s just plain confusing. I do believe Bluesky does this better, allows to change the audience once it’s out to limit interactions.

14

I think it should be possible to set visibility and replies separately. I don't mind a post being visible to a lot of people, but I do mind it if complete strangers feel ok to give their opinion in some cases (for instance discussing sensitive topics). Maybe I want to keep my post public, but only really want to hear from followers about certain things.

Also UI wise, the pop-up to set visibility has to go. Giving us the option of using icons instead of that annoying pop-up with full-text drop-down menu would be more intuitive, for example ; it could be enabled in the settings so that people would pick what is more comfortable to them.

15

I pretty much addressed this in my previous response. But also, I think if someone "disables private mentions" (by hiding notifications for this category), maybe this should be disclosed? Or at least a warning that the person might have them "disabled" to avoid confusion about undelivered/ignored messages.

16

The poster should be able to decide who can reply to a post and change that at any time. E.g. I should be able to make a post with open replies, but then if people are still debating each other in the replies days later and I don’t want to hear about it, I should be able to change the reply setting on that post to restrict new replies from coming in.

Also it would be nice to be able to “detach” unwanted replies and not have them appear in the thread. This is especially important with the only sorting for replies being chronological: as it is now, if the first person to reply is rude, that’s the first thing everyone will see when they look at the thread forever.

17

If we can’t fetch all the other replies (I know that’s an area of work) could I get a reminder that I’m not seeing all the replies? I would hate to pile on inadvertently.

18

I like that you can still browse Mastodon while replying, but I don’t like that you only see a tiny cropped preview of the post you’re replying to. I’d love to have access to the full post (and thread?) while replying. Possibly have the entire thing be a pop-out that I can open and close at will with progress saved? (or a design of similar effect)

19

Limiting who can reply is key functionality, and so is removing replies from the thread.   [Yes I know these are tricky to do in a federated way, and the approach of building on the infrastructure for quote posts makes sense, but this functionality really is long overdue!]

Additional visibility: scoped to mutuals (people I follow and who follow me).

I'd like to see a different notification for "replied to me" as opposed to "mentioned me"

20

I dislike the loss-of-context that happens when people have automatic periodic post deletion. Some of the conversations have great value to me long after the fact and I'd love for a way for that context to remain, in a respectful way to those that want auto-delete

21

I wish the threading was better. Thread-based filtering would be good too — if I block someone I generally don’t want to see anyone else arguing with them either.

22

If people are confused with the previous question, perhaps a different icon type could be used. I'd imagine like the reply , reply all, and forward you could find in some email apps.

23

The most owner of the thread should be the context through the life of the thread. They and their server’s admins and mods should be able to decide which replies are allowed and remove any replies they determine violate the rules or the culture of the server that the thread originated on.

24

I’d love to have indentation/threads/hierarchy in the replies instead of a flat list, to know who is responding to the original post or to an existing reply.

25

on the home feed, replies should be grouped with the post they are replying to

26

No, I really like this granulated approach!

27

It defaults to reply all which can be a nuisance to remove all the extra people

28

Being able to limit who can reply might be helpful in preventing harassment, mansplaining etc.

29

I would like more fine grained reply controls, like GoToSocial, or well, Bluesky offers. Some posts might be public, but that doesn't necessarily mean everyone should be able to reply to them, and I think people should be able to decide who can interact with their posts, like people can already decide who can quote them, follow them, etc.

30

i'd like it to be more obvious a reply is private or follower only

31

I think it generally works for my needs

Response

Count

Percentage

5 (Very intuitive)

49

62.8%

4

17

21.8%

3

9

11.5%

2

3

3.9%

1 (Very unintuitive)

0

0%

Response

1

A system based on using any emojis like on discord would be nice & varied, I feel like each instance could have its set of allowed reactions for their posts, which would probably end up just being a favourite with a different display

2

Support (like a thumbs up, or "agree") and laugh.

3

downvotes

4

I would like to be able to click "like" to a post, not necessarily "favourite" as not all of them are, if fact, favourites.

5

I think it's best to keep it easy and not over engineer the UI with dozens of features and actions.

6

No, and I'd rather not have other people use more reactions, either. I find it weird/confusing that people use the star to "react" to a toot, because favouriting a toot seems like something you'd do for yourself, or to show appreciation/agreement, but people seem to also use it as a way to acknowledge a reply when they don't want to actually say something back.

7

I'd like to signal solidarity, kind of like I'm appreciating their contribution, feeling the same things they are, feeling for them in their perspective. I might use the star this way at times but something more specific could help spread encouragement on the platform.

8

Using emojis to react to posts would be nice. But I fear that it might encourage people to reply even less to posts because they can express what they feel about a post with just an emoji. I feel more connection to other people if they reply to me instead of just reacting with a star or an emoji.

9

I like the idea of supporting more reactions. I think it can be good to know when someone thinks something is funny or they don’t like it or it makes them sad. That said, I also like the idea of providing the option to disable that for certain posts or for all posts.

10

no, good god we do not need more fluff weighing this thing down

11

Nooooo, it gives LinkedIn/Meta data collection vibes!

12

Nah, keep it simple.

13

I prefer the power of positive reinforcement and not negative reinforcement in public. The star as an approval is good. Not having an icon for "downvoting" something is good in a public sphere, and in a sense of reinforcement learning. I downvote with mutes and blocks ... I don't need anything else.

14

It would be great if there were more personal reactions possible, like a heart or a laughter but I understand that allowing any Unicode symbol could lead to people replying with poop or vomit which is definitely not the type of community we want to curate

15

Emoji reactions, like in the announcements, are great!

16

Sometimes I think I would like a symbol for expressing "I feel you"/"so right, more's the pity" that might be more appropriate than a star e.g. in case of depressing political develpoments or smallish personal disasters.

17

On one hand, I would sometimes like to use other emoticons when replying to things. However, then I often find that there aren't enough of the ones I want - i.e. The typical set of "Like/Star/Fav,  Heart, Care/Hugs, Laugh, Angry, Surprise, Sadness" works for most cases, though I often find myself wanting also "Rolling Eyes" and "Puke".  (In that sense, MsTeams is neat in that you can choose  to select something from the wider set, though that gets annoying to hunt down sometimes0

On the other hand, what Mastodon has currently actually feels ok, and I'm not sure we really need/want to have to add extra complexity like that, as the platform feels fine as-is. So, I'm a bit conflicted on it.

18

Not sure what but that might be nice. Something more nuance than a like (which means everything from “awesome” to “I acknowledge having read your post”)

19

The 'star' action (favoriting) has become a catch-all action for my different responses. Sometimes, I want to acknowledge someone's message, rather than saying 'I hear you' it's a 'star'. At time I love someones post, again 'star'.

Using my familiarity with Slack, LinkedIn here. Those reactions are not worth words. But, they do worth little more than the a 'star'.

20

It would be nice, but not necessary.

21

NO!

22

Oh god no, please no "reactions", a terrible idea we don't need to import

23

I'm sure other emoticons would allow for a greater emotional range (e.g. a comfort/hug reaction when someone posts bad news), but I like the simplicity of the star.

24

Maybe a "seen" react for the things that aren't good but we want the person to know they're seen. I think most of us understand liking a post with bad news is acknowledging it, not really enjoying it, though. But I definitely don't want a dislike or other emoji available. The Facebook reacts were so awful when they started.

25

Different reaction types like a heart or crying face or something might be nice.

26

Maybe. Only if this allows me to e.g. save posts to different “collections” that I can revisit later, e.g. read later vs like vs memes I’d like to save

27

I think there’s value in registering dislike for a post, but this introduces issues too

28

Not really. To be honest I don't use the star a lot. I don't like that everyone can see what I've liked or not (by clicking on the list of people who did like a post). Sometimes I wish my likes could be seen only by the author of a post, without it being public. The current way things work is the cause for my low use of the star (instead using bookmarks for posts I like even though I have no intentions on coming back to them later) because it sends the signal that I'm online browsing Mastodon, and gives the illusion of an availability I don't always have in the moment.

29

Yes, emoji reactions would be awesome! It would encourage people who otherwise don't interact (they may not like to reply publicly, a "like/favorite" may not be an appropriate response) to engage more often.

Consider how some polls get a lot of votes, but not as many boosts/favorites.

30

Since favorites on Mastodon are generally only visible to the recipient, I would love if there was (optionally!) a way to react that was more public, but not as public/noisy as boosting, similar to how likes work on Twitter or upvotes work on Reddit. I want to be able to tell the world “I like/support this” without necessarily blasting it to all my followers, which is what boosting does.

31

Coming from Twitter and Instagram, I’ve always been ok with fav/boost, but I’m also curious about upvotes/downvotes. I guess favs count as upvotes. On second thought I like the simplicity of it. You can always to a poll for more.

32

I like the star. I wouldn’t want it to be replaced with a heart like Twitter did many years ago. I don’t use it only for stuff I love, but to mark any kind of interest in the post. It can mean “thanks for posting” or “I read that”. It would be inappropriable to “heart” certain posts.

I wouldn’t mind some other curated reactions (Facebook or LinkedIn like), even if it’s a little gadgety. Not sure how I would feel about full emoji reaction (chat-apps like), it would likely be distracting and too colourful on the timeline.

33

yes, arbitrary emoji for reactions

34

Yes, it feels wrong to star a post where someone is telling the world bad news that happened to them, a hug/sad icon would be better

35

Dislike

36

Thumbs up might be better than star, most people seem to use star as a kind of thumbs up, whereas I thought originally it was intended to be more of a bookmarking mechanism.

37

YES. i want reacts with custom emojis a lot (like it's been already implemented in Chuckya, a Mastodon fork)

38

It’s a nice functionality that I enjoy when on Sharkey, other Misskey forks, Discord, Slack, and Teams. It’s not a high priority for me.

39

Different emotion types could be interesting, but I feel like it's a low-priority as a simple reply with an emoji/reaction is essentially the same thing

40

When I star something it normally means “acknowledged, nothing to add, over and out”. I feel that’s already universally acknowledged, but perhaps there’s a better solution.

41

Would be nice to have emoji reactions. But I could see that getting spammy.

42

Yes, it would be nice to react to a sad post with a sad emoji etc.

43

I actually think favoriting works mainly as a kludge. People use it because it's the simplest form of acknowledgement afforded, not because it provides any legible semantic content. The mechanism is a carry-over from corporate social media where having a binary means of expressing favor encouraged and facilitated data harvesting and sentiment analysis for commercial purposes. My preference would be to dispense with it altogether. If people want a single-click, relatively unobtrusive way to react to posts, my preference would be for a distinct post type with a single emoji as the content, that's displayed in collapsed form relatively to the Note type.

44

Custom emojis are a big part of what makes using Mastodon fun, so yeah, I'd really enjoy being able to react with an emoji, it's something I use constantly in apps like Signal

45

in a way why not?

46

Not really, this is not LinkedIn

Response

Count

Percentage

Yes, and I use filters on notifications

30

38.5%

Yes, but I don't have any filters on notifications

25

32.1%

No, I was unaware of this feature

23

29.5%

Response

Count

Percentage

Hiding notifications based on specific interaction types (e.g. boosts, favourites)

22

73.3%

Filtering by account type (e.g. only people you follow)

8

26.7%

Filtering out notifications based on keywords

5

16.7%

Something else^[79]

6

20%

Response

1

open customizable algo

2

If I am involved in a loooong thread, I would like the ability to silence (not mute) notifications on it.

I don't want to turn off sounds or computer notifications for all messages but only this thread

3

I don't get any indication of notifications in the iOS app, so I need to check manually, and then they again look unread when I open the web app.

4

I often get notifications from different automated aggregation/boosting bots that I don't really consider an interesting interaction. I imagine I can filter these already, but I'm not sure

5

Not sure why, but I only get notifications on one device and not the other. Likely user error or an app limitation (Ice Cubes).

6

In the Mastodon web UI, the default notifications pane mixes up all kinds of things. For example, follow requests are considered an on-par notification (in terms of value or importance) with a like, a boost, etc. I feel like there needs to be a better way to gather those in the interface. I find myself missing follow requests, only to stumble on them a month later when I see the "Follow Request" menu item WAY over on the right of the deck view has numbers next to it, indicating requests.

7

My notifications are separate on the web and on iOS, viewing notifications on one device does not clear them on the other and they are still marked as new. Also, iOS notifications are often out of sync with with the "new notifications" indicator, so the indicator shows there are unread notifications but you have to forcefully pull to refresh a couple times on the notification list until the new notifications show up.

8

Fix the technical bug that means you can't open multiple tabs open (and then forget about some of them) without accidentally starting to DDOS your home server, resulting in annoying "Rate Limited" popups that start spawning multiple times all over each other. The notifications counter / checker stuff should just stop polling when you leave the tab, and then should even just give up trying to update once it gets past that 42-ish number where it starts displaying the "+" (at least until you reset that tab to be up to date with your latest notifications)

9

(I use Ivory) Automatically dismissing message notifications on other devices, when I read the message on one device. Right now I need to open the app, for it to notice.

Also: A dedicated view of my messages, viewed as threads, like in an IM app like Signal. (but this is already the case on Mastodon Web, isn't it?)

10

Automatically marking everything as read if I'm on the page and can see all of the notifications. The extra step to click the "Mark all as read" button is kinda annoying.

11

Ability to mute or filter notifications for older posts. Also the "...and X others liked this post" be able to expand so I can get a list of who those others are. If I'm on mobile I will never find out because I can't mouse over the icons.

12

I would like a setting as an administrator that would let me see only people who have joined the server.

13

some form of aggregates. E.g. if I post something and get one star or boost, I would be happy to know. But if something takes off, the permanent clicking noise that I didn't want to have in the first place is not what I want. Also, I miss mentions in the noise of boosts/stars.

14

I don't always understand how notifications work. For instance the other day I posted a question in public, all replies allowed, using a hashtag. Some strangers (accounts I had never interacted with nor them with me prior to this) answered and I saw their reply immediately. But one stranger (account I had never interacted with nor them with me prior to this) replied and I got a notification that their message were hidden. There was no filtered word involved in any of these cases. Why are some people hidden and not others ? Those were not even private mentions. I don't understand it. And I also don't understand what exactly I allow once I have clicked on that notification. Am I giving them access to me forever, or just this conversation ? Does that allow them to reply to me publicly, or does that now include private mentions ? I wish I had more control over what happens when and after I receive these notifications.

15

Having read/unread status for notifications be pushed to all clients and devices instead of having to mark the same notification as read separately on every client and device I use.

16

Since I’m on an ongoing convo, that clouds my other replies. How could I disentangle public replies from the group of friends chatting?

17

Regularly I choose a specific type tab in notifications, like Polls or something, just to see something, and then forget about it. After days, I’m like “I don’t get any notifications, is no one replying or liking anything?”. Then I realise that all this time, it was stuck on that tab. So a solution that for example: shows a little thing on the bell icon or something to tell you you have a tab on / or adds an option to notify of notifications even on other tabs, or anything to avoid this situation, would be nice!

18

Consistent grouping in all apps (as web client does nowadays e.g.)

19

When I have a post go “viral,” my notifications become completely useless unless I mute notifications for that post … regardless of the other notification filters. I seriously have no idea how anyone on mastodon copes with having 1K or more followers.

20

give me a setting to filter out notifications from bot accounts please! bot services like tagpush.app, FediProfile and others boost my posts and it is annoying to see these boosts in my notifications. It also falsifies statistics for boosts in services that analyse post statistics.

21

Syncing whether I've viewed notifications across devices and apps

22

There is a swipe feature when someone wants to follow me. I don't like the dating app feel of swiping. It could just be the Toot! App I use. I prefer to just approve or deny, with those words. Not swipe right or left.

23

Extending notification grouping more aggressively, so if a post starts getting a like every few seconds I don't get a notification every few seconds

24

An option for more aggressive grouping. Ideally, the notifications timeline should have only one entry per post, showing both boosts and replies, that gets bumped to the top as new interactions occur. Mouse-hovering over the icon of the boosting or faving account can show details of the interaction, like date and time, with a link to their profile, rather than prioritizing the profile.

25

I rarely get any - which is super fine with me

Response

Count

Percentage

Yes, several times

36

46.2%

Yes, once or twice

23

29.5%

No, I haven't run into this

15

19.2%

I didn't know this could happen

4

5.1%

Response

1

Losing posts I've replied to — don't show in my history — and double posts showing in feeds.

2

It already happened with a person, she hasn't blocked me (I can see her posts on her timeline), but each time she is mentionned in a thread appearing in my timeline, when I check the thread, her replies never appear (and the thread is not on private mode).

She is not on a weird instance, so I really don't know this is happening.

3

i have experienced these things, of course, i just don’t consider them problems. it’s expected behavior.

4

Too many, like every time I want to reply to someone whose post was quoted in my feed. It open in a new tab, where I'm not logged in, but the servers are connected.

5

Reply sometimes takes me to my browser rather than remaining in-app. Or having to search for the user even though they appear in my timeline—confusing!

6

Translations often do not work for an unknown reasons

7

I curate my followers. It's frustrating to have to use several clicks to get to their feed on their instance so I can see their post history. I wish this would sync to a local instance better.

8

I have friends who follow me from other instances and say they are not getting all the posts syndicated from mastodon.online accounts, including mine. I also encounter people who link to mastodon posts using their web UI's link (so it links to their instance's web UI showing a foreign post instead of the actual post, the link then opens a web browser instead of showing a post inside Mastodon), I think it would be useful if the instance could catch its own UI being posted and unfurl the URL automatically.

9

Even though I clicked several times on the icon, it didn’t boost. No response.

10

The other server was experiencing difficulties, disruption was intermittent.

11

It rarely happens now as I've just stopped trying to find new accounts on other servers to interact with.

But mainly, if I ever come across something via a link on some other server that I then do want to interact with, then it is always a bunch of mental gymnastics to figure out what's the best way to access that post from my own server to somehow interact with it

The other big problem is searching for some account / coming across some account that has interacted with your posts, but then seeing a blank profile telling you to look on the other server.

12

IIRC: Clicked a link in a post, Ivory struggled to load it, and booted me to the Web browser, where the page opened. It was a Mastodon server maybe, maybe a weird variant.

13

A case I find it hard is where I was taken to someone's Mastodon post from a website or chat. I use a Mastodon server with a small community. So every time I need to do something on the post I saw, I need to do a bit of copy pasting. What worked for me is copying the URL to the post and pasting it in my Mastodon instance's search box.

14

Turns out they were blocked, or I was blocked. Either way, doesn't matter.

15

Sometimes replies don't appear from other servers, but I'm aware of the reason

16

Happens way less often now that the fetch-all replies and quote toots are in place. Before people would link to a post and it would be on some random server and I'd have to go through a song & dance to interact with it.

17

I am pretty sure the issue was that is was bridged from Bluesky and while the replied/commented on my post, I could find no way to reply to them nor could I find their reply on their Bluesky timeline. So something wasn't being shared correctly is my guess.

18

1. Quote boost force me to click through to the original server and there too much hoop jumping to reply and like.

2. There are some posts that just don't show up directly even if I am following the account and I am forced to click through, see 1 above.

19

Yes, though it has improved. Sometimes not all replies to a post load, still. Often I don't see the correct amount of favourites/boosts for a post. This makes Mastodon seem much emptier than it is, which I imagine discourages new users.

Sometimes when I want to favourite a post on another server, I have to type in my own instance. Not a huge hassle, of course, but it would be nice if that could one day be a bit more streamlined, too.

20

It happens from time to time, especially that things load slowly - more responses showing up after I already started scrolling the page.

21

Well it's hard to tell when I've had trouble interacting with someone whose posts I couldn't see, by definition !

Something that does annoy me is that quite often when I open the link to a post into a new window, I can read it but not interact with it (because it turns out it's on a different instance and it asks me to log into that instance instead of recognizing that I'm on Mastodon). So I have to put it into the search engine and THEN interact with it. Maybe it's because I'm in advanced interface mode, with the three columns ? No idea. But very confusing. Hasn't happened in a while though... mostly because I've stopped trying to open posts in a different window entirely.

22

Not since fetching of replies from remote servers has been introduced, I don't think.

23

The most common thing I experience is not being able to see images or watch videos in posts in my Home timeline that come from people on other servers. It seems like the posts appear right away but my server (mastodon.online) takes a lot longer to load/deliver the media, so the images appear blank and videos either don’t play or take a long time to load.

24

Copy pasting links from other servers to search on my server is a daily Mastodon experience. Frustrating but I don’t know how it could be solved :(

25

I click on a link and instead of bringing it up in the UI, it takes me to the original page (on another server)

And, while the new "Fetch all replies" functionality is a big improvement, there are still sometimes replies that don't get fetched

26

Only with bluesky bridged posts

27

Recently there has been quite a lot of further posts appearing and clicking and having them appear, at which point I have to look back through the thread again. This isn’t great.

28

Not a.big deal for me

29

Primarily having to search by URL to load a post.

30

The feed of posts from people followed from an account on actu.blois.fr works, but replies to those posts (or the stats numbers) aren’t always appearing or complete. If I view the same post from an account on another server, they’re there.

31

kind of, but mostly when attempting to interact with mirrored content from X.com or other non-federated platforms. When viewing lemmy posts I can't see comments (Ivory app) and the same is true with Pixelfed. Also, Pixelfed stories don't appear on mastodon but that may be intentional.

32

Not since Fetch All Replies was released. Great feature.

33

Yes, two things:

- Whenever a mutual from another instance copies-pastes a link to one of their private posts in a new post, I usually can't open it (although we're mutuals and I know I did read the original post when it was first published, for instance), I get an error message.

- My main account is on [server name redacted], but I have a secondary account on @mastodon.social (different username, different timeline, etc.). If I click on a post by someone who is on mastodon.social to open it, I will automatically interact with them with my mastodon.social account, and not with my main [server name redacted] account, which can lead to errors and misunderstandings.

These are problems I don't have when using a smartphone app (Ice Cubes currently), only on the website interface.

34

Sometimes I click on a toot which is reply and the toot it's replying to isn't there, but if I do "Open in browser" then I can see it.  I've also had media not show up unless I did "Open in browser"

35

I've been on the network since about 2017, so I've run into most of the difficulties federation sometimes presents, from inaccessible accounts to missing replies. They honestly don't bother me that much, but in part that's because I have a fairly detailed understanding of how instances interact with one another, so my expectations are different from those of a person who comes here expecting a 1:1 replacement for Twitter or Bluesky. There may be genuine problems that need addressing, but I think many of the complaints that arise around this topic are the result of people expecting or, less reparably, wanting something that ActivityPub and the fediverse were not designed to deliver.

36

I think the clunkiest bit so far is if somebody shares a post to an obscure server and then on the web I cannot easily "login" to this - I have to know my instance. If instead people would always remember the whole username the same way they remember their email address and this could be entered, this would be cool

37

Often wondered why I couldn’t see replies that clearly existed

38

We self-host our own small instance for our team and the experience of having an account on there versus being on mastodon.social is vastly different, regarding visibility of replies. It’s much harder to find interesting people to follow when being on a small instance. I’m sure there are sound technical reasons, but this seems extremely unintuitive, that you wouldn’t be able to see all replies to a post, regardless of your own location in the network.

Response

1

Offer` a browser addon in the spirit of FediAct.

2

some kind of note/icon with info on conversations where some parts may be expected to be missing due to my server not being able to show all parts (maybe due to blocking).

3

A way to answer to a post from another server.

4

Search, finding profiles, etc. that span servers is slow at times.

5

maybe educate people about how the web works, how distributed systems work, etc. instead of trying to dumb down the experience.

6

It'd be great if I could see that I can't interact with an account because my server blocked theirs. I can see their profile publicly, but the search starting from my server won't find anything.

7

Maybe more handholding to explain and instruct whenever a server barrier exists?

8

Fewer clicks to see other feeds on other servers, etc.

9

Indicate when there are most likely still posts or replies missing so I know I should wait a moment for them to load.

10

Not for me personally, but I've seen people being confused by the community instances allowing custom emojis in display names, including things that look like Twitter and Facebook verification seals

11

Technical terms like server or instance are opaque to most people. I'd explore more human-centred terms, such as community, neighbourhood ...

12

1) When showing profiles / etc. from another server that your server hasn't currently got cached, instead of displaying that cop-out thing about you needing to follow a link to go there and see for yourself on that other server, it should really just offer to fetch the missing stuff right then and there - maybe in a paginated way (so you have to keep pressing the button to fetch more), but at least it should try to get 5-10 to give you a taste, then keep asking if you want to grab more

2) Several years ago, I did have a bunch of thoughts on how all those cross-server interactions could be smoother, but having not really have had to do it for years now, I don't care that much anymore / can't remember now.

One idea though is that we could:

a) Just ask the user for their handle - and if they only provide a username, the UI will then start searching commonly known servers that that server already knows about. And if no match is found, only then do es the user really have to type out their full ID manually

b) Once you have the handle, Mastodon servers should just be able to send "interaction" intent requests back to your home server for you, which will redirect (maybe in a new tab) to said server, with a popup asking you to confirm the interaction, so you can now continue interacting further with that foreign server's post but now on your home server. And all of this bypasses all that annoying dance around not being able to do cross-site embedding stuff due to web security policies

13

I mean staying logged in across servers, on the Web, but that sounds hard or impossible.

Also search seems to find less things from other servers? Which is a bummer.

14

In an ideal world, navigating between instances should be seamless. But I know it is not that easy. To be honest, I don't know.

I'll say this, using browser extensions like 'Homecoming for Mastodon' didn't really take away that pain.

15

No, i guess it's fine

16

I think it kinda needs to blend into the background for most people. The server you're on is just another bit of identifying information for me, we're all operating in the big, federated universe.

17

I don't get why it takes me to different servers? If it could understand what server I am on and show me it through that (without having to go through entering my server name etc) automatically it would be so much easier.

18

Yes. It would be great for some help/alt text explaining "You're unable to view this person's posts because they auto delete" or "You're unable to view this person's posts because your instance doesn't know about this instance" or "You're unable to view this person's posts because it's a bridgey thing" Anything to fill the void of why when I go to someone Mastodon profile page on their server that shows 2,000 followers & I click I see 0 followers or see only the 3 out of that 2,000 that happen to follow me.

19

There was the example of when LibreOffice quit X a couple of months ago, where users looking at their Mastodon page couldn't find where to sign up. Apparently reading that they could still join another server was too hard,  so that should probably be simplified for those who refuse to read.

See this issue on it: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/21556

20

It would be nice if it were easier to browse the public local timelines of other servers. I have one app which adds this functionality, and have found accounts of interest on a few servers' timelines. (The local timeline on my home server, mastodon.social, is too much of a firehose to be useful in this way.)

21

I don’t know what you need to do, but incomplete threads are the most annoying. It turns out some odd server doesn’t federate? With mine so I see only people replying to some account but not the posts by that account. Sometimes it’s a troll or a problematic instance but it often happens to smaller instances too

22

A lot of the issues need to addressed by browsers. Maybe Mastodon could create its own browser plugin that could help handle some of the awkward user experience. Also, I still see people getting confused about needing to create a new account on each server, the messaging needs to be improved/simplified.

23

When I click a link in my server’s web interface that links to a post on another server, it should open in my server’s web interface instead of the other server’s web interface. Pretty much all the apps (Ivory, Ice Cubes, etc) already handle this properly.

24

I want to view other servers’ timelines! that would be sooo helpful for discoverability from a tiny server

25

ActivityPub becoming some standard browser feature or something?

Definitely fetching anything that can be fetched is nice, and never linking to outside servers except for the “see original post” features.

26

I tend to go back to my server and look people up, rather than using their server and having to tell it what my server is and having it redirect me. Maybe that’s improved these days, but it was pretty useless back when I last tried it.

27

Perhaps an estimated time for the external server and internal server to communicate and follow each other.

28

The way the handle dialogue works on a profile has improved but still has unnecessary friction.

29

Yes, and the biggest win would be abstracting away the "server" layer from everyday interactions. Right now, remote follows and replies expose too much federation plumbing to the user. Copying a profile URL and pasting it into your instance's search bar to follow someone is a dealbreaker for most people coming from centralized platforms.

A few things that would help:

A universal "follow" or "interact" button that handles cross-server redirects seamlessly, no copy-paste required.

Better thread federation so replies from unfamiliar servers actually show up. Incomplete conversations are one of the most disorienting parts of the experience.

Opt-in full-text search across the fediverse. Discovery feels siloed without it.

Reframing server choice during onboarding as low-stakes ("pick a neighborhood, you can still talk to everyone") instead of something that feels permanent and confusing.

The less users have to think about which server someone is on, the better. Federation should be infrastructure, not a user experience hurdle.

30

Backfill profiles when loading them

31

Apart from the two issues I mentioned in my last answer, I'd love to have greater clarity or transparence sometimes. Maybe a short message saying "3 answers to this post are hidden from you because their instances are blocked by your instance", something like that.

32

I'm not sure if bridged accounts see my replies so I just don't bother interacting with them, even if I follow them.

33

It would be better if it was more seamless - if you could follow someone on any server from any server, and also I don't think you should ever have to go to someone's home server, you should be able to do everything from your own server

34

I think many people would find some form of visualization helpful. A kind of graph, automatically generated by each server, showing known instances distinguished by their federation status (federated, moderated, blocked), with the user's home instance at the center. Even if they don't drill down into the details presented, being able to see a graphical representation of the fediverse as a network of connections will help people cognize the sort of higher-level relationships that condition their experience of that network.

35

like how/what is the fastest way to get a specific directly shared post (I'm on that other posts server) show up in my instance's account view?

36

Probably but not sure how to describe other than to say show everything for posts I am trying to interact with

37

it would be a great improvement if i could easily check whether my server has limits/rules for the other servers, without trawling through the entire list posted elsewhere by admins of my server

38

It seems like being able to request all replies from the server of the toot’s origin would be handy, or ideally the software would do that under the hood automatically. But also very possible I’m not getting the full picture of the complexity here.

Response

1

it's a confusing and strange experience when I stumple over an unknown profile, look it up in Tusky and I don't see nearly or no posts of this person, but when I open it up in the webbrowser (without being logged in) I can see more posts of this person.

2

It'd be beneficial for individual profiles to allow "retweet with quote" style responses on their posts. I know some of the reasons Mastodon doesn't support it, but it might raise engagement with profiles like news sources, etc.

3

It would be nice if the actual current number of replies, boosts and stars would be shown directly in my timeline without opening the post and reloading the page because I want to see from my timeline where discussions are happening and I can’t to that when I’m on a relatively small instance and almost every post is shown as having almost no interactions when first seeing it.

4

“Quiet public” always stops me. I eventually get it but I have to take time to work out what it means, every time.

5

The way conversations are shown as a tree of replies is not easy to read, but that may vary per client

6

A better interface for private messages, and with actual privacy better guaranteed.

7

Bluesky has the interesting feature of notifications when someone interacts with a post that I reposted (and I guess that was shown to them because of my repost).

I'm not sure if that is still a good idea when thought through or how complicated implementation would be.

I just wanted to leave that as an idea to show the impact of reposts a bit more.

8

Please have the timelines collapse self-replies into threads automatically, the Meta Threads app does this really well, each threaded post there also automatically displays a counter so people are not forced to add a "3/5" manually.

In the single post view, it's also sometimes unclear, which replies are responding to which post, this is also something I think Threads does well, with their Reddit-inspired tree-like threading.

9

Separate Private mentions from the feed would be great.

10

My experience (and I am aware it is not everyone's) is that the Fediverse is generally much more courteous than other social media. People can disagree without descending into shouting matches or abuse.

I like that.

11

1) I'd be nice to be able to mark certain threads / polls as things you're interested in following the results of, and have these then show up in your notifications. Otherwise, right now, if I see a thread or poll I'm interested in following up on, right now, unless I explicitly remember to go back and check, I never do, as I have long forgotten about them.

2) It would be good be able to more easily mute certain threads from generating notifications

12

As previously mentioned, I'd like the option to Follow a person in the context menu of their reply. I currently have options for: Mention, Mute, Block, Filter, Report, but not Follow.

13

A threaded display might be nice.

14

It would be great to have more "widgets" to display feeds, streams, posts, convos, on our blogs. Anything that would self update within a sidebar or something.

15

Just that if the favourite and boost counts could be federated better, it would help a lot with making the Fediverse seem more alive, I think! Love your work on this!

16

I would very much like it if, as well as (or instead of) followers-only, there was a way of making things visible only to a list of people you follow, or mutuals, or LiveJournal/Flickr-style friend lists. Unless you lock your account down, "followers" can include anyone, which makes the default expectation of privacy that posts are public. Friends-only posts would encourage more personal conversations that one might not want seen by potentially unsympathetic people.

I understand that doing this in a federated fashion is tricky, though have also heard that there are efforts to add end-to-end encryption to ActivityPub applications for DMs, and this could hopefully be used for such privacy options.

17

Labelling accounts of trolls etc. and/or adding community notes. I have personally not experienced this as my account is small enough but I’ve seen several accounts leave because of reply guys, mastodon’s hoa, trolls and/or harassment. It sucks that federation makes this invisible and therefore more difficult for other people in the community to catch it and report it.

18

As said earlier, I use the advanced interface when using Mastodon in my web browser (which is most of the time, I use Tusky much less than the browser version). I like it for everyday browsing, but find very grating that I can't just double click a post/thread in order to read it in full screen. Instead am limited to reading it in its tiny column. For just browsing my timeline, keeping an eye on notifications while catching up with what others have been saying, and more, the advanced interface is efficient and great. But whenever I'm reading someone's long post/thread, or combing through replies, not being able to be more comfortable is really a problem, and makes me want to get it over with as fast as possible, rather than read the whole conversation or take part in it. This is particularly an issue I have because of my eyes ; the older I get the more I want to make fonts bigger when I'm trying to focus on long reads ; but the advanced interface is absolutely not playing nice with Firefox' zoom (CTRL+mouse wheel) function, which visually gets tiring for long reads.

19

Sometimes it can be uncomfortable to have a super popular account boost my posts, especially with older posts that I still want to keep and not delete, but don’t necessarily want them to become a public conversation again on someone else’s terms. I wish it was possible to change the boost-ability of a post after the fact like we can with quotability. Reply controls would also help with this as long as we can limit replies after the fact.

20

The ongoing chat, we call ourselves [name redacted] and this gentleman chats with us the entire day. It feels it’s a support system for people. It’s so wholesome and also not used the way Mastodon is set up for. We’ve been chatting for years and even have had video calls. We’re in [3 countries, locations redacted]. We’ve explored other alternatives but someone never find a place. It should be like a close friends timeline.

21

When there is a post with a lot of replies or a thread with replies to different posts, it’s very hard to follow and understand what is a reply to what in the view. It just becomes a long list of posts and you have to click on individual posts to understand what they were replying to. I wish there was some indentation and visual layout to make this clear (while not super complex like Reddit or other). Basically the whole thread/replies view could be rethought.

22

Local-only posts are great, and especially with Mastodon's new-found focus on communities really really should be accepted into the mainline release

23

The interactions have intrinsic value, I want them to be fully searchable and first-class ctitizens in archives. I also would like solutions for when moving instances, a searchable easy-to-reach archive is the main reason why I don't migrate.

24

No, just better thread display and thread-based killfiles please. (Like Usenet trn. I’m old.)

25

I would love to see the numbers of replies, favorites, boosts, and bookmarks a post has.

26

The way mastodon displays threaded posts is difficult to parse, leading to misunderstandings about conversational context. Phanpy improves on your threading model but is still not 100% on this.

27

It would be great to be able to make a thread of posts directly from the web interface, to posts multiple messages at once.

28

There's room for more features, similar to CWs, that function as a courtesy provided by the poster to other users, rather than a means of controlling one's own experience — an example I've argued for in the past is hushtags, a variation on hashtag functionality that would hide a post from Home timelines unless the potential recipient is following the corresponding hashtag. Likewise, if Mastodon is serious about providing value to communities and interest groups, something like local-only posting would be a strong step in the right direction. Finally, bridging to other protocols and services complicates interactions in ways that I think most Mastodon users are ill-equipped to assess, precisely because the features and infrastructure that differentiate the fediverse are not always rendered legibly to them.

29

I'm still sad that tumblr style quotes, where the reply is below the quote, didn't win out in the end. I was really exited for a different / well thought out approach from Mastodon, but then it was just implemented like everywhere else, and it feels like it could have been more…

30

End to end Encrypted Messaging should be a VERY high STRATEGIC priority for Mastodon (even before full fediverse support). It can and should be a key differentiator for attracting more users to Mastodon and hence the fediverse. Being a good fediverse citizen is not as important as making this happen ASAP because end users want and need it and dragging this out only gives centralized social media more time to prevent a move to open social media and maybe prevent it from happening ever.

31

It’s great! Possibly the last public space on the internet with kind and respectful conversations.

Response

Count

Percentage

I've explored these settings in detail

55

78.6%

I knew some of these existed but haven't looked into them

12

17.1%

I wasn't aware of these settings

3

4.3%

Response

Count

Percentage

Opted in or out of appearing in account suggestions

32

47.1%

Opted in or out of having my posts indexed in Mastodon search

31

45.6%

Opted out of search engine indexing of my profile

27

39.7%

Set a default visibility for my posts (e.g. Followers only)

22

32.4%

Required approval before someone can follow me

17

25%

Hidden my follower and following lists from others

17

25%

None of the above

12

17.7%

Something else^[80]

2

2.9%

Response

1

Turn off display of Quite public posts for not logged in visitors to my profile.

2

'- Hide unlisted posts from my profile.  They're not intended to be public!

- Make the bulk of my profile private (everything other than my name and avatar), visible only to followers, and/or local-only, visible only to people on my instance

3

I wanted to err on the side of caution when I post things. I don't want this to impact my professional profile too much if it comes up in search.

4

I’d be happy to be as discoverable as possible by default … it would be a real bummer to realize later on that I should’ve toggled on a few settings. Of course loads of users will disagree with that statement, so I'm sure you have sensible defaults.

5

A default reply privacy? Being able to be included in collections but on a per collection basis? Just some ideas, not things I strongly need.

6

Less discoverable is still findable. Posting on Mastodon is great, I don’t post things I wouldn’t say publicly. But that’s a privilege that I could lose.

7

Being part of collections or recommended accounts due to type of content posted - i.e. privacy.

8

Reject the extraction of posts or profile information from scrapers associated with AI training.

9

AI scraping

10

Way to limit some posts to home instance "Live Feeds" timeline (when logged in), but not generally showing up outside of that server (except to followers / when boosted)

11

I’d like to be able to opt in to my public posts being searched by real people using Mastodon (or other legitimate Fediverse clients) while opting out of scrapers who abuse Fediverse infrastructure to provide information (or A.I. training) outside of the Fediverse.

12

I would like the option of having "friends-only" posts, visible only to people I have added to a list (or followed). This would open Mastodon up to more personal connection, facilitating for people to engage in the kinds of conversations they might not want to be visible to strangers. (For example, conflicts at work, relationship/social drama, health issues or similar.)

Note, that "Visible to followers" is not a viable alternative unless you lock down your account to make it useless for talking to people who aren't in your group.

13

It'd be easier if I had a separate field to add hashtags. I don't always remember to put them at the end of a post (which is preferrable in terms of accessibility as well as them looking better in the UI if you don't put them in the middle of a post), so having a way to add tags after I've typed/quoted/linked everything I wanted in my post, in a separate field, would be ideal. Way too often I use all the characters in my posts and then delete part of the text to make room for tags, too.

14

I wish it was easier to find to change and had more explanation about each.

15

Maybe not technically feasible, but the ability to opt out of bridges.

16

A bit off, but: I'd like to be able to make posts silently (no-one sees them on their timeline) to then pin them.

17

Official "No Bot" and "No AI" settings

18

I used to be on a small instance that ran the Mastodon glitch-fork, and I really miss the local-only posting.

Especially on a smaller instance that creates the possibility for some interesting community get togethers. We had our little pizza parties, in-jokes, and generally a space that still felt open (the instance had a few hundred users) but kind of a time-out from the whole fediverse for a bit.

I still spend a lot of time on the local timeline on my new instance, but that magic of stuff just sometimes happening only there, that campfire feeling, that's missing.

19

I’d love for my posts to be available in a global feed/stream available to all Mastodon servers. Likewise, I’d love to add that service/resource to my single-user instance so I can discover more people.

20

Opt in to be a suggested account for when someone follows another account I interact with

21

I think the discoverability options are great, very clearly explained and easy to use. I just don't like that these pretty much replace other safety features, such as being able to disable replies. Security by obscurity, you could say.

22

I wish it was possible to toggle the details. If I post something new, I want it to have a different setting than when I'm responding to something.

23

I don't care how discoverable I am but ideally would love to access straightforward-enough ways to be mobilizing together more and more and better and better for our planet, people, etc... if only there were smart ways to collectively demonstrate (and/or at least experiment on) what we can still do as a network facing same and similar challenges !

24

Would like to have encrypted messaging between users

Response

Count

Percentage

Daily or more

20

28.6%

A few times a week

23

32.9%

A few times a month

16

22.9%

Rarely / never (I mostly read or interact with other people's posts)

11

15.7%

Response

Count

Percentage

As myself

46

78%

Both as myself and on behalf of an organisation or brand

12

20.3%

On behalf of an organisation or brand

1

1.7%

Response

Count

Percentage

To share something I find interesting or useful

45

76.3%

To participate in a community or conversation

36

61%

To connect with people who share my interests

32

54.2%

To express myself creatively

18

30.5%

To document my life or work

18

30.5%

To support or amplify others

17

28.8%

To build an audience or following

8

13.6%

Something else^[81]

3

5.1%

Response

Count

Percentage

5 (Very satisfied)

21

35.6%

4

28

47.5%

3

9

15.3%

2

0

0%

1 (Very dissatisfied)

1

1.7%

Response

1

I honestly love the way interactions work and the options for controlling audience on a per message basis.  

2

I feel you sometimes get lost in the noise with the way boosts work. It amplifies the bigger voices and I get the feeling I'm missing a lot of people with interesting things to say who are not boosted as much.

3

Anything beyond the current setup would overly complicated and heavy. Though I will say that trying to reply to someone who engaged with my bridged post on Bluesky feels impossible. No good way yet.

4

If I look at my own posts, I don't know if someone has reacted or responded unless I click on the post or I look at my notifications.

5

Would be cool if people had the option to scope their replies' visibility to include my followers in followers-only replies.

6

'- Lack of emoji reactions

- No ability to limit who can reply

- No ability to detach posts I don't want associated with my thread (blocking helps some but leaves the posts visible on federated versions)

The first two are especially frustrating because several other fediverse platforms have this functionality -- GoToSocial, Misskey and its forks, etc.

7

Sometimes it gets quiet and lonely when people don't respond. Not so much a problem with my current following, but I can see this being a struggle.

8

Please,  no likes, hearts, etc!

9

The UI can be a bit confusing when multiple people reply to a single comment

10

Stars and replies and boosts and quotes, it’s quite good already! They work and not sure what else there could be.

11

Like, boost or reply is enough. I’m not looking to get large number, which is also not realistic for a small instance. I love knowing someone is reading me and find their replies witty. I don’t need more validation than that.

12

Same answer as my previous survey: limitations in servers being able to see each other, search not being universal, replies not all showing up.

13

I still think quote toots were a mistake. Tbf, I haven't really seen them misused for piling on, but I'm still not in favour.

14

I suspect that creative people in the community, if they made their ideas aware, could influence me to understand there are other new things that could improve the experience. So I am happy, but I bet I could be happier! :-)

15

It is what I expect from social media

16

Most likely f the interactions and replies I receive are normal, friendly, and fun. A small minority of replies come from a bunch of people who are acerbic and rude. Every time I post, I’m doing a complex bit of math in my head to determine what thing is most likely to provoke a hostile response from, say, Linux evangelists or some other kind of know-it-all who wants me to upend my entire life to behave the way they’d prefer. A lot of times, I just don’t post. When I do, I often include a disclaimer about specific types of unwanted behavior that I won’t tolerate.

Mastodon has a huge problem here.

17

I mean it's fine ?

18

i'd like emoji reacts

19

I sometimes miss replies from others

20

Being able to respond with an emoji like Discord does would be nice, but it's not essential

21

I'm still not entirely convinced that quote posts add as much value for communities as they do for clout-chasers and would-be influencers.

22

It's rarely an issue for me personally (I don't post enough for that), but I'd really like better reply controls, who can reply, removing replies, etc.

23

As I alluded in one of the previous replies, I don't like the lack of reply controls. And emoji reactions would also be neat!

Response

Count

Percentage

5 (Very satisfied)

22

37.3%

4

20

34%

3

12

20.3%

2

4

6.8%

1 (Very dissatisfied)

1

1.7%

Response

1

I'm not really tracking engagement levels, if I were trying to market things via Mastodon that'd be different, but I really don't feel like that's something Mastodon users would readily engage with.

2

It's really hard to understand what's happening to my posts when they bridge to Bluesky.

3

It's nice to know how many people interacted with my post, I dont need detailed information

4

While I appreciate that there isn't any additional tracking that people haven't opted in to, from an activism perspective it would be useful to know how many people have seen a post -- and I've heard journalists say similar things.  Of course it would need to be an opt-in approach to avoid privacy issues, so it's not straightforward (and I don't know any examples of other platforms that have done this), so I'm not sure how to prioritize this, but I really do feel the lack as compared to other platforms.

Also losing all poll responses WITHOUT ANY WARNING if any of the options are edited -- even to fix a typo -- is one incredibly frustrating place where critical engagement information is lost.  https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/33606

5

I really don’t care about things like follower counts, “clout”, how many people a post reaches, and so on. I view all those potential features as toxic to community.

6

The interaction counters, especially the favorites one, seem wildly unreliable at times

7

Honestly, I don't understand the question

8

I have notifications which is fine for my use, and can check individually each post if I need. I can see how some posters might want analytics, and I think it would be good to have if done in the spirit of a non-profit social network. For instance, it shouldn’t feel like it’s gamifying getting more engagement or something, numbers are not as important as the quality of it.

9

I don’t really look at it. I’m just 1 human, I’m not trying to make my Mastodon account nothing beyond random thoughts.

10

I don't know what this means. Is it about stats about posts? I don't look at those at all.

11

* I'd like the option to turn on the numbers in more places. While it doesn't have to be the default, I would still like to see them in more places where I can't turn them on

* Also, in particular when sharing videos / links, there are times when I would like to have a bit more insight into if people were not clicking as they were not interested, or whether they had things configured to not show the links at all (such that it would be a pain to try and view it), or whether they just scrolled right past...

12

Again, I am happy with things, but I bet there are ideas out there for how this could all be more rewarding.

13

I prefer less info if it means increased privacy for everyone

14

I feel like my answer would be different if FediTips wasn’t around. Y’all’s information discoverability leaves something to be desired.

15

I really don't care about getting information about "engagement". I'm sure it's useful for people who try to monetize exposure however.

16

Apart from knowing that my posts aren't disappearing into the void, I don't have much need for engagement information, and think that "engagement" tends toward a corporate-influenced understanding of the value of social media. On the whole, I find I'm happier when I don't pay too much attention to the analytics-type data surfaced by the service.

17

There’s engagement information currently available to me as a poster?

18

I'd love more of a history maybe. A graph over the years?

19

I don't actually want to see engagement numbers on posts, because I don't think people should be defined by how many likes/boosts something gets, whenever I have the option I turn all the metrics off.

20

It is hard to have an overview of which posts really struck a nerve. I recently started using Fedisuite and like the visualisations of post success and follower changes.

21

I’m unsure how accurate it is across the fediverse, based on how inaccurate it is for public engagement metrics for other people’s posts.

22

Don't need details stats

23

I'd like a direct way to know when someone boosts something they saw from my boosts

I'd appreciate anonymized stats on link clicks or image views on my posts

Response

Weighted Score (0-4)

Never

Rarely

Sometimes

Often

Always

Links

2.9

0%

1.69%

13.6%

81.4%

3.4%

Images or Photos

2.6

0%

5.1%

27.1%

67.8%

0

Hashtags

2.6

3.4%

10.2%

20.3%

52.5%

13.6%

Content Warnings

1.6

12.1%

32.8%

41.4%

13.8%

0%

Polls

1

28.1%

52.6%

15.8%

3.5%

0%

Video

0.8

30.5%

59.3%

6.8%

3.4%

0%

Audio

0.4

69%

24.1%

6.9%

0%

0%

Response

Count

Percentage

5 (Very satisfied)

18

30.5%

4

27

45.8%

3

11

18.6%

2

2

3.4%

1 (Very dissatisfied)

1

1.7%

Response

1

I'd love if my instance allowed longer posts.  Also clearer formatting options, links on words (without blowling the letter count!)

2

For a micro-blogging platform it seems pretty well equipped. I don't know what I would need right now that is possibly missing.

3

 If I post a link to content outside of Mastodon, it will include a preview of the content. But if I want to post about someone else's post, it includes a link to their post, not a preview. It would be nice to include a preview to provide visual context to the post.

4

The lack of even basic formatting is ridiculous -- and inexcusable since it's been available in forks like Glitch for years.  Ditto the way Mastodon intentionally makes it difficult for admins to change the default post length.  

The lack of reply controls is a huge problem as well.

5

More CommonMark support would be nice. GitHub flavored would be even better.

6

The character limit to 500 chars is slightly annoying … it’s not short enough to create a creativity-inducing constraint and make all posts easily scannable, but it’s also not long enough to post a more complicated thought process or an entire blog post (like e.g. LinkedIn allows). It sits somewhere in an awkward middle.

7

It would be nice to set a content warning for just the attachments (e.g., photos, video, audio) while leaving the text readable, I don't think that's currently possible; the UI for content warnings is not ideal, it makes the fact some content is hidden more prominent than the surrounding posts

8

More images would definitely be good. Maybe turn it into a carousel or something if there is more than 4?

More space to write, the composer is tiny!

500 characters always feel short. Maybe not counting links or usernames for as many characters would be good.

9

usually a 500 - 1000 character limit is sufficient for my posts. But sometimes I'd wish there would be an option to mark a post as "long" with no or a very high character limit.

10

I guess my brain still keeps the old twitter format, so what I have through Ivory is enough. It’s nice my server allows for longer posts, but I seldom go larger that was used to be a tweet.

11

Well... very satisfied when our instance admin bumped our limit from 500 to 1000, then very soon after, up to 2000.  (That said, maybe a warning when going past 1500 or so would be good to hint that maybe your post is getting a bit long and would be better (auto) split into a thread OR put behind a content warning to not become a giant wall on the timeline

12

I think it would be nice to be able to post a still image and a video, together, in the same post. It would be nice if the UI could handle this.

13

500 characters and no markdown is pretty shoddy at this point. Not being able to include a poll in a post with images or other media is a perpetual problem for artists.

14

I don't fully understand what I can and cannot upload when it comes to audio/video. The few times I've tried, it didn't work (and one time the video didn't have any sound) so I've given up on it and just link a Youtube video if there is one. The error message was not giving me enough information to work with : was it the format ? Was it the size ? Was the problem on my end (internet speed) or Mastodon's (server shenanigans) ? Should I try again later or do I need to make changes ?

The limitations in terms of character count, I'm used to them even though I do admit some other instances appear to have found a better balance than mine. I'd love it if hashtags didn't count in the total, though. But again, I've already made a suggestion about that.

I also don't understand why it's so hard to have an image in a post where I'm quoting another post. In 2026 it seems like an outdated limitation.

15

Very little formatting

16

I'm not sure whether this is the right place to bring this up but I'd really like to be able to add formatting to posts - bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, maybe bullet points, code blocks

17

I want to be able to add a photo and a poll to the same post! Otherwise I am happy.

18

Sometimes the default post character limit is an issue

19

Local-only posting would be a benefit for building community around home instances. More courtesy features — i.e. options that let me reduce the noisiness of my own posts in other people's timelines — would be appreciated. I also think it would be beneficial in some cases to have the effects of the different visibility options available as a la carte option, rather than bundles together in pull-down menu headings, e.g. making a post searchable but not including it in public timelines by default.

20

I wish it was possible to see and control how/whether link previews will appear to the people who see my posts before posting them. I wish we were allowed to post an image along with a poll or in a quote post. I wish it was possible to post videos or screen recordings from modern devices without having to compress or resize them manually first to avoid processing errors from Mastodon.

21

I'd love ① italics/bold and ② the ability to have multiple videos, or a video and images

22

1. Surveys should have an analog setting or at least a setting for 48 hours.

2. Markdown should be universally supported.

3. A. The scheduled post API should be surfaced so it doesn't require a special client.

B. Support for scheduling a reply to a scheduled post should be supported - allowing using reply chains for ongoing posts.

4. Quote boosts are currently crap.

5. Quote and post should not be in the same option but separate allowing for fewer clicks.

23

I'm used to writing markdown, so I'd love more options to style my posts. Other than that, the 4 picture limit is annoying at times, especially since other fedi software supports more, which then don't get displayed…

I sometimes wish I could set a time limit per post, my posts are set to auto-delete after a while (with some exceptions), but some posts don't even need to exist that long.

24

It fits my needs I guess. I sometimes struggle to find the best hashtags.

25

As an admin, I would like to have a setting to extend characters limit for the whole server via the web admin UI

26

I miss the option to compose partial or complete threads and post in one go

I absolutely love the post editing feature!

27

Mostly satisfied, but again, lack of reply controls is a big issue -- less so on a personal level, but I know some marginalized group would greatly benefit from these.

28

i would like a higher default character limit

Response

Count

Percentage

5 (Very satisfied)

20

33.9%

4

23

39%

3

12

20.3%

2

4

6.8%

1 (Very dissatisfied)

0

0%

Response

1

Very easy, in general.  The physical constraints on my phone screen are annoying, but that's not a problem unique to mastodon.

2

I use Ice Cubes and the web interface. I find both very easy and intuitive.

3

The privacy option "only people listed" is confusing, change it to private message or direct message

4

I deliberately set the visibility on the majority of my posts. The recent change where this was combined into a modal with the quotability setting (which I almost never want to change) has made this action which I do dozens of times a day tremendously more involved. Instead of two clicks close by it's now four clicks, moving the mouse way more, and needs more attention to select the right option.

5

More screen space!  phanpy -- or for that matter Bluesky -- provide much more area, and even for short posts it's very useful.

6

I'd like to be able to precompose and post entire threads. Ideally, in a way that makes them all succeed or all fail -- given how unreliable Mastodon instances can get at times, you can end up stuck with 3 out of 7 messages posted

7

I find the small post composing field on the right hand side panel a bit restrictive. Usually I write long sentences, but the small text field makes me feel uneasy. I feel like I'm typing in a chat field, where it expects me to type only small thoughts.

8

I don't like the new popup when I want to change the audience. Before that, it was just a drop-down menu. Not it includes the quote feature. For my part, I configured it as "no" and don't intedn to change. So why not 2 settings instead of one?

9

It’s probably too small, not very welcoming or pleasant to write with.

When replying, you only have a small portion of what you are replying to, and no context of the thread and other replies to what you are replying to.

When drafting a post and then replying to another that you suddenly come across, you have to lose what you were writing before.

10

I post from Ivory and the experience meets my expectations.

11

I mostly use third-party clients, but last time I composed a toot on the web I found the compose UI was tiny and over in the sidebar, which was awkward while working on a toot because that's what I was focused on, but it was small and off to the side.

12

1) Be able to view the complete thing you're replying to, instead of being limited to a summary of the start

2) Ensuring the controls at the bottom of the compose box are always accessible even when long posts can be made

3) Be able to drag the thing around anywhere in the window, to put it alongside something you're referencing

4) Emoji Picker - Split the custom per-instance ones into a separate category alongside the other ones, so that if your instance defines a lot, it won't be hard to navigate around them

5) When it looks like you're writing a long thread OR simply when you start exceeding the post limits, it would be better if there was an auto-tool available for helping you segment that post out into a thread for you (instead of having to stash all the stuff you wrote into a separate notepad app, then copy and paste chunks back across, one post at a time)

13

I wish there was a buffer in the Mastodon apps so that, when it inevitable crashes (e.g. the iOS or Android app fail and exit), the content was there in a backup buffer when I restarted the app. Same with the web UI. I hate retyping a post that, as I was finalizing it, got lost by an app crash or mis-click in the UI.

14

Can be hard to add image alt text on mobile

15

Shrinking the composer area to make space for more buttons rather than giving a bigger composer space when it’s activated is kind of a problem at this point.

16

The pop-up to set the visibility option (which I've discussed in a previous survey this week) is an annoyance. I don't understand why I need a pop-up where some icons with a nice tooltip could do the job more efficiently.

17

Composing threads could maybe be made easier.

18

WE WANT MARKDOWN

19

If I could see the previous post when I'm writing a thread

20

Sometimes hard to know if a hashtag will be parsed correctly if for example it includes or is directly followed by punctuation without a space

21

I'm a long-time user, so I'm accustomed to the experience, but the current visibility options are not very intuitive, and I suspect that people who aren't familiar with previous incarnations have a difficult time understanding exactly what each setting entails.

22

Fix bug #35705 where the hashtag suggestions get stuck on the screen and can’t be dismissed without picking one (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/35705) and reduce the number of nested boxes with individual “X” buttons when working with quote posts or editing a post.

23

On the Web, the composer feels cramped, in the small sidebar on the left. I think I can't reorder images? Which is frustrating. Being able to compose threads (multiple posts at once) would be nice (but maybe it's there now and I haven't used the Web composer recently enough to notice)

24

Universal support of Markdown

25

I'm using ivory - that works quite well (only drafts are a mess but somehow drafts were always a mess in any app)

26

It’s too small on desktop web. I wish it was a larger form and more focused. For example, displaying a modal window would be nice.

27

Some copy pasting formating issues sometimes, like line breaks that shouldn't be here.

28

Automatic drafts to avoid losing elaborate posts midway or requiring copy/paste on mobile devices to ensure safe handling

Better treatment and char limit avoidance on links

CamelCase hashtag suggestions by default!!

29

The compose box would benefit with a few quality of life updates, like more real estate space on the screen, and being able to easily see the full message you're replying to, especially in the Android mobile app.

30

It would be useful to have some basic image editing tools (thinking of cropping / rotation only, no need for "filters", drawing or the like)

31

The ability to post multiple messages at once (threads).

Response

1

Suggested hashtags for communities? I'm not sure how to find them, except for searching around the inter-webs.

2

I've long wanted post templates. So if I am posting about dogs or travel or books - I would have the ability to choose from 3 different post templates that I had pre-populated with the hashtags I use every time. It would be a huge timesaver for folks that post regularly about certain topics they're passionate about and help eliminate errors.

3

Nothing leaps to mind but I do want to highlight one thing that Mastodon does very well on this front that I haven't seen elsewhere: the ability to automatically extract alt text from screenshots of text.  Extremely useful!

4

Having some sort of built-in image downscaling and optimization would be good. Currently I go elsewhere to do that.

5

I'd like to be able to claim an identity in a domain I own and delegate it to a Mastodon server of my choice. And then move it to another server without changing my identity, with the protocol taking care of doing the right thing. I'd be happy to pay a small monthly for this feature.

6

When I want to do a thread, (this is the behavior in Ivory) after the first post I have to go to my profile and refresh until it’s there to reply and continue the thread. It’s hard to add second or third thoughts on the same topic threaded.

7

All the necessary functionality is there.

8

I don't think posting is a problem, really, I think it's pretty well solved.

9

* Ability to schedule posts for later natively

* Ability to import all your current posts (as exported from an archive) to any new instance, should you suddenly find yourself needing to move on short notice. Even if not available on a big public instance, this should always be an option for if/when spawning up your own dedicated one (and be a well documented workflow)

10

Not sure this is just a me problem or something else, but in some of the mobile applications I notice that emojis are empty when I click on the emoji icon to insert one. Emojis work in other apps on the same device, but not in the Mastodon app. Never mattered enough to me to make it a priority, but I might as well mention it here!

11

Enable the GUI for post scheduling! I shouldn’t have to use a third party tool for a function that is so basic for artists and creatives!

12

There seems to be a schism in what content warnings mean, with some people using it to describe any post (i.e., "cw: food") while others using them for things that are likely to upset others. The default app behaviour adds friction to opening CWed posts, and I have skipped over posts from the first group which didn't look compelling enough to warrant an extra click but which I would have at least skimmed were they shown inline. Perhaps there is scope for expanding the CW system into a spectrum, and having the option for non-sensitive ones to open inline unless the user specifically mutes them, whilst still having the option to have an extra layer of indirection added for sensitive subjects.

13

I use Mastodon on desktop/browser in the advanced interface configuration, and sometimes I wish I could expand the typing area to make it bigger, and proofread my post more comfortably. Again, the advanced interface is fine for some uses of Mastodon, but not for others, so being able to switch between column view and "fullscreen" (not real fullscreen but, you know, comfortably using all of the space) when needed would be much better.

14

WE WANT MARKDOWN

15

Saved drafts

16

Drafts and scheduled posting would be a welcome addition.

17

Allow posting HDR photos! (Technical info: currently Mastodon either strips the HDR metadata or converts them to a different format that doesn’t support HDR. Instead it should allow it, but use the `dynamic-range-limit` CSS property to keep the thumbnails from being displayed too bright in the timeline when not expanded.)

18

Native thread feature with posts counter would be interesting maybe.

19

More forgiving handling of comm or temp errors while composing and posting, even of involuntary refreshes.

Anonymized stats on post outreach (mainly link clicks and image views)

20

I was recently looking for a way to schedule posts. I think that posting at the right time is ideal on Mastodon and while it was in the middle of the night, I wanted to make sure a post goes out only when people can actually see it.

Since timelines are currently "realtime", your post easily gets buried if you post it at the wrong time.

Response

Count

Percentage

5 (Strongly agree)

16

22.2%

4

28

38.9%

3

18

25%

2

6

8.3%

1 (Strongly disagree)

4

5.6%

Response

Count

Percentage

5 (Strongly agree)

30

41.7%

4

26

36.1%

3

10

13.9%