Federated social network adds n00b-friendly features to the ‘Fediverse’
Mastodon, the open-source Twitter-like federated social network server, has issued a major release that adds features aimed at making life easier for new users.
Version 4.2, released Thursday the first release Mastodon has deemed worthy of a blogged announcement since March 2022’s version 3.5, is billed as a “massive update” by CEO and founder Eugen Rochko.
Anyone can run a Mastodon server, and operators can choose to network them to other Mastodon servers. Users can see whatever servers their Mastodon host chooses to expose. One way to understand Mastodon is to consider each instance as an email server that can talk to other email servers – all of them if an admin wants to, or a select set if that’s preferred.
The result is what’s come to be known as “the Fediverse” – a federated universe of content that feels a lot like using Twitter, but in fact touches multiple Mastodon instances run by different operators.
The big addition in this edition is a rebuilt search facility, which matters because it’s something users expect to just work. Mastodon 4.2 has therefore made it possible to search for users using by words in their bio and their names.
