Mastodon 2.5 released with UI, administration, and deployment changes

Mastodon 2.5 is here, a social network often viewed as an alternative to Twitter. The 100th version of the social network has a variety of software improvements in UI, media and a bunch of fixes including security and performance fixes.

UI changes in Mastodon 2.5

The web interface in Mastodon 2.5 has been redesigned for public areas. The design and color scheme is now more consistent when logged in to your account. A better use of space is made with a new profile layout with prominent follow buttons for new users.

The public pages now display reply, favorite and boost buttons. The actions can open a remote interaction dialogue. You can interact with the dialogue from your home server and interact with the toot from your account. This is a simpler approach than the previous approach where users had to copy paste permalink to the server’s search bar.

You can also choose to feature specific people you follow, on your profile. They can be displayed randomly or as a recommendation to your profile visitors. The count of replies to toots is now displayed enabling you to know if a question has been already answered or if a discussion is happening. Mastodon 2.5 now also accepts MOV video files from iOS, and other large video files. It also has better image resizing.

Admin and deployment changes

For admins who moderate Mastodon servers, a new dashboard is available providing an overview of important information like weekly sign-up and activity numbers. The e-mail notifications generated from reports have been cut down and report notifications can be disabled for your account now.

Suspending users now has a confirmation screen where you can type the name of the account you want to suspend. The temporary lock-out is now reversible and works as an alternative to suspensions.

For admins who run Mastodon servers, the database schema has been changed to reduce disk write operations and CPU load of PostgreSQL. For scaling, there is support for red-replicas baked into the software, you only need to change the configuration. There is also a new command-line interface for making it easy Terminal easy to use

These were a select few updates. For a full list of changes, take a look at the changelog.

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