Mastodon, the decentralized alternative to X, is going to adopt a controversial feature from the platform formerly known as Twitter: quote posts. The company on Friday shared the progress it’s making on the implementation of the feature, which has divided users over its potential to be used for online abuse and bullying.
Critics have long argued that the addition of quote tweets helped ruin Twitter, turning the network into a more toxic online community.
Some Mastodon users feel strongly that quote posts don’t belong on Mastodon, as the feature is often used to “dunk” on another person’s post, which not only breeds negativity but can also result in helping spur a flood of abusive replies to the original post’s author — especially if the dunker is a high-profile individual with a lot of followers.
However, other Mastodon users want to see quote posts added, as the feature makes it easier to reference another person’s post and its content when making a response. Plus, quote posts would bring the network more in line with its competitors, including X as well as newer rivals like Threads and Bluesky.
Mastodon noted in its blog post that it’s aware that the feature is both a “source of concern” for some and “highly requested” by others.
“Many people simply do not want their content to be reframed by others; or they may find that if it is reposted, they receive unwelcome attention,” the Mastodon blog post says.
The organization applied for a grant to help fund the development of quote posts back in 2024 after earlier discussions around the feature. Now, the team is sharing its progress, particularly in terms of how it hopes to mitigate user complaints.
For starters, Mastodon says it will allow users to control whether their posts can be quoted at all. This would protect people from being the recipient of unwanted attention or hateful replies to some extent. (Though, arguably, people could still screenshot someone’s post to circulate it more broadly if they intended to troll the user.)
In addition, users will be notified if someone quotes them, and they’ll be able to withdraw their post from the quoted context at any time. This latter option could help in the case that someone’s quote post goes viral, and the original poster starts to receive too much attention or even abuse, forcing them to reconsider whether they want their post to be quotable at all.
Beyond the potential for abuse, Mastodon says there are also technical challenges around the implementation of quote posts, as there’s not a standardized way to build the feature in ActivityPub, the underlying protocol that powers Mastodon and other federated apps.
Some third-party Mastodon clients also already offer their own version of quote posts, but they don’t include the features that Mastodon wants to add for additional user control and privacy. As a result, Mastodon is collaborating with others to create a specification that would allow all Mastodon apps and clients to access the same functionality.
Quote posts will also affect other parts of Mastodon’s code base, the announcement states, including the ActivityPub-handling code, the public API, the web user interface, the moderation panel and capabilities, the administration panel, and the official iOS and Android applications.
Unfortunately, Mastodon’s announcement didn’t share how much longer it will be before the feature is added or any sort of timeline for public release, only saying that quote posts “will still take more time to develop.”
