Mastodon is launching quote posts, for years a controversial social media feature, with an unusually strong set of protections aimed at preventing driving signals through social networks by way of “dunking,” as well as brigading and pile-ons.
The feature allows users to reshare a post with their own comment, as well as fine-grained controls over who can quote you and how those quotes propagate around the fediverse.
Why quotes, and why now
Quote-and-comment resharing has long been a feature of rival platforms, but it has its documented pitfall: It can supercharge public shaming. Researchers and digital rights organizations have cautioned that quote mechanics can focus attention in ways that invite harassment. About 4 in 10 U.S. adults have experienced online harassment, including “stack-on” behavior, according to Pew Research Center. Mastodon’s solution is to release the quotes without importing all of those bad incentives that made dunk culture so frequent elsewhere.
The shift also mirrors influence user demand. Mastodon held out on quotes for years, preferring the more primitive “boost,” but many journalists, researchers and community organizers said that quotes can offer necessary context, corrections and discoverability — particularly in the case of lifting marginalized voices. The real trick was creating a feature that amplified the discussion without amplifying the derision.
How Mastodon’s protections work
At the account level, users can choose who is permitted to quote them: Anyone, Followers only or Just me. That can be changed in the composer with a per-post override of any permissions useful if you know you’ll be discussing something that could get heated and you want more control.
Visibility is equally nuanced. Quote posts may be made Public, Followers only or Quiet public. It’s notably a quiet public option: quotes remain publicly viewable but are excluded from Mastodon search, trends and public timeline, reducing virality while preserving transparency for those with the link.
Control doesn’t stop when a quote is live. ‘s three-dots Options menu when somebody quotes your post in the thread that triggers the notification. You can also change the future quote permissions on the fly, or shut the quoting account down completely if you don’t even want to see them around. This is a big change from platforms where the quoted person has little means of recourse once the pile-on is under way.
To use quotes is simple: You can find the option right next to Boost, Mastodon’s analog of a repost. That’s a subtle but meaningful UI decision: Boosts become default for simple sharing, while quotes are presented more as an additive tool rather than a replacement.
Federation, compatibility, and rollout
Mastodon’s federated architecture adds complexity. The fediverse is a collection of independently operated servers that communicate through the W3C’s ActivityPub standard. Since each server controls its version of the software and policies, quotes may not be displayed uniformly initially. Servers that have yet to implement the corresponding specification will be able to display quotes as plain old links, or not support them at all until they update.
That feature is coming to Mastodon’s largest community servers — mastodon. social and mastodon. online — first in an initial rollout, and then make it available more widely with the 4.5 software release. Smaller instance admins will roll things out on their own schedules as its decentralized nature.
Balancing expression with safety
Designing for safety at the protocol edge is even more important in a decentralized environment, where we don’t have one algorithm to downgrade toxic content and no universal moderation backstop. By allowing users to limit who can quote them, where quotes will appear and to withdraw consent after the fact, Mastodon is moving toward a model that privileges individual agency — in accord with recommendations from an organization like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which promotes user control and transparency.
There are trade-offs. Limiting visibility for quotes — especially through quiet public — could help reduce discovery for breaking news or advocacy campaigns that depend on rapid and wide penetration. But for many communities that fled mainstream platforms to avoid harassment, that friction is a feature, not a bug. It can also slow down mobs who react without turning off accountability journalism or expert annotation.
What to watch next
Community standards will drive the result more than code. If that’s what users gravitate toward using quotes for, in order to provide context, translation or signal-boost underrepresented voices— like Mastodon hopes —this feature could end up benefiting cross-instance conversations. If dunking pressures do return, admins could still set local policies — say, disallow quotes or make defaults tighter — for their servers.
Interfederation will be tested on a larger scale with the fediverse. Platforms such as Misskey and Firefish (and others) already have some sort of quote equivalent, and implementors continue to work on how objects refer to one another in ActivityPub. If adoption is widespread, we can then look forward to more consistent rendering in apps (including third-party Mastodon clients), moderation tools that correctly attribute and preview quoted content, and accessibility features.
Mastodon’s wager is very explicit: quotes can add context without resurrecting the worst bits of social media virality. The button isn’t the difference — it’s the guardrails, the defaults and the ability to say no.