Mastodon, the federated microblogging platform, has been updated to version 4.2, which comes with massive improvements to search and the web interface, particularly for logged-out and first-time users.

One of Mastodon’s many charming qualities is that, unlike Twitter X, Bluesky, Instagram, and most other social media platforms, the user base is split across thousands of instances, each of which can decide to federate with or block any of the others.

This is good in many ways. You can get a nice little intentional community going on your local server, and servers that are filled with abusive, illegal, and harmful content and / or users are widely ostracized. But it presents some, shall we say, unintuitive workflows for people used to…

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