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.

If you’re logged in to Twitter X, for example, you can click on a link to a tweet post, and you’ll be able to retweet it, reply, star it, whatever.

In order to engage, you had to copy the URL, go back to your instance, paste it into the search box, and then do whatever you were going to do (assuming you remember).

If you haven’t tried Mastodon yet — or you tried it and bounced off — you may be interested to know that 4.2 also improves the sign-up process in the web interface.

One last note: the search and web interface improvements only show up on servers that have installed version 4.2.

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