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FediForum April 2026

Mastodon 4.6 Demo, continued

Topics Discovery & feeds User experience & design

Conveners:

Participants who chose to record their names here:

Mastodon Discovery Week (11-15 May): https://app.hi.events/events/6360/mastodon-design-team

Notes

  • Collections vs StarterPacks, how do we do this the “Mastodon way”?

  • Profiles challenging as it’s an established feature

    • lots of chaotic edge cases like “oh, btw there can be 24 custom fields on a profile”, which led to iteration on the design.

    • Profiles wasn’t originally on our roadmap, but institutions had some new use cases

    • e.g. Institutions can have users go to their profile and sign up for updates (no mastodon account needed)

  • New insitutional server page option coming soon!

    • The server as the face of the institution

    • Subscribe by email as an option to “follow” by email — is this newsletters or per-post?

      • Requires a role be assigned to an account to use this feature, cannot be assigned to the default role.

      • Changes PII / Privacy Policy

    • Sponsored by an NLNet Grant

    • Blog post specifically about them coming, potentially a workshop too.

  • Lots of pieces to profiles! How do people discover you? Understand who you are?

  • Enables you to update your identity just a bit easier

  • Suggestion: Have the pronouns in the compose window because that’s when you need to know the info (lifting some profile custom fields up out of custom fields to top-level profile content)

    • Blacksky and Northsky have both shipped their versions of this feature

    • Bluesky hasn’t shipped this because they need to do a profile redesign in general.

  • The Atmosphere could probably “steal” your handle information panel, because we have the same language/explainer problem there too.

    • fun story from the atmosphere: our handles are domains, so @imanijoy.mastodon.social would be an equivalent for @imanijoy@mastodon.social; but when we built Eurosky Portal, we made a change to also actually accept on login both @username@eurosky.social and username@eurosky.social even though we just replace the @ with a .

  • What are the forward looking steps from Mastodon on those, would a Social Web CG Taskforce help?

    • Renaud: if there is a taskforce or a FEP we would be interested in being able to implement or figure out participation (caveat: I dont know what this involves on our side or how complex this could be)

  • Renaud: Next Mastodon release expected in 5–6 weeks

  • Can the custom fields be searched, like location?

    • No, but would be nice to have more support for structured data in general

    • Further explanation: custom Fields in ActivityPub representation are currently just schema.org PropertyValue representation, not structured data.

    • Would love to see Mastodon support more geosocial structured data https://github.com/swicg/geosocial

      • Have to be careful about added geo data that is searchable to social apps, since this can lead to people accidentally doxxing themselves. So lots of Trust & Safety considerations

        • Definitely something we’re thinking about as we write the Explainer doc. Would love to have more input on that!

        • Create a T&S issue and come to our meeting when we get it on schedule! (we haven’t currently had this on our direct radar)

  • Mastodon Discovery Week