Mastodon is an open-source social network server, based on which anyone can create a product similar to Twitter/Weibo—that is, to build a “private server Weibo” as the title says. But Mastodon is different from common social networks, its positioning is a decentralized social platform.

Sites based on Mastodon are called “instance“, these “instances” are both independent and related to each other (because users of different sites can communicate without hindrance).

For example, there are two instances named “Motion” and “Weibo”. As a “move” user, they can of course view the public content posted by all users in this instance (Mastodon calls it “local timeline”). But in addition, users of “Motion” and “Weibo” can follow each other across instances and view each other’s public content (Mastodon calls it a “cross-site federated timeline”). Users across instances can also interact, such as posting content and chatting with each other, and the other party will receive notifications in time and then reply.

At present, Mastodon has released version 4.0.0, and then released version 4.0.2 to fix some problems introduced by version 4.0. The two versions bring the following contents:

Add to

• Added ability to filter posts from followed accounts by language
• Ability to add follow tags
• Add ability to filter individual posts
• Added ability to translate posts
• Add Featured Tab to Web UI
• Added support for trend status and linked language preferences, now trends in the preferred language are shown at the top, with other languages ​​below
• Add server rules to the registration process
• Add privacy icon in web UI to report mode
• Added option to open original page in remote content dropdown in web UI
• Add warning for sensitive audio posts in web UI
• Add language attribute to posts in web UI
• Add support for uploading WebP files
• add to uploadaudio/vnd.wavefile support
• Add support for uploading AVIF files ( txt-file )
• Added support for uploading HEIC files
• Add more debug information when dealing with remote accounts
• Add retention policy for cached content and media
  • Set how long remote posts or media should be cached on your server
  • tootctlHands-off alternative to commands
• Added customizable user roles, previously there were 3 hardcoded roles, user, moderator and administrator, now you can create custom roles and decide their permissions
• Added the ability to select all accounts matching the search bulk action in the admin UI
• Added ability to view previous edits of the status in the admin UI
• Added ability to block registrations from IPs
• Add webhooks to admin UI
• …

For details about version 4.0, see v4.0.0 Release Note.

Fixes brought by version 4.0.2:

• Fix wrong color hiding behind web UI content warnings
• Fix other user’s filters used in streaming services
• Fix unsafe-eval used when wasm-unsafe-eval is sufficient in Content Security Policy.