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We’ve all seen how social media like X and Bluesky can be used to “dunk” on others, by resharing posts with a (usually snarky or incendiary) comment underneath, often to draw in likes and engagement. But the open-source X alternative Mastodon has rolled out some innovative new features to protect against malicious “dunking” when users quote-share each other.
The platform will now support quote posts for the first time this week, starting on its largest servers mastodon.online and mastodon.social and more widely following Mastodon’s upcoming 4.5 software update. But unlike on platforms like X, users will have much greater control over how they are quoted.
Users will receive a notification when their post is quote-shared and will be able to remove the original post from the other user’s post. Users will also be able to adjust their settings to stop a particular post from being quote-shared in the future.
In addition, users will be able to permanently block a user from quote-sharing any of their posts, as a hedge against malicious dunks. They will also be able to limit who can quote them, including restricting it to followers only or just themselves.
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If you want to give quote sharing a try, you’ll see an option to quote their post under a new menu accessed from the Boost button, but only if the author of a post has enabled quoting.
(Credit: Mastodon )
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