Mastodon's popularity increased by an order of magnitude at the end of last year, and we've spent the last 9 months removing pain points and friction from the app and adding highly requested features. We've overhauled search, improved the sign-up flow, and made interacting with posts from other servers outside your logged-in interface easier. Of course, we haven't been withholding these improvements for a whole 9 months. We work in the open and we've been deploying new updates on mastodon.social regularly during that time; but since Mastodon is open-source software installed by over 12,000 independent service providers, we also package stable releases. :) **If you'd like to check out what Mastodon is like with this update, there is no easier option than simply registering at mastodon.social.** But for those who like open-source software, you can of course install and run it on your own infrastructure. That's what the European Commission, the German, Dutch and Swiss governments and the BBC do!

I’ve been using Mastodon for a while now and the best thing about it is community. It’s not obsolete like a lot of people are saying, but there is no place for overhype and self promo in a twitter way. Go get Mastodon and enjoy quiet social experience:)

Mastodon was already the Twitter successor of the future (as in it’s the better replacement that we need, not that it’s a Twitter clone), but it does have its quirks. This update goes a long way towards removing those quirks and, both feature and UX-wise, puts Mastodon in a position to be ready for mainstream adoption. Some of its features are already more powerful than Twitter’s, there’s really no reason not to switch if you’re still on Twitter.