Mastodon is finally adding a feature a lot of people have asked for — and a fair few have warned against. In a post on Sept. 11, 2025, the Mastodon team announced that users on mastodon.online and mastodon.social will start seeing an option to quote a post “next week,” with the ability to create quote posts more widely arriving in the Mastodon 4.5 release soon after.

This isn’t a simple “copy a Twitter feature” story. For years, Mastodon resisted quote posts because they can be weaponized — used to lampoon, misrepresent, or funnel harassment toward the original author. That hesitation turned into a rethink earlier this year when Mastodon concluded that the lack of quoting was itself a barrier for people who want the convenience of quoting when they migrate from other networks. The project first explained the trade-offs in February 2025 and has since been steadily building a version that tries to preserve the platform’s safety-first instincts.

What the feature actually does (and how Mastodon tries to stop the bad stuff)

On Mastodon, quoting will live under the same menu you use to “boost” (their word for repost). If the author of a post has allowed quoting, the Boost menu will show a “Quote” option. Choosing it opens the composer with the quoted post embedded, so you can add your comment before publishing. That’s intentionally familiar — it’s the same interaction people expect from other networks — but with a few Mastodon-specific guardrails.

Those guardrails are the product’s headline features:

• You can disable quoting globally in your posting defaults, or turn quoting off for an individual post.
• You can limit who may quote you: Anyone, Followers only, or Just me.
• If someone quotes you and you don’t like the context, you’ll be notified and you can remove your original post from their quote via the options menu. Blocking the user will stop future quotes from them.
• Quotes can be made Public, Followers only, or a “Quiet public” (still viewable if you have the link but excluded from search, trends and the public timeline) — a design choice meant to reduce instantaneous virality while keeping the quote transparent.

Mastodon also emphasises that quoting across the fediverse is messier: a quote of a post hosted on another fediverse app “may take some time to appear,” and not every server or client will support the new spec immediately. To address that, Mastodon worked up a technical specification for “consent-respecting quote posts” and has been collaborating with other developers so the feature can interoperate across ActivityPub implementations.

Why this mattered — and why some people worry

Quote posts are a polarising feature because of what they enable in practice. On one hand, they let you reference a specific post while adding your own view — a handy tool for conversation, amplification, and context. On the other hand, they can enable “dunking” — taking someone’s post and adding ridicule, piling on replies, or pushing attention toward someone who didn’t ask for it. That very tension is why Mastodon delayed the feature long enough to redesign it around consent and revocation.

Not everyone is convinced the protections go far enough. Veteran fediverse observers have pointed out a simple risk that technical fixes can’t fully erase: people who don’t want to be quoted may still be screenshotted and shared elsewhere, or screenshots can become the de facto “permanent” quote that can’t be removed. That was one of the cautions voiced by independent developers and commentators watching the rollout — a reminder that product options change behavior, but can’t eliminate every adversarial use case.

How Mastodon phased the rollout

Mastodon is taking a staged approach. The 4.4 release laid the groundwork by letting servers display quote posts created elsewhere on the fediverse, and only after that initial phase is widely available will 4.5 flip the switch to let users create quotes themselves. That mirrors how Mastodon has rolled out other big features (like post editing): build interop and display support first, then open authoring. The staged plan is meant to reduce surprises across the many different servers and clients that make up the fediverse.

Quick, practical guide — if you don’t want to be quoted

If the new option makes you nervous, Mastodon gives you immediate levers:

1. Go to Settings → Preferences → Posting Defaults and set your default quote permission to Just me (or Followers only). In servers running 4.4.x you’ll find this under Settings → Preferences → Other.
2. When composing a post, open Visibility and interaction settings in the composer to override your defaults for that post.
3. If someone quotes a post and you want it removed, use the ••• Options menu on the quote and remove your original post from it; you’ll also get a notification when someone quotes you.

Why it matters for the fediverse

This is a live experiment in trade-offs: Mastodon is trying to add a familiar engagement tool while building in stronger consent mechanics than those on many centralized platforms. If the technical spec lands with other ActivityPub apps and clients adopt it, quoting could become a federated, consent-aware primitive — something that expands conversational tools across the fediverse rather than importing the worst of centralized timelines.

If it doesn’t land cleanly, expect the usual contingency: screenshots, forks, patchy client support and, inevitably, more community debate. Either way, Mastodon says it’s committed to listening and adjusting; the project thanked NLNet and NGI Entrust for funding work on the feature and invited feedback at feedback@joinmastodon.org.