Posts and timelines

A reply or a thread in a timeline, and now a quoted post that is itself a reply, has a Show thread button that unfolds the posts it answers right where it is, without moving what you are reading. Hide thread folds them again, the thread also folds by itself once scrolled off screen, and when the post it answered was deleted, the button opens onto a line saying so.

You can follow RSS feeds and read them as a timeline, with feed discovery, unread markers, feed images and widgets, and their items can show in Home. Subscriptions import and export as OPML, and admins can set default feeds.

Pick the timeline that fills the Home slot and arrange up to nine more tabs from Following, Accounts, This server, Recommended, All servers, custom feeds, Forums, RSS, and your antennas and lists. The arrangement is stored on the server, so it follows you to every device.

Timelines can have custom addresses, and Home gains controls for mutual followers and for including this server’s public posts. The Accounts timeline was worked on, timeline tabs behave better, and the scroll position and focus are restored when you come back.

A timeline in split panes, with the accounts that posted recently on one side and their latest posts on the other, which loads new posts as they come. It can be filtered and used with the keyboard, and you can hide chosen accounts from Home.

A popular post from another server used to show only the likes and reposts that happened to reach here, often a small fraction of the real number. Catodon now reads the counts Mastodon states on its own posts, shows the larger of the two, and refreshes them as the post is read.

Replies missing from a thread are fetched through ActivityPub’s conversation context, and accounts are found more reliably through WebFinger, so conversations are rebuilt more completely.

The server now counts the links people share and ranks the ones suddenly shared more than the day before, the way Mastodon does. Explore gains a Links tab where each one is a card leading to the posts sharing it, and by default nothing is shown until a moderator approves the link or its publisher.

Bookmarks now live at addresses named after them, and get more interface and defaults of their own.

Your posts can be deleted automatically once they reach a certain age, with exceptions you choose.

A repost can be scheduled for later.

Under a post that shares a link, “Also discussed in” lists the other posts sharing it, forum topics first, then the most replied to, and only those you could open anyway. The forums a topic is cross-posted to move beside it, under “Cross-posted to”. Posts from before the upgrade are found once they are edited.

A post that one of your custom feeds added to Following, from an account you do not follow, now has a line over it naming that feed, which opens it, much like the Followed hashtag line. When a hashtag you follow already explains the post, only the hashtag is named, and posts that would be in Following anyway get no line.

The post form and the Messages composer have a toolbar for formatting text.

You can follow hashtags, across servers too, and find them in a new Explore tab with a preview on hover. Mutes and blocks apply, antennas can match hashtags, and a hashtag can become a custom timeline with its own name and icon.

Quotes work as they do on Mastodon: from the visibility menu you choose who may quote you, quotes have states, and they federate with Mastodon’s approval and revocation (FEP-044f). Mastodon apps get the same behaviour.

A new custom feed switch stops a keyword from matching inside the handle of an account a post mentions: with catodon as a keyword, a post that only mentions someone on catodon.social no longer lands in the feed. It applies to excluded keywords too, is off by default, travels with exports, and apps set it through keywordsIgnoreMentions in antennas/create and antennas/update.

A post from Misskey, Sharkey, CherryPick or another Catodon server used to show only the reactions your server happened to receive. Now, when someone signed in opens one, your server asks the post's server for its reactions and shows the larger count for each emoji, updating the post on screen, and Mastodon apps see the same counts. Requests are few and spaced out, and blocked or silenced servers are never asked.

A post you have already reposted now offers Repost again, bringing it back up for your followers without undoing the first repost, with the visibility of your latest one. To keep timelines from flooding, reposts of the same post, scheduled ones included, must be at least 24 hours apart, and the post climbs no further in trends. Undo repost still removes all your reposts of it at once.

Posts now record which app they were posted from, and make it available.

A quoted post, and a post shown in a link preview card, now has its own reply, repost, like and menu buttons with their counts, so you can answer or like it without opening it. A forum cross-post shows its original this way, with its score and downvote, and the counts update live as others reply, like, vote or repost.

A post's repost count now rises and falls as other people repost it or undo their repost, in timelines, forum cards and quotes, where before only your own reposts showed without a reload. Apps watching a post on the streaming API get the new renoted and unrenoted events, and forum cards now show the higher counts reported by the post's own server.

RSS, Atom and JSON feeds for a hashtag, in the same shapes as an account's own. Because it crosses everybody's posts rather than one author's, it guards each author and each post, leaving out anything that is not fully public — unlisted posts included.

Bookmarks can be sorted into private categories, shown as a row above your saved posts, so a long list stays easy to browse; a post can sit in several at once, and a post's menu files it in one click. Nobody else can see your categories, Misskey apps see them as clips, and a server migrated from Misskey gets its users' old clips back as categories.

A right click on a post that comes from another server now offers to open it where it was written, which saves opening the post first to reach that link. A repost is judged on the post it reposts.

A custom feed shown as its own timeline tab can now be displayed as a grid or immersively, like a list. The layout does not filter the feed, and one already stored for a feed, which the app used to ignore, now takes effect.

Layout, grid columns and media-only settings are reachable from the timeline itself rather than from Settings, and media only is now set for each tab on its own — so a photo list can show only pictures while a news list shows everything.

Mastodon shows only the first four files of a post, so the post form now warns as soon as a fifth is attached, marks the cut with a dotted line and dims the thumbnails after it. Files can be dragged to choose which four come first; nothing is blocked, and people on Catodon still see every file.

A new switch in Settings → Posts and reactions → Links and Media hides the whole preview box, not just its thumbnail; a post whose link was only reachable through that box shows it as a plain link. It applies to your device only, and the Forums timeline keeps its link cards.

Beside the reply button, a post in a timeline or on a forum card now shows how many replies its whole thread holds, not just the direct replies, and pointing at the button spells out both numbers. A setting brings back the old "3 (12)" form or direct replies alone, and apps find the total as threadRepliesTotal.

The Accounts timeline now lists the hashtags you follow among the accounts you follow, each with its latest public post, and selecting one shows its posts beside the list with a button to unfollow it. A switch in Options leaves them out and a new Hashtags category lists them alone; the deck's Accounts column has the same, and the list now loads more as you scroll.