Saturday, 8th November 2025
Mastodon 4.5 (via) This new release of Mastodon adds two of my most desired features!
The first is support for quote posts. This had already become an unofficial feature in the client apps I was using (phanpy.social on the web and Ivory on iOS) but now it's officially part of Mastodon's core platform.
Much more notably though:
Fetch All Replies: Completing the Conversation Flow
Users on servers running 4.4 and earlier versions have likely experienced the confusion of seeing replies appearing on other servers but not their own. Mastodon 4.5 automatically checks for missing replies upon page load and again every 15 minutes, enhancing continuity of conversations across the Fediverse.
The absolute worst thing about Mastodon - especially if you run on your own independent server - is that the nature of the platform means you can't be guaranteed to see every reply to a post your are viewing that originated on another instance (previously).
This leads to an unpleasant reply-guy effect where you find yourself replying to a post saying the exact same thing that everyone else said... because you didn't see any of the other replies before you posted!
Mastodon 4.5 finally solves this problem!
I went looking for the GitHub issue about this and found this one that quoted my complaint about this from December 2022, which is marked as a duplicate of this Fetch whole conversation threads issue from 2018.
So happy to see this finally resolved.
The big advantage of MCP over OpenAPI is that it is very clear about auth. [...]
Maybe an agent could read the docs and write code to auth. But we don't actually want that, because it implies the agent gets access to the API token! We want the agent's harness to handle that and never reveal the key to the agent. [...]
OAuth has always assumed that the client knows what API it's talking to, and so the client's developer can register the client with that API in advance to get a client_id/client_secret pair. Agents, though, don't know what MCPs they'll talk to in advance.
So MCP requires OAuth dynamic client registration (RFC 7591), which practically nobody actually implemented prior to MCP. DCR might as well have been introduced by MCP, and may actually be the most important unlock in the whole spec.