The Sunny Gardener - July 2025

– on the fence by @ZebraFeatherAH

Mastodon Updates

We got a new major version of Mastodon this month with Mastodon v4.4 (Official Announcement)

This version brought web interface updates to profiles, list management, media controls, and the navigation menu.

Mastodon now has the ability to display — but not create — quote posts, as part of a staged roll-out of the feature, and the ability to actually quote post will arrive in a future release.

There were also a couple of hotfixes released: v4.4.1, and v4.4.2, with mostly small behind the scenes fixes.

Fetch Replies

One interesting feature that arrived in v4.4 is the ability for administrators to enable automatically fetching replies to remote posts.

As you might be aware, replies to any given post are not shared across the entire fediverse automatically. If you open a post, you’re probably only going to see replies from anyone that has a follower on the local server, meaning you likely won’t see replies from anyone else. If somebody asks a question, you may not see see many of the answers in the thread. On popular posts especially this can lead to a lot of people replying with the same advice/joke/question etc., because they can’t easily see that multiple other people already have.

The main way to deal with this situation in the past has been to open the original post on the remote server.

Fetch Replies (FETCH_REPLIES_ENABLED=true) has been enabled on sunny.garden, so expanding threads should now generally show a more complete picture of replies than was previously the case, though there are still limitations such as new replies only being fetched every few minutes.

Verification Scam

This month’s flavour of spam was the Verification Scam.

If you receive a message along the lines of “Your account has been temporarily suspended for identity verification.” claiming to come from “Mastodon”, “Mastodon Support”, etc… then it’s a scam, don’t follow any links provided, and please report the post so that the account can be suspended by moderators.

As always, do not give Nicole your credit card information, identity documents, passwords, etc.

If in doubt, contact server staff listed on sunny.garden’s About page, either by private message or the admin contact email.

Summary

Hosting Costs

As always, thank you to everyone that has donated on ko-fi! There’s no obligation or expectation that you donate in order to use the server, and I’m still able to cover any shortfall myself if needed.

– Brook