It seems that multiple social media companies decided that today would be a good day to release some new features. Both X (formerly known as Twitter) and Mastodon have released some small but notable updates to their apps.
For Mastodon, users are now able to share a QR code of their profile. Eugen Rochko, the CEO and Founder of Mastodon, announced the update, saying that the Mastodon team realized it was difficult to share profiles with each other when they met up in person for the first time. Today’s updates are only available for the Mastodon for Android app.
Now, you can navigate to your profile and click on the QR code icon next to the name to bring up a QR code that will allow others to open the profile on their device. In addition to adding the QR Code, the company has also improved confirmation dialogs for all muting and blocking functions as well as the design of profiles.
We want to make Mastodon as intuitive as possible, and a part of that is making sure you don’t need to read documentation to understand what the different functions in the app do. We’ve updated the design of profiles to solve a common question that newer users tend to have, which is “what does the domain name in a Mastodon handle mean?”. You can now tap the domain on a profile to bring up an information sheet that explains that decentralized nature of Mastodon.
Over on X (formerly known as Twitter), it appears that the company is leaning even harder into Spaces, the feature that allows a user to host a live audio session where others can either tune in or even be invited to speak or co-host as well.
An account called DogeDesigner posted that the company has now added video to Spaces, meaning that a user who hosts a space can now, in addition to sharing their audio, also share a video feed. You can check out a quick example of what it looks like below:
It’s not surprising to see X add live video to Spaces. Since the company killed off Periscope, which was its former live video technology (and used to be a pretty sweet app before Twitter acquired it honestly), Spaces seems to be the next best place for it.
Let’s see just how crazy some of those Spaces get when video is involved.
