Mastodon adds email newsletters so people who don’t want an account can still follow creators on the open social web

Mastodon is betting that email, the oldest surviving communication protocol on the internet, can solve its biggest problem: reaching people who will never create a fediverse account. The open-source social network released version 4.6 on Tuesday, and its most strategically significant feature is the ability for creators to send their posts directly to email subscribers. People who want to follow a Mastodon account no longer need to join the platform, they just need an inbox.

The email newsletter feature is not turned on by default. Mastodon’s developers chose to restrict it because sending newsletters can, as the team put it in a blog post, “significantly rack up the costs of operating a Mastodon server.” Creators who want to use it need an assigned role with the correct permissions, which means they either run their own server, use one hosted by Mastodon’s paid institutional service, or negotiate access with their existing server operator.

That restriction is deliberate. Mastodon said the feature is primarily intended for institutional users, referencing the hosting and moderation services it began offering to organisations in September 2025. Clients already include the European Commission, the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, and the French city of Blois, though independent journalists and bloggers who operate their own servers can also use it.

The feature addresses a fundamental growth constraint. Mastodon has roughly 735,000 monthly active users, according to its own server directory, while the broader fediverse counts over a million active accounts. Bluesky has 44.8 million registered users, Threads has more than 450 million monthly actives, and Mastodon’s audience remains a fraction of either.

The 💜 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

Email newsletters could bypass that problem entirely. A media organisation running its own Mastodon server could publish posts that reach both fediverse users and email subscribers simultaneously, without requiring the latter to understand what a fediverse server is or how to pick one. The anonymity of email subscriptions may also appeal to users who avoid newsletter platforms that track reading behaviour for advertising purposes.

Because Mastodon accounts are portable, creators who build an email subscriber list through the platform can still migrate to a different server and take their audience with them. That portability is one of the few structural advantages the fediverse holds over centralised platforms, where leaving means abandoning your followers.

The 4.6 release also introduces Collections, Mastodon’s version of the curated account lists that Bluesky popularised as Starter Packs and that Threads has adopted in its own form. Users can create shareable lists of up to 25 recommended profiles, with controls that let any included user remove themselves at any time. Collections appear on the creator’s profile under a “Featured” tab.

Mastodon designed the feature with abuse prevention in mind. Users who have not opted in to a “Feature me in discovery experiences” setting cannot be included in any collection, and every user is notified when they are added. If a collection’s title or description changes, members are notified again, and there is no “follow all” shortcut, which forces users to evaluate each profile individually rather than bulk-following lists padded with spam.

Profile pages have been redesigned to surface information users value most, based on a community survey. The editing experience now happens directly on the profile page rather than requiring navigation to a separate settings area, and users can crop pictures and headers in place while adding alt text for accessibility. New controls let users hide or customise the media tab, including whether it shows attachments from replies.

The accessibility work extends well beyond profiles. The release includes improvements to keyboard navigation, focus management, colour contrast, and screen reader behaviour across the interface. The Dutch government sponsored a significant portion of this effort, according to the Mastodon team.

Mastodon does not take venture capital, does not sell advertising, and does not sell user data, a positioning that resonates with privacy-focused users but limits the resources available for growth. The institutional hosting service launched last year represents its first serious attempt at a commercial revenue stream. The newsletter feature extends that institutional bet by giving organisations a reason to choose Mastodon over other publishing platforms.

Whether email can meaningfully expand the fediverse remains an open question. The feature lowers the barrier to following a creator, but it does not solve the network effects problem that has kept Mastodon’s user count flat while its centralised competitors grow by hundreds of millions. What it does offer is a bridge, a way for the open social web to reach people on infrastructure that predates every social network and will likely outlast them all.