Vivaldi Social, like any social media platform, is full of people posting on a multitude of topics at various intervals. If some accounts post too much or you don’t care for the content of their posts, you have the option to mute the account or block them outright.

To stop seeing posts from someone:

1. Click on ⋯ More below one of their posts or on︙Menu on their profile.
2. Select Mute/Block [@username].
3. If muting, review the additional options.
4. Click Mute/Block to confirm your decision.

When browsing Vivaldi Social as a web page on a larger screen, you’ll notice that there’s just one column of content and quite a lot of free space on the page. If you want, you can opt for a multi-column view instead. With the multi-column aka advanced view, you can have different timelines, hashtags, direct messages, and moredisplayed in individual columns side by side.

To enable the multi-column view:

1. Go to Preferences > Advanced Web Interface.
2. Tick the box for “Enable advanced web interface”.
3. Click “Save changes”.
4. Exit preferences.
5. Click on the “Show settings” button on the column headers to pin or unpin them.

If you follow many different types of accounts on Vivaldi Social, the main Home timeline can feel like a huge smorgasbord of content. To focus on one topic or group of people at a time, divide the accounts you follow into Lists.

To create a list:

1. Go to the Lists page.
2. In the text box that says “New list title” give your new list a name.
3. Click “Add list”.

To add people to Lists:

1. Open the list.
2. Click on “Show settings” > “Edit list”
3. Enter the usernames of the people you want to add to the list.
4. Click on “Add to list” next to their name.

Alternatively:

1. Visit the user’s profile.
2. From the account menu, select “Add or Remove from lists”.
3. Select which lists you want to add the user to.

Lists’ timelines can be accessed from the menu column on the right side of the page.

Like any social media or public communication channel, Mastodon, including our Vivaldi Social instance, isn’t immune to spam and other bad actors. Luckily, it has many useful settings you can toggle on and off to make your experience on the Fediverse more pleasant. One of them is preventing users that you don’t follow from sending you a direct message.

To enable the setting:

1. Go to Preferences > Notifications > Other Notification Settings.
2. Enable “Block direct messages from people you don’t follow”.

Posts with tall images will require you to scroll more to get to the next post in the feed and if there are many posts like that, you’ll end up scrolling a lot. That’s why they’re cropped by default. If the content seems interesting you can click on the image to see it in full.

If you prefer to always see images in their full size and don’t mind scrolling, you can disable the cropping. To do that:

1. Go to Preferences > Post Layout.
2. Disable “Crop images in non-expanded posts to 16×9”.
3. Click “Save Changes” at the top or bottom of the page.

Not everyone needs to be able to keep track of what we post on social media. That’s why in Vivaldi Social you have the power to decide, who is able to follow your account.

To enable manual follow approvals:

1. Go to Preferences > Profile.
2. Tick the box for “Require follow requests”.

Then every time someone wants to follow you, you’ll get a notification and you can either approve or decline their follow request.