Lists are a great way to group similar accounts and view them together. By default, posts from all accounts you follow will show up in the Home feed, but there is an option to exclude accounts you’ve added to Lists.

To hide Lists’ posts from Home:

1. Go to a list’s page.
2. Click on “Show Settings”,
3. Toggle on “Hide these posts from home”.

If you’d like your posts on our Mastodon instance, Vivaldi Social, to reach every corner of the Fediverse, you can allow your public posts to be included in search results.

To opt in:

1. Go to Preferences > Privacy and reach > Search.
2. Enable “Include public posts in search results”.

If you want to exclude a specific post from search, set the post’s privacy to “Unlisted”, “Followers Only” or “Mentioned people only”.

Is an account you follow on Vivaldi Social boosting a little too many posts by other authors while you’re only interested in the posts they make? If that’s the case, you can easily hide their boosts.

To hide boosts from someone:

1. Go to the account’s profile.
2. Click on the Menu button next to the Unfollow and Notification buttons.
3. Select “Hide boosts from …”.

Going forward you’ll only see their own posts in your Home feed. By visiting their profile, you can still take a look at what they’ve been boosting.

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.

If you follow a lot of people on Vivaldi Social, then after a while you might start to wonder, why did you start following one person or another. Luckily, Vivaldi Social has a neat little feature that allows you to add notes to accounts, so that even after months and years, you can check the account and get a reminder.

And don’t be afraid to be honest in these notes. They’re only visible to you.

To add a note to an account:

1. Go to the person’s profile.
2. Look for the Note section.
3. Enter a note about the account.

If you follow a lot of accounts on Vivaldi Social, posts from your favorites may get buried in all the content. To make sure you never miss a post from a specific Mastodon account, enable notifications.

To enable notifications for an account:

1. Go to the account’s profile on Vivaldi Social.
2. Make sure you follow the account.
3. Click on Notify me when @username posts between Unfollow and account menu buttons.

Then whenever there’s a new post, you’ll find a notification about it on your Notifications page.

In Tip #155 we showed you how to filter posts in various public timelines based on the languages you speak. This time we’ll tell you how to fine tune in which languages you see posts from users you follow.

To change language subscription per user:

1. Go to the user’s profile.
2. Click on the Menu button near the Unfollow button.
3. Select Change Subscribed Languages.
4. Tick the boxes for languages you want to see posts in.

If you select none, you’ll see posts in all languages they post in.