How to disable notification sounds in your Mastodon account
Update August 2025, New Quotes Notification
Quotes are now available and as such there is another notification setting that must be turned off to make this article complete. If you follow the instructions below, all will become clear.
For those of you familiar with the settings setup, it can be located between Boosts and Poll results.
Introduction
Love Mastodon, loathe the annoying notification sounds? Finding where to turn them off is somewhat less than intuitive.
You’d expect them to be under Preferences > Notifications but they are not. Rather they are tucked away and only accessible by clicking a Filter Icon on the Notifications page.
A quick video showing the process
What to look for gallery
Image Index
A quick point about Preferences > Notifications
As previously mentioned, you’d expect to find the notification sound settings under Preferences > Notifications (See Image 1) but as you can plainly see they simply are not there. Playing with the “Select events that you want to receive notifications for” options have no bearing on sound control.
Use the following three simple steps to disable them.
Step 1. Login to Mastodon and click the Notifications link
After logging in you should see a panel on the right hand side with the Mastodon logo at the top. Click on the Notifications link (See Image 2) it is highlighted in red.
Step 2. Click the Filter Icon
Once in the Notifications page the central main panel header has a Filter Icon on the right hand side (See Image 3) it is highlighted in red. Click this and a Notifications Preferences Panel will slide down.
Step 3. Disable sound on each notification type
There are eight nine types of notifications (See Image 4) that will generate sounds, they all have a Play sound checkbox.
- New followers
- New follow requests
- Favourites
- Mentions
- Boosts
- Quotes (New, see Aug 2025 update.)
- Poll results
- New posts
- Edits
… so remember to scroll down that panel and click (uncheck) each and every one!
Final thoughts
So simple when you know how, you’ve now disabled all those annoying sounds.
If you are still hearing them check that you don’t have other windows of the same account still open, if so, close them. This may, or may not have happened to me *ahem*, *cough* *cough*.
Maybe one day the preferences will be updated but until then this is the way to go. Hopefully you will now have less distractions in your life, “silence is golden.”
// End of Article
Article Information
Further Reading
- Mastodon Documentation (docs.joinmastodon.org)
About Dave A.K.A. 'barrd'
