Mastodon, the decentralized, open social network with over 8 million accounts and nearly 700,000 monthly active users, is planning to introduce a new feature, called “Packs,” which will make it easier for newcomers to discover curated collections of users to follow.
The idea is similar to a feature Bluesky, another open social platform, introduced last year.
Starter packs are designed to address the “cold start” problem of joining new social networks. When you first sign up for an account on a new platform, you may not know who to follow and aren’t sure who might be posting about topics of interest.
Bluesky tried to solve this problem with Starter Packs, a feature that lets everyday users curate a collection of suggested follows. Today, you can find Starter Packs focused on nearly any topic, as well as those that feature top users on the app or other sorts of recommendations.
The idea was so popular that Meta late last year implemented a similar feature on its X competitor, Instagram Threads.
Now, Mastodon says it’s ready to do the same, but with some key differences.
Mastodon believes that users should have control over whether or not they will appear in Packs on Mastodon. It suggests making Packs an extension of the service’s existing account discoverability features. That means to opt out of Packs, you would disable the setting “Feature profile and posts in discoverability algorithms.”
In addition, users will be notified when they’re included in a Pack. On Bluesky, a user who wanted to be removed from a Starter Pack would have to report the pack or block the user who made it. Mastodon says it aims to offer a simpler mechanism to remove themselves from Packs, similar to how it allows users to remove their posts from the newly launched Quote Posts.
The nonprofit developing the Mastodon software, Mastodon gGmbH, is collaborating with other fediverse developers on a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal (FEP), which is now on GitHub. It says the initial version of Packs and other onboarding improvements should be available in the Mastodon 4.6 release. (Currently, Mastodon is on version 4.4.5.)
