Mastodon snags Bluesky’s starter packs feature and includes the ability to opt out

Mastodon is introducing “Packs” to help you quickly find accounts to follow and fill up your feed. The decentralized social network announced the feature as part of the FediForum event on Tuesday. It will work similarly to Starter Packs on Bluesky, which offer curated lists of accounts you can follow based on categories, like verified users, podcasters, and journalists.

Mastodon will allow you to opt out of Packs, meaning other users can’t include your account in one. You’ll also receive a notification when someone adds you to a Pack, and, unlike Bluesky’s Starter Packs, you will be able to remove yourself from a Pack without reporting or blocking the user. Mastodon is working to make them available to developers of other ActivityPub-based applications as well.

The feature comes as part of Mastodon’s efforts to make the onboarding process easier for new users, something it has already attempted to address by directing users to create accounts on mastodon.social rather than having them choose from thousands of instances. The Meta-owned Threads has added a Starter Packs-style feature to its platform, too.

But implementing its own take on Starter Packs will take some time. Mastodon plans to launch an initial version of the feature inside the onboarding process in Mastodon 4.6 (it’s currently on 4.4). “We believe that these kinds of user-generated, curated collections could help people to find their tribe more quickly when they join the Fediverse,” Mastodon product designer Imani Joy says in the blog post. “At the same time, envisioning a similar feature that prioritises user consent, and works across a constellation of independent servers, is no small feat.”