Mastodon, the decentralized and open social network with more than 8 million accounts and nearly 700,000 monthly active users, plans to introduce a new feature, called “packs”, which will allow new arrivals to discover more easily than user collections are organized.
The idea is similar to Bluesky functionality, another open social platform, presented last year.
Starting packs are designed to solve the problem of “cold start” of membership in new social networks. When you register for an account on a new platform, you may not know who follows and you do not know who could publish on subjects of interest.
Bluesky has tried to solve this problem with the start -up packs, a feature that allows everyday users to manage a suggested follow -up collection. Today, you can find start -up packs focused on almost all subjects, as well as those who present the best users of the application or other types of recommendations.
The idea was so popular that Meta at the end of last year implemented a similar functionality on its competitor X, Instagram Threads.
Now, Mastodon says he’s ready to do the same, but with some key differences.
Mastodon believes that users should control whether or not they will appear in the packs on mastodon. He suggests making packs an extension of the existing service discovers of the service. This means to remove the packs, you deactivate the “functionality profile and publications profile in discovenability algorithms”.
In addition, users will be informed when they are included in a pack. On Bluesky, a user who wanted to be removed from a starter pack should report the pack or block the user who did it. Mastodon says that it aims to offer a simpler mechanism to withdraw from the packs, similar to the way it allows users to delete their publications from newly launched quotes.
The non -profit organization developing the Mastodon software, Mastodon GGMBH, collaborates with other developers of Fediverse on a proposal for improvement Fediverse (FEP), which is now on GitHub. It indicates that the initial version of the packs and other integration improvements should be available in the Mastodon 4.6 version. (Currently, Mastodon is on version 4.4.5.)
