Starter Packs

/2025-10/session/1-d/

Topics:

Convener: David Roetzel (@dave@upp2.com)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

Notes

One of the number one reasons we hear about why people leave is that “there is nothing here”.
Starter packs help that issue by giving you accounts to follow quickly.
Starter Packs lineage: Bluesky, Pixelfed proposal, Fedidevs.com, WordPress. Next: Mastodon.
The news of starterpacks on the Mastodon blog: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/10/our-ideas-about-packs/
FEP draft and discussion: https://github.com/mastodon/featured_collections
Timeline for starterpacks: feedback now, start development in Nov, hopefully ready with a first release in version 4.6. Overall: months not years.
Fedidevs.com will transition its starter packs to Mastodon’s format over time, as the Mastodon release with support for the new interaction policy rolls out.

Suggestions / questions from the chat for the Starter Packs:

Add an optional description to the collection.
Name it CuratedCollection instead of FeaturedCollection (since the action is curation).
- I appreciate switching the name from Starter Packs to Collection; it has always seemed odd to me that Bsky calls these “Starter”; such tools are perfectly useful for non-beginners. That name makes it seem like they are only for newbies.
Q: Is it possible to limit Startepacks visibility to certain people?
Link to BSKY starter pack problems: https://bsky.app/profile/hailey.at/post/3m2mldbsmys2t
Add an ability for admin to feature a few starterpacks.

Q: Would a Starter Pack become like a List (specific feed) or part of the main feed?: A: Follow all button / Follow all and create/add a list are currently be discussed
Q: Flag activity; who is receiving the flag activity?: A: The server staff of the user who curated the pack.
Q: How are you thinking about exporting these collections? Across servers and networks?: A: Not much investigation done in this space. Open to suggestions.
Q (Jim DeLaHunt @jdlh@mstdn.ca): Thinking of my use case, to migrate my physical neighbours from corporate social media platforms to Fediverse platforms, would Curated collections be a way for me to subscribe newcomers to all their physical neighbours right away? A: yes, it works great for that.: Actually there are multiple parts to this “neighbourhood community” use case: collecations to follow, but also simple invitation/installation/account creation, and questions of should our neighbourhood host its own instance. Those might be good topics for a session tomorrow. —Jim
Q: what about the popularity dynamics that Starter Packs created on Bluesky, where people played a “game” to get on popular Starter Packs and get lot of followers (which what amplified by Bluesky featuring popular starter packs), which might be detrimental to the quality of the network and created weird dynamics: https://bsky.app/profile/hailey.at/post/3m2mldbsmys2t**