Mastodon is working on a new powerful onboarding feature, Packs, that will give new users a curated way to browse recommended accounts as soon as they sign up.
The move replicates the success of Bluesky’s Starter Packs and addresses one of the classic cold start problems for any social platform.
- Solving the cold start with curated follows on Mastodon
- User controls put consent first in Pack-based discovery
- Built through the Fediverse Enhancement Proposal process
- What Packs could look like in practice for new users
- Risks, safeguards and quality signals for Packs
- Why This Matters For Decentralized Social
The nonprofit organization that makes the software, Mastodon gGmbH, says Packs will improve discovery of new content. The move comes as Mastodon boasts of more than 8 million accounts and about 700,000 monthly active users, a large community that nonetheless can appear perilous for first-timers who don’t readily know how or where to start.
Solving the cold start with curated follows on Mastodon
How successful onboarding is depends largely on the speed with which new users see posts they care about. Veterans of the industry generally accept that retention is better when sign-ups are accompanied by a helpful group of people on their first outing. Packs are designed to capture that moment with topic-based sets — from local news and book clubs all the way to open-source maintainers and climate scientists.
Bluesky’s Starter Packs served as the template: People in the community produce lists that others can adopt with one click. Later, Meta brought a version of this idea to Threads to help new accounts find creators and conversations. Mastodon’s method looks set to replicate such freedoms in the thousands of independently operated server environments.
User controls put consent first in Pack-based discovery
Mastodon’s key twist is control. Users can already opt in to have their profile featured across Packs with the feature that reads “Feature profile and posts in discoverability algorithms,” or they may specifically choose it for each Collection and Pack. If you opt out, you won’t be surfaced in Packs at any level.
Mastodon, for its part, will inform users when they’ve been added to a Pack and provide a direct, low-friction path out. Bluesky users who wanted out of a Starter Pack, meanwhile, generally had to report the pack or block its creator. For Mastodon to frame this as a natural extension of their discoverability settings hints at a more robust consent model that better aligns with the project’s privacy-forward ethos and with the expectations of many European and public-interest institutions that maintain a presence in the fediverse.
Built through the Fediverse Enhancement Proposal process
Instead of rushing out Packs alone, Mastodon is working on Pack support with other federated social developers under the Fediverse Enhancement Proposal system. That collaboration increases the likelihood that Packs, or pack-like objects, may be portable across ActivityPub-based services besides Mastodon servers, including Pixelfed or Firefish.
The team claims that the alpha implementation of Packs and associated onboarding improvements is slated for a release with Mastodon 4.6. Today, unstable builds are from the 4.4 series, which means that the feature should not be too far off and is active in development. Publishing the spec work in public allows server admins, client devs, and mods to get a head start on policy and UI/RFC feedback.
What Packs could look like in practice for new users
Pretend you just joined an arts-centric server and picked a Pack curated by a museum’s social team, immediately following conservators, curators, and art historians who share process notes and exhibition updates.
Or a new user chooses a “Local Journalists” Pack assembled by a nonprofit newsroom to track city council meetings, transit adjustments, and school board debates. Packs reduce the activation energy necessary to see signal over noise, and enable communities to stretch out even more.
There’s also space for instance-level Packs handpicked by moderators, as well as community-maintained Packs created by researchers, librarians, or advocacy groups. Because curation takes place at the list level, Packs can shift as accounts change servers or people go on break, sidestepping the brittleness of a set of static follow recommendations.
Risks, safeguards and quality signals for Packs
And with recommendations surfaced, there’s the potential for spam, brigading, or low-quality lists created to appeal for followers. To fight back, Mastodon and fediverse devs can fall back on signals that are already employed by moderation tooling: server reputation, account age, verified links, and human curation by trusted orgs. Transparency, including the ability to see who created a Pack, the last time it was updated, and how many people follow it, can also help discourage abuse.
Clear removal mechanics and opt-out controls are equally important. Does knowing when you are added to a Pack, along with a one-click remove and an all-or-nothing discoverability toggle, seem like the minimum consent anyone should have? It also provides a direct method for moderators to handle reports without requiring users to block curators or go through server-to-server disputes.
Why This Matters For Decentralized Social
Centralization empowers control, but control can slip into tyranny. Packs are a pragmatic attempt to lighten the first session on Mastodon without centralizing control over who gets recommended. If the implementation results as described — specified in the open, consent-aware, and easy to reject — it could set a new floor for onboarding across the fediverse.
The bottom line is the fediverse is following growth patterns that have succeeded before while holding steady to its core values. Discovery is increasingly a protocol-level issue, not one of tacking on more features to apps. If successful, Packs could help to make Mastodon-friendly from minute one — not just after you find your herd.
