Mastodon is taking cues from Bluesky with plans for its own starter “packs.”

Mastodonthe open decentralized social network with more than 8 million accounts And nearly 700,000 monthly active users planning To introduce a new feature called “Packages,” which will make it easier for newcomers to discover curated groups of users to follow.

The idea is similar to the feature BlueskyAnother 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 you should follow and aren’t sure who might post about topics of interest to you.

Bluesky tried to solve this problem With starter packsa feature that allows regular users to organize a collection of suggested follows. Today, you can find focused starter packs On almost any topicas well as those that display the top users in the app or other types of recommendations.

The idea was so popular that it died late last year outlet A similar feature to its X competitor, Instagram Threads.

Now, Mastodon says so Ready to do the samebut with some key differences.

Mastodon believes that users should control whether or not they appear in packages on Mastodon. It is proposed to make the packages an extension of the service’s existing account discovery features. This means that when you opt out of packages, you can disable the “Feature profile and contributions to discoverability algorithms” setting.

Additionally, users will be notified when they are included in the package. In Bluesky, a user who wants to be removed from a Starter Pack must report the pack or ban the user who created it. Mastodon says it aims to offer a simpler mechanism for removing themselves from packs, similar to how it allows users to remove their posts from newly launched quote posts.

The non-profit organization developing the Mastodon software, Mastodon gGmbH, is collaborating with other federal developers on… Federal Improvement Proposal (FEP)which is now up and running Gerop. It says that the initial release of packs and other improvements should be available in Mastodon version 4.6. (Currently, Mastodon is at version 4.4.5.)