Mastodon
We’re thrilled to be bringing you a upcoming feature to help you find your people on Mastodon: Packs. (Or something… we’re still figuring out the name.)
As always, we want to build this important feature for the community WITH the community.
Read this blog post about our approach and let us know what you think!
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/10/our-ideas-about-packs/
Werner
@Mastodon A flock of elephants (which is the closest we get I guess) can be called a herd, sure, but it can also be called a parade!
Join the parade! Find your parade! Your new friends awaits you at the parade!
I think we should call it a parade!
✨PARADE✨
bitbonk
@Mastodon Is the main scenario really just onboarding here? I‘d like the idea of curated lists of accounts on a certain topic. Something that may be updated regularyliy. Something like the lists feature but sharable. Maybe similar to OPML.
daspotato
@Mastodon is this the implementation that takes advantage of #activitypub "Organization" object type, so that ppl can join / unjoin an org?
Tom Walker
@Mastodon This addresses the consent aspect but doesn't have anything to say about how it skews the power dynamics. What happened on Bluesky was that getting included into a few packs was a "lottery win" and people gave little Oscar acceptance speeches to their new followers, while people who had happened to not be included in this or that pack were bitter about their exclusion
I Write Like
@Mastodon It would be nice to be able to browse through such “albums.” So far, it’s been challenging to discover accounts by focus or interest. “Packs” brings to mind stray dogs, but also piles of material, so I suppose it depends on personal perspective.
Marius Gundersen - mdg 🌻
@Mastodon we should borrow the collective noun of elephants, and call it a parade!
A Guy Named Brian (he/him)
@Mastodon I like the direction you’re taking here and I look forward to seeing how this works out. One idea: would a “starter pack” of hashtags be a thing that would make sense? I really appreciate the ability to follow hashtags; maybe that could be a way to help on board new folks: “Not sure *who* to follow? Follow your favorite hashtags and find your people!”
Jeremy Jackson
@Mastodon If not “packs” then maybe “sets?” I’d be hesitant to obscure the meaning too much for the sake of thematics, the simpler the better.
Something else that they did that helped with onboarding was to create shareable lists (called feeds) that are for certain topics based on words and tags within posts. I know we can search topics via words or tags, but a topic of interest being a click or two away vs manually entering the search terms is powerful, almost like a subreddit but not.
Dmian 🇪🇺
@Mastodon Maybe “bundles”? I don’t know… 😝
Frank
@Mastodon I'm sure many will like this new feature, but many will also hate it and may even leave Mastodon because of it.
Chris De Jabet
@Mastodon Mastodons group up in “herds” right? 😉
Tanner
@Mastodon based on how this played out on bsky, I urge you to reconsider this feature. At minimum you need controls to opt out of packs entirely at the account level. They very easily became a vector for abuse or unwanted attention and confused replies.
:🍪:Semele
@Mastodon The first two things that come to my mind are that I'm pleased we can choose to opt-out of being included, and the way hashtags work on here is most satisfying and I'd like to see it continued.
JEDABL
@Mastodon une planche maçonnique sur le dire et le faire
Danish Akhtar
@Mastodon What about the Word "Circle". ? I miss it from Google+.
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.