We’re thrilled to be bringing you a upcoming feature to help you find your people on Mastodon: Packs.

[markhughes@mastodon.social]

@Mastodon Please, please just let me turn off the boost/quote menu.

I can't remember seeing more than a single quote toot so far and have never used (or wanted) it myself.

That's it. Please fix this before I can't stand it any more.

80% of the time the only option on that menu is boost. This is an awful #UX fail.

Thanks for listening.

[daspotato@mastodon.social]

@Mastodon is this the implementation that takes advantage of #activitypub "Organization" object type, so that ppl can join / unjoin an org?

[tomw@mastodon.social]

@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 tens of thousands of new followers, while people who had happened to not be included in this or that pack were bitter about their exclusion

[hillertson@mastodon.social]

@Mastodon Starter-Packs wären grundsätzlich eine gute Sache. Leider sind aber schon viele z.B. Bundesministerien , Politiker und Journalisten zu Bluesky gewechselt, ohne die Bridging-Funktion zu Mastodon zu nutzen. Somit werden die Accounts, die dann möglicherweise in diesen Starter-Packs gelistet sind, hier leider garnicht mehr genutzt.

[semele@mastodon.social]

@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.

[iwritelike@mastodon.social]

@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.

[jeremyjackson@mastodon.social]

@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.

[tanner@mastodon.social]

@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.

[chrisdejabet@mastodon.social]

@Mastodon Mastodons group up in “herds” right?

[gundersen@mastodon.social]

@Mastodon we should borrow the collective noun of elephants, and call it a parade!

[guynamedbrian@mastodon.social]

@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!”

[dmian@mastodon.social]

@Mastodon Maybe “bundles”? I don’t know…

[f112m@mastodon.social]

@Mastodon I'm sure many will like this new feature, but many will also hate it and may even leave Mastodon because of it.