You Can Create Bluesky-Like Starter Packs on Mastodon

Every now and then, a company comes up with an idea so good that every competitor ends up copying it. Such is the case with Bluesky's starter packs, which are now starting to spread to other social networks. Starter packs are lists of accounts and topics that make it easy for you to populate your feed with the people and things you actually want to see. Following Bluesky's lead, Threads announced last week that it's building this feature into its platform, and now third-party developers are bringing it to Mastodon as well.

This is great news: On Mastodon, it is hard to find interesting new accounts because of the decentralized nature of the social network. There are many great accounts on relatively obscure instances, however, and with these starter packs, you can view them all in one place.

Integrating starter packs with Mastodon

You can find Mastodon starter packs on FediDevs, a site built to help people find developers on Mastodon. Since this is not an official Mastodon feature, you'll need to give FediDevs access to your Mastodon account. The site is quite transparent about these permissions and they're reasonable: It asks for read-only access to accounts and search, and read and write access to follows. With these permissions, FediDevs can see which accounts you follow and help you follow multiple accounts at once. 

Once your account is linked to FediDevs, you can start browsing through various starter packs on the site. Take a look at the Apple and Adjacent Tech starter pack if you're interested in following accounts that post about things related to Apple.

FediDevs lets you create your own starter packs as well. Go to the Create Starter Packs section and start gathering your favorite accounts. Instead of starting with a blank slate, you can actually see all the accounts you follow when you create a new starter pack. This way, you can quickly add multiple accounts and avoid having to manually search for more accounts each time. Note that you can only add accounts that are set as discoverable, which respects people's privacy. Use the search bar to find more accounts, and, once you're done, click the Finish button to launch your starter pack. 

It's quite easy to edit and modify starter packs—those options show up under the three-dots button below the title. You can follow all accounts in any starter pack with just one click. My only complaint is that the site displays each profile in a large card, which makes it tedious to scroll through longer lists. Not everyone wants to follow hundreds of accounts without looking at who is in those accounts, and for this, I wish there was a way to either display multiple smaller cards in a row or to simply view compact lists.