Bluesky’s Starter Packs feature has undoubtedly been a hit. It isn’t without some faults of course, but it certainly makes the process of organizing, finding accounts and being “discovered” much easier. That’s great! For Bluesky, but what about the Fediverse?
Fedi Discoverability Timeline
Discoverability has always been a bit of a weak spot on the Fediverse. With no algorithm to prop up posts or accounts, coupled with inherent visibility issues of a federated system, it has always been up to individuals to share and boost stuff to their respective followings so that others may be discovered. Here’s a quick rundown, in somewhat of a “timeline” form of how discoverability has worked/works on the Fediverse…
“Fedi-native”
Ok, so starting off, we’ve got boosts, local timelines and hashtags.
Boosts are great, but in practice, they only move a post as far as the individual who has boosted you’s individual network goes. And though I think the Fediverse’s culture is the best in terms of boosting (compared to Threads, Bluesky, etc…), I still think most people shy away from the practice. For accounts with only a few, or no followers at all, how can you expect to get a boost if no one sees your post to begin with?
Local Timelines can help people discover you, and you discover others, but in a federated world, a lot of who you might want to connect with will live outside your immediate instance. Also, one of the joys of the Fediverse is having your own single-user, or small instance.
Hashtags are also available, but following one can be fraught (noisy) which limits the extent to which people would discover you in that way. I also have found that a lot of people don’t bother using hashtags.
Search is available, but is notoriously limited in many ways thanks to the decentralized/federated nature of the Fediverse.
Community-driven discoverability
Beyond what the Fediverse offers natively, there are other community-driven efforts to help with discoverability…
#FollowFriday is a great hashtag that seems to have decent adoption. Just list out some accounts you like in a post with the #followfriday tag and boom!
Others have attempted to build and then share manual lists of recommended, or like accounts (i.e. I have some examples listed here).
In the spirit of the web’s blogroll, I attempted to make #Fediroll a thing. It did not take. The idea was simple though. Much like a blogroll, list your favorite Fedi accounts on a post and pin that to your profile.
The advent of Bsky “Starter Packs”
Then, Bluesky announced Starter Packs - the adoption and popularity of this feature has been off the charts!
So, the Fediverse community responded. Some of us pointed out all the past efforts to juice discoverability.
The awesome Mastodon Migration account went a step further, formalizing and then creating + sharing a wide variety of “Follow Packs”. A nobel effort, but suffers from the overhead involved in downloading a .csv list and manually importing it.
FediDevs Starter Packs
Which brings me to now, Fedi-native Anže has released their project for implementing Starter Packs on the Fediverse. It is (in my opinion) a more elegant solution that simplifies the process for creating and following packs in an interface that looks pretty great! It solves for the “manual import” issue which previous methods suffered from by having you log into FediDevs with your Mastodon account, allowing the app to leverage the built-in API to follow accounts en-masse.
It’s early days, so there are still some bugs, weaknesses and other concerns with this implementation of starter packs, but I think it’s a fantastic addition to the Fediverse and a great display of the power of the community here.
Notably, packs are still limited to 150 accounts, some profiles are hard to search for and add, and as of now it is not possible to upload an existing list of accounts to a starter pack, but these are all issues that have understandable tradeoffs. This project might also be limited to Mastodon (for now).
I look forward to what the larger community will build with this, I’ve actually already started a pack or two!
IndieSec
I created a FediDevs-fueled Starter Pack! It’s titled “IndieSec”. It features Infosec / cybersecurity individuals. No corporate accounts, no bots, no influencers.
Some more context on the pack: I created it by searching some existing lists I had, a few infosec-related local timelines and things I had starred in the past, trying to find folks that…
A. post about infosec (not exclusively or anything, but y’know, a decent amount of their posts/replies are infosec-related),
B. are at least mildly active on the Fediverse,
C. aren’t accounts that already have a gigantic following (no offense to those accounts, but I’d like to use the limited space in this pack to help smaller accounts be discovered)
As such, guaranteed I’ve missed a lot of folks who should be in the pack. It is a manual effort, and sorting through who is still active here is a bit of a chore. One that I was happy to do up to a point, but I eventually just needed to publish the pack and work on adding more accounts as they come and as people request to be included.
So yeah! Check out the pack. You can peruse it and follow selectively, or “Follow all” with a click of a button. If you want to be added to the pack, just send me a note (keeping in mind the criteria I mentioned above). If the pack runs out of space, I’ll probably start up an “IndieSec 2” sequel pack.