I've been building starter packs for Mastodon in my spare time and today I want to share what I've built with the community:

https://fedidevs.com/starter-packs/

I've started building this when I saw how popular starter packs on Bluesky are and I think a feature like this is even more critical for Mastodon where it's harder to find people to follow across thousands of instances.

Only a small number starter packs are available right now, but I'm hoping the community will add more soon! ❤️

Also a huge shoutout to @paulox and @villapirorum who spent a lot of their time testing, reporting bugs, and giving me precious feedback!

@anze3db Really cool! I have one feature request: the ability to add a Creative Commons licence to a Starter Pack. That way, if Mastodon (or other Fediverse software) adds native support for them, existing starter packs with the right licence can be auto-imported.

I also ran into a couple of 500 errors, or existing handles that couldn't be found (mostly on non-mainstream servers). I don't know if there's any helpful info I can provide, or if there are server logs.

Thanks for making this!

@VincentTunru I like the idea of adding a CC license. Does that just mean showing the CC clause on the starter pack page?

I still have to go through all the 500 errors that were logged. I think a few of them was because the instance was running an older version of Mastodon. If you give me some concrete examples I can try to prioritize those errors.

Thanks for the feedback!

@anze3db

If you want to get fancy you could use https://microformats.org/wiki/rel-license, but yeah, as long as the data (i.e. the fact that the starter pack author agreed with the licence) is there, making it available can always be solved afterwards.

As for the 500, I got it when trying to add @noeldemartin, for example.

@VincentTunru @anze3db Thanks Vincent for wanting to add me on the starter pack :D.

Yeah, I'm running a very old version of Mastodon, so that's probably the issue 🙈. I have to update it some day, but since I'm the only one using the instance and it seems to work fine (until now xD), I was in no rush to update.