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!
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.
@noeldemartin @VincentTunru @anze3db would you like some help upgrading?
@thisismissem @VincentTunru @anze3db Thanks for asking :D.
At the moment, no, it's just something I've been procrastinating... But I've been thinking that maybe I should switch to something more lightweight like GoToSocial or Pleroma, do you have any tips? I'm the only one using this instance, and I don't need any fancy features. So I think Mastodon is overkill.
@noeldemartin @VincentTunru @anze3db
GTS I hear is nice for single user, but I've personally no experience with it yet
@noeldemartin I use GoToSocial and wrote up some stuff people should know before switching over: https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-08-25-gotosocial
@alex Thanks for sharing. The points about Limited federation and keys sound scary :/. I also wasn't aware that it was Beta software (no longer Alpha!), but looking at their README this doesn't sound great either:
> we intend to exit beta some time around 2026
I think I may stick to Mastodon for now 😅.
@VincentTunru @anze3db By the way, I remember using this when I started on the fediverse. It's very similar to the idea of "starter packs", take a look if you weren't aware: https://communitywiki.org/trunk