**In a major breakthrough for the digital rights movement, the German government has refused to back the EU’s controversial Chat Control regulation today after facing massive public pressure. This blocks the required majority in the EU Council, derailing the plan to pass the surveillance law next week. Digital freedom fighter Dr. Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party) hails this as a huge victory but warns that the fight is far from over.** Former Member of the European Parliament Patrick Breyer comments on the victory: “This is a tremendous victory for freedom and proves that protest works! Facing a wave of calls and emails from the public, the Social Democrats held their ground, and for the first time, even the conservative opposition leadership is voicing criticism. **Without the tireless resistance from citizens, scientists, and organizations, EU governments would have passed a totalitarian mass surveillance law next week, spelling the end for digital privacy.** That we stopped this—for now—is a moment to celebrate.” **“EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen must now admit the failure of her dystopian Chat Control plan.** The Commission must withdraw this irreparable bill for good, as it has failed to find a majority in the Council for years. Instead, it should embrace the European Parliament’s alternative, which delivers effective child protection without mass surveillance: safer apps through ‘Security by Design,’ proactive clearing of illegal content online, and swift takedown obligations.” Breyer concluded with an appeal: “Today proves that our protest has the power to stop a totalitarian surveillance system that has no equal in the free world. But the threat is not gone. **The proponents of Chat Control will use every trick in the book and will not give up easily. We will keep fighting until this proposal is defeated once and for all, and the privacy of our digital lives is secure for everyone.”** “Freedom is only as valuable as our willingness to fight for it. **Now is the moment to support the civil rights organizations that made this victory possible, so we are prepared for the fight ahead.”** For more information, visit Patrick Breyer’s information portal on Chat Control: https://www.chatcontrol.eu

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## Background Mastodon’s timeline doesn’t rely on dopamine-driven algorithms – it is chronological and consent-based, showing only posts from accounts you (the person using Mastodon) have followed. This focus on privacy and conscious consumption is what leads many people to join the Fediverse in the first place. It also places an unfair ultimatum on incoming users: You’ll have to make an effort to figure out who to follow, or your timeline will mostly be empty. Bluesky pioneered a brilliant solution to this “empty feed problem” in 2024, with the introduction of “Starter Packs”, a feature that allows users to curate and share their own collections of recommended accounts. We believe that these kinds of user-generated, curated collections could help people to find their tribe more quickly when they join the Fediverse. At the same time, envisioning a similar feature that prioritises user consent, _and_ works across a constellation of independent servers, is no small feat. In this blog post, we want to talk about bringing a similar concept to Mastodon and the Fediverse. We’ll use the word “Packs” to refer to the shareable collections of identifiers throughout, but we’ve not yet landed on final terminology - so, consider this word a placeholder, and not what this will definitely be called in Mastodon. ## Challenges and considerations We know that there have been existing efforts to make it easier to discover curated collections of users (for example, fedidevs.com offers “Starter Packs”). We’ve been happy to see these being shared, as they can help people discover interesting individuals and organisations to follow. We’d be equally happy to have the creators of these tools provide feedback on our own ideas 🙂 We believe that there are several ways to improve on the existing examples, that are more aligned with the values we try to bring to the Fediverse, and that offer more to the decentralised ecosystem as a whole. Firstly, it’s important to us that users have control over whether they appear in Packs on Mastodon. Early design explorations with our concept of Packs led us to the following possibilities: * Packs will become an extension of discovery. Users who wish to opt out entirely from Packs will be able to do so by disabling the existing setting, labelled _“Feature profile and posts in discovery algorithms”_. This will signal that an account cannot be added to a Pack. * Users will be notified when they are included in a Pack. Unlike on Bluesky, where users wishing to remove themselves from a Starter Pack must either report the Starter Pack, or block the user, users on Mastodon will have a more neutral mechanism to remove themselves from a Pack they do not wish to be part of. (note: we implemented something similar with the Quote Posts feature, where an original post can be removed from a quote post; this same idea would flow through to Packs). As always, federation presents its own challenges. Just as Mastodon users can follow people on other Fediverse servers, our goal is for them to also be able to find and interact with Packs created elsewhere in the Fediverse. When Alice creates a Pack on her server `example.com`, how does Bob on `example.online` get to know about it, and come to interact with it? What if `example.com` and `example.online` run different ActivityPub-compatible software? These questions can be addressed via established Fediverse discussion processes. ## Next steps We’re in the process of collaborating with other Fediverse developers on a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal (FEP), so that a common implementation for Packs can be made available to developers of any ActivityPub software. The initial work is now available on GitHub. The FEP process will be the place to direct any technical questions. Meanwhile, we’re also conducting broader research to understand overarching themes related to user onboarding, and how we can make things easier for people to get started on Mastodon. We expect to release an initial version of Packs, plus other minor improvements to onboarding, in Mastodon 4.6. In the meantime, the next stable release (Mastodon 4.5) is right around the corner! ### We want to hear your thoughts We want to make Packs a great feature for discovery and onboarding! If you have thoughts on the ideas described above (beyond the technical aspects that will be part of the FEP), contact us at [email protected]. We may not be able to respond to every individual message, but we’ll be reading every piece of feedback to learn more about your ideas.