New idea about #Fediverse and #Mastodon starter packs: a call for local instance solution.

What about chance to automatically follow publicly shared existing lists - but limited only to local instance? This seems to be relatively harmless and practical at the same time.

Technically, it would be trivial. No change to ActivityPub needed. The private lists are already local, in database. The accounts are already followed by some local user. No overhead. The functionality is already here, actually. Just hidden from GUI.

From UX point of view, the experience would be more comfortable, than downloading and uploading CSV files, which is current method. It would be easy. It would work just like "featured hashtags", except you would mark some of your lists as public (at least: it would motivate me to maintain the lists and think twice, who to include).

Politically, the instances have now very strong moderation powers, but all these powers are of restrictive nature. There is no real locally configurable tool to recommend anything... perhaps, this is driven by fear, that it would be useful for marketing or propaganda purposes, who knows. There is chance to recommend accounts to new users, but it ends there. No other interaction of moderator or instance administrator with local users. (Not even a way to locally announce eg. change of instance moderation rules!)

Chance to toggle local private lists as public for local users of instance would change the balance of impact just very slightly, because all of list members might appeared in Federated timeline anyway - but randomly, without any categorizing information.

Instead of huge, unified public Starter Packs, we would have many local Starter Packs with local impact. There would be no friction with domain bans or individual bans, because of course, only locally non-censored accounts and domains would be visible (by definition: because you cannot add locally invisible accounts to private lists).