Bluesky’s “Starter Pack” has proven to be a popular way to help people connect with others on social networks, with a curated list of people to follow. In fact, it’s so popular that X is now copying this feature.
On Wednesday, Nikita Via, head of product at Company X, announced in a post that the Elon Musk-owned app will soon be introducing its own version of these lists, which it calls a “starter pack.” (How ingenious!)
The idea behind the new feature is to allow users to find accounts that match their interests across a variety of categories, including news, politics, fashion, technology, business and finance, health and fitness, gaming, stocks, memes, and more.
However, unlike Bluesky’s Starter Pack, which anyone on the platform can create and share with other users, X has created its own list internally.
As Beer explains in a post on X, the company “scoured the world for the top posters in every niche and country” over the past few months to create the list. In other words, packs are based on X’s internal data rather than individual users’ personal recommendations.
Bier said the starter pack will be rolled out to everyone on X in the “coming weeks.”
Recommended user lists are not new to X. This list has been used on social networks since the early days when the social network was known as Twitter. As one of the first interest-based social apps, Twitter users didn’t necessarily just want or need to find and connect with friends, unlike other apps like Facebook. Instead, they wanted to find people with the same ideas and interests as them. To help them get started, Twitter provided a list of recommended users who would lead to a good following.
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Still, this feature was controversial at the time, as a user’s popularity and number of followers increased significantly when they were added to the suggested users list. Some people felt the system was unfair, and in 2010 Twitter revamped the editorially created list to one determined by an algorithm.
X isn’t the only social app to copy Bluesky’s creative idea for starter packs. Meta’s Threads began testing its own version of Bluesky’s Starter Pack in December 2024. This was also a curated list created by individual users. These collections of suggested users were shown to users when they first signed up for Threads or within their For You feed. Decentralized social network Mastodon has also recently developed “packs” to help with user onboarding.
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